So does the team at 42floors and their investors, who have put $12.3 million into this search engine for office rentals.

42floors seeks to be the missing link between companies without office space and office space without tenants. The database currently contains listings in San Francisco, New York, and Brooklyn, and this funding will fuel entrance into new markets. Users input their desired location and can narrow the results by cost, square-footage, and neighborhood. The listings are accompanied by professional photographs and there is a map view to display all available units.

The marketplace does not circumvent landlords and brokers. Rather, it helps customers see a range of options before trekking all over town or shelling out for professional help. The service is free for brokers, landlords, and consumers, but 42floors takes a commission on the sales. Companies like Zillow and Trulia tackle the home rental market, and 42floors takes a similar approach, of focusing on user experience to take some of the pain out of the process.

The founding team participated in prestigious accelerator Y Combinator’s winter 2012 class and raised $5 million in September of 2012 including Thrive Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian, Chris Dixon, and Dave McClure. New Enterprise Associates led this round, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners and Thrive Capital, as reported this morning by TechCrunch.   

In addition to expanding its geographical reach, 42floors will also build out its e-commerce offerings, where companies with related products can market or sell through the site.

Read our interview with cofounder Jason Freedman. 

File this one under too good to be true: Mike Judge, the comedy genius behind Office Space, King of the Hill, and Beavis and Butt-Head, is working on a dark comedy pilot for HBO called Silicon Valley.

According to Deadline, the pilot will shoot in Spring 2013 and will be directed by Judge. Legendary Hollywood producer Scott Rudin, who also produced The Social Network, will executive produce the show alongside Judge and his King of the Hill colleagues John Altschuler and Dave Krinsky.

Not surprisingly, it will be set among the modern Silicon Valley gold rush “where the people most qualified to succeed are the least capable of handling success,” Deadline wrote.

I’m a big fan of Judge’s ability to deconstruct and mock idiots (see the hilarious, terrifying, and downright prescient Idiocracy), so I’m excited to see how his particular brand of humor translates to the world of startups. Between nonsense business ideas, exorbitant hype, and silly startup names, Judge surely has a lot to make fun of. It’s also a much-needed antidote to Bravo’s Silicon Valley reality show.

So far it looks like HBO has only ordered a pilot for the show, but if it turns out well it could lead to more episodes, and hopefully a full season.

In yet another case of San Francisco “stealing the show” from Silicon Valley, visual interest site Pinterest has just moved its headquarters from Palo Alto to San Francisco’s South-of-Market (SoMa) neighborhood.

It was only in May that venture firm Benchmark Capital made a similar long-term move into the city, on the premise that two-thirds of its recent deals were based there anyway. While Benchmark’s office are north of SoMa, Pinterest’s more immediate neighbors will include social gaming dynamo Zynga and online room rental startup AirBnB, all cozied into the repurposed warehouses and lofts that define the district.

Pinterest has skyrocketed to success in the past year, becoming the fastest standalone website to hit 10 million users, according to comScore. With that momentum, it’s raised $100 million in 2012 from Andreesen Horowitz, Rankuten, FirstMark Capital, and Bessemer Venture Partners.

San Francisco Mayor Ed Lee, who has a Pinterest page of his own, has indicated that Pinterest will be in the city for the long-term. But the company has thus far only signed a short-term lease on 572 7^th Street, a space that’s just large enough for Pinterest’s current workforce, estimated to be near 40 people (their team page, which lists 29, is outdated).

The company has been mum on long-term plans, declining our request for comments. The owner of the property however has been marketing the space as one property with the adjacent 808 Brannan, a much larger space that’s still being prepared for occupancy, according to this Planning Department document. Both buildings combined have about 55,000 square feet of office space that could accommodate nearly 200 employees. It’s likely that Pinterest is currently negotiating the lease on the latter property, making sure it can sublease the space (or parts of it) as it uses its newfound war-chest to expand its own staff and grow into the office.

Justin Bedecarre, who advises startups on office space for real estate firm Cushman & Wakefield, reckons that moving to San Francisco makes sense for a number of reasons, including access to a wider pool of Bay Area tech talent, more vibrant neighborhoods for employees to live in, a greater inventory of creative office spaces, and more transit options than the peninsula.

Pinterest is hardly alone in deciding to escape Palo Alto’s high rents and low vacancy. San Francisco is now home to a raft of popular companies, including Alphonso Labs, Twitter, One Kings Lane, Yammer, and ZenDesk, to name a few. Bedecarre says that rents in Downtown Palo Alto are “still 30-50% higher over San Francisco’s SoMa district,” with certain firms like data mining and security company Palantir placing a chokehold on the surrounding real estate with all the space it’s leased.

MakerBot is growing.

Emerging from its modest three-person founding, the 3D printing company is now 125 employes strong — and it needs some new office space.

Hence why Markerbot is moving to the MetroTech Center, a business and academic complex in downtown Brooklyn. A 16-acre site, MetroTech is currently home to the New York City Fire Department headquarters, Empire Blue Cross Blue Shield, and Polytechnic Institute, among others.

MakerBot will be taking up the entire 21st floor of One MetroTech Center, a space offering it 31,250 square feet to develop and test new products. The company won’t, however, be leaving its current location behind: A little under half of the company’s current employees will stay at MakerBot’s current office at 87 3rd Avenue in Brooklyn.With the move, MakerBot also intends to expand its staff even further, adding fifty jobs by the end of the year.

That the company has made it this far is in and of itself a success story. MakerBot was born in Boerum Hill, a Brooklyn neighborhood more famous for being home to hipsters and Spike Lee movies than DIY startups.

“We are a Brooklyn-based company and it was important to stay where we started (and it’s only a short walk from our current offices)!” MakerBot’s Gavin Murphy told VentureBeat over e-mail, when asked why the company didn’t consider a move to Manhattan. “We are growing pretty quickly, and are running out of room where we are just as quickly, so I would say yes, the move is motivated purely by our personnel growth.”

Now, three years after its founding, MakerBot is more than just a small Brooklyn startup. It’s slowly nearing its goal to make products like the Replicator as common as the microwave.

Photo via MakerBot

42Floors emerged from Y Combinator’s Winter 2012 class back in March as an office space search and discovery service with the mission of helping companies find their dream office.

The company launched with some strong rhetoric about technologically upending the commercial real estate industry and liberating data from fragmented listing sources; all goals that are still actively pursued.

But after gathering lots of feedback from their users and fellow startupers, it realized that finding a dream office is more than just a real estate transaction: it’s also all the work that goes in after the deal closes.

That’s why 42Floors is today announcing an extension to their office search site that puts the focus back on companies seeking their dream office: a one-stop, nationwide marketplace called Showroom where companies can get inspired and shop for office products and services from space planning to furniture to catering.

The site is currently limited to a simple showcase of wares and services that can’t actually be bought, but the next iteration will allow streamlined purchasing so that a dream office can be ordered and delivered with the same fluidity as buying and downloading an app from the App Store.

I had a chance to talk about the new development with co-founder and chief executive Jason Freedman, a provocative figure in startupland these days—one need look no further than his very public hiring stunts or his unabashed condemnation of “non-technical” startup founders.

But despite all the showboating, Freedman and his company display a keen understanding of what startups in Silicon Valley want and will pay for.

Says Freedman, “We know on a tactical level that we can make an office manager’s job a lot easier, but we also know that right now, if you’re a CEO, the chief reason to invest in your office is hiring.”

Hiring indeed. It’s no secret that Silicon Valley is experiencing a fiercly competitive talent crunch that’s forced companies to pursue every available avenue to successfully market themselves to potential hires. This includes the physical office space they inhabit, where each piece of furniture or catered meal plays a vital role in communicating the culture of that particular startup. Once compensation levels reach a certain point, factors like culture tend to sway employment decisions.

In terms of market positioning, however, Showroom is an oddity. There’s no denying that with all the money chasing deals in the Valley these days, there are a lot more companies that are willing to part with their freshly infused cash for offices with “personality.” At the same time, several of 42Floor’s own Y Combinator cohorts were acculturated on the “ramen-profitable” philosophy: running a lean operation that looks down upon anything other than shipping and iterating product. Odds are that most of those startups will be fine with their local IKEA offerings.

The current market for Showroom is thus limited to high-growth seed-stage and first-or-second round venture-backed companies. These firms are not bargain hunting: they can afford to allocate toward aggressively marketing their startup to new hires through swanky office space.

The company is aware of the need to be flexible, however. Version 2 is set to debut with an option to view Showroom offerings depending on what company one might be shopping for (ranging from a small two-person startup to, for example, a large financial services company).

No matter the size of the market, Showroom opens a new revenue stream for 42Floors as well. It plans to take a percentage of all transactions that go through the marketplace, adding to the company’s existing stream of referral fees from brokers closing deals procured through the main office search site.

42Floors has ambitious plans for the future. Freedman tells me that both iPhone and iPad apps are to be released “soon,” with interesting features like crowd-sourced photography of spaces.

The company is also set to announce a large funding round soon, which Freedman says will go toward further refining the product, strengthening ties with brokerages, and expanding to other cities (New York being first on the list).

When I last covered 42Floors, my parting note was that the company had a unique opportunity to use the showcasing of office spaces to drive community-based growth as a startup-for-startups, like what AngelList is for the startup funding process. Showroom is a good starting point that seems to take at least some of this commentary to heart.

If you’re a startup, you’ve probably considered joining an incubator. But residency can be competitive and the requirements stiff. TechStars and Y-Combinator are well-known incubators that offer funding, mentorship, and access to a community of venture capitalists and anointed digerati — but only for a select few. Applicants also have to provide detailed business plans and disclose development, operational, marketing, and sales activities to get into the club.

There’s another alternative that might actually be a better fit for the majority of startups: co-working spaces.

Co-working spaces offer more freedom and flexibility than traditional business incubators. For many startups — those that don’t want need the full range of incubator services, or that want more control of their company and don’t want to be apprenticed to someone else’s vision — co-working offers the perfect alternative. Co-working may actually be a better environment for startups because it gives them what they really need. VentureBeat, based in SF, uses WeWork for its small but growing NYC staff. WeWork, which also has locations in LA and SF, allows easy expansion of space as we scale up our team.

Gangplank in Arizona started out as an incubator in the traditional sense: “We put together a C Fund and held a process similar to what Y Combinator or TechStars do today. We funded businesses, and we ran those businesses inside of Gangplank, as well,” said co-founder Derek Neighbors. But then they realized that the mix of companies working in a shared space was creating unexpected synergies.

“What we started to see was the formula of small companies working together actually helping put together the environment necessary for all of them to succeed,” Derek says. They realized the real missing ingredient — having a supportive community. “What’s missing for struggling startups is not capital funding, and it’s not lack of talent, right away. What’s missing is putting the people who are doing things in the community together to basically ignite the community to be even stronger.”

Consider these other benefits of working in the same shared office with other like-minded entrepreneurs:

Grow at your own pace. While many incubators provide a structured environment that demand startups meet benchmarks as a resident, co-working spaces let you grow at your own pace. Memberships are flexible, offering space by the hour, day, or month. Jason Richelson, a former member of Hive at 55, agrees that co-working makes it easy to save money, especially for the entrepreneur just starting and trying to reach a sustainable operational level. “You don’t want to commit to a lease in the initial stages of a new company, so going month-to-month is the only way for startups.”

Learn from others. Rivaling the best incubators, co-working spaces organize an array of events and programs ranging from brown bag lunches and networking nights with different experts and sponsors, to workshops on topics like “VC pitching” and “Ruby on Rails.” Cospace in Austin teams up with GeekAustin, which provides regular development classes. TechShop offers a variety of free DIY classes, on topics such as laser cutters, silk screening, AVR micro-controller programming, and AutoDesk modeling — ideal for the startup testing product prototypes. Co-working spaces are best for self-directed learners who prefer to choose the classes and programs they attend.

Partner up or share ideas. At a co-working space, where collaboration is not only encouraged but also cultivated, you get the opportunity to harness your coworkers’ collective brainpower for the benefit of your startup. Sometimes, good things happen from a serendipitous seating arrangement. Doug Naegele, who runs healthcare software company Infield Health, and is a member of Affinity Lab, recalls how a simple conversation with a neighbor led to a new, exciting venture. “The person I sit next to recently won a Ford Foundation grant to help alleviate food deserts in Washington D.C. We came up with the idea of supporting the vendors and patrons of the Pop-up Farmers Market through text messaging. Two months later, we’re actively trying new ideas around health, food deserts, and mobile technology,” says Doug.

Get exposure and support. The expansion of Greg Wilder’s Orpheus Media Research, a music search and discovery platform, which closed a Series A round and opened headquarters in New York City, owes much to its co-working community at Indy Hall: “Every key person involved in the company today can be connected in some way to co-working networks or co-working connections.”

If you still don’t think that co-working spaces are rigorous enough, consider that many do partner with accelerators and incubators. CoCo teams up with Project Skyway, a tech accelerator that provides software companies early stage seed money, mentoring, and networking. Dogpatch Labs focus on helping launch startups using its connections with Polaris Ventures. Its most famous alums include Instagram and Task Rabbit.

Co-working shifts the startup mentality away from the tunnel-vision focus on getting funding, and onto the “first-things-first” task of growing a company culture, developing ideas, and most importantly, nurturing support networks.

Genevieve DeGuzman is the co-author of Working in the UnOffice: A Guide to Coworking (Night Owls Press), a collection of stories from over 33 startups, small businesses, and nonprofits, as well as 19 co-working space founders across the country, all working and thriving in shared and collaborative workspaces.

CoCo Minneapolis co-working space image via CoCo/Flickr

When starting a company, you just can’t replace what happens when people are in the same room. Creating a company is all about vision and pushing that vision forward, day in and day out. These things don’t translate as well over email, chat clients, or even phone calls. While it’s easy to “work remotely,” it’s much more difficult to keep everyone on the same page and believing in the same vision. These elements are critical in the early stages of a startup, when things are constantly in flux and companies just can’t afford to wait.

The remote workforce may work at later stages of operation. But after being part of three startups, it’s more clear to me than ever that the office, and the collaboration and the establishment of company culture that goes with it, defines how the vision manifests.

Here are seven reasons why early-stage companies should start up in the same physical office space:

1. Decisions happen on the fly. In the early days, many company decisions are based on intuition and made at the last minute. The time it takes to set up a meeting, receive an email response, or even convey the correct message is insurmountable when in a hurry. These decisions require the right people in the right conversations, and that’s much easier when they are sitting right next to you.

2. Hallway conversations are priceless. You can’t create true serendipity over instant message. It’s crazy to think that one discussion can make, break or change the path of a company, but sometimes, those “accidental conversations” do turn into some magical idea, approach or direction. The early collaborations can determine what the company becomes, and the more interactions that can be had within your company, the better. It also makes everyone feel like they’re part of the process and the company altogether.

3. Passion in person is contagious. I’d argue that it’s almost impossible to convey passion accurately to someone at a remote location. If you think back to times when you’ve been convinced to do something, it usually results from face-to-face interaction. It’s harder to influence and create change through the digital highway. Also, in-person passion helps to create a social pressure that makes people work better. If the person next to you is working late, it’s much easier to ignore if you can’t physically see staying in the office longer.

4. Keeping people in the loop becomes extra “work.” The squeaky wheel is harder to hear over the telephone. The person who is out of the office may have an amazing perspective, but it is difficult to get that voice transmitted via phone or IM. On top of that, it’s hard to keep the people who aren’t at the nexus feeling like they make an impact. Ultimately, the feelings of control and empowerment can easily be lost.

5. Company culture is key. Culture binds a company early on, so maintaining that culture in multiple locations requires extra effort and even a separate “culture team” — members of management who ensure that the culture is universal across the company. Everyone talks about how important it is to set it, embrace it and make sure every single employee believes in it, but it’s hard to live and breathe something if you aren’t actually breathing the same air.

6. “Whiteboards” work in real time and space. Company whiteboards are where the brainstorming magic happens. I haven’t once seen a collaboration session for a critical decision happen successfully from sending files back and forth. The time wasted, the communication breakdowns, and the lost creativity can all be rectified by meeting in one room with one whiteboard.

7. Miscommunication causes too many problems. Miscommunication causes product problems, PR nightmares, culture issues and, ultimately, is the reason many problems aren’t discovered until it’s too late. Clear communication is more difficult with remote workforces over in-person teams due to the response lag time and unavailable immediacy. And no video chat software can capture the unspoken messages of body language.

When considering remote operations for your company, it comes down to where you are in development. If you are truly looking to create a great company, attract the best talent, and in the end build something that will change the world, I’d suggest getting everyone together and getting things done in the same space. Amazing companies are built by amazing teams, composed of amazing people.

People in the same room, that is. Get an office.

Shane Mac is the Director of Product at Zaarly. He’s the founder of Hello There and previously spearheaded marketing for Seattle-based Gist, which sold to BlackBerry. Shane is also an author, a professional musician voted best wedding band in 2009 and is obsessed with creating technology that can connect people and change the world for the better.

The Young Entrepreneur Council (YEC) is an invite-only nonprofit organization comprised of the world’s most promising young entrepreneurs. The YEC leads #FixYoungAmerica, a solutions-based movement that aims to end youth unemployment and put young Americans back to work.

Office image via Shutterstock

Starting today, 42Floors is finally the answer to that question. It’s a web service aimed squarely at helping companies find office space easily—and also those listing leasable space.

But could it really have taken five to seven years for office space search to finally be optimized by the Internet?

Yes, says 42Floors co-founder Jason Freedman, who blames the commercial real estate industry’s lack of a consumer focus and reliance on hapless brokers for keeping the opportunity at bay for so long. It’s hard to believe, but in an era when software is eating the world, it hasn’t yet taken a bite out of this $11 trillion industry, which has a poorly executed presence on the web.

In classic Silicon Valley—and Y Combinator—fashion, Freedman insists that 42Floors is strictly a technology company saving an industry that’s anything but. Industry data providers still rely on thousands of cold-callers to gather information; brokers base their livelihoods on faxes, paper fliers, and hastily assembled spreadsheets. “It’s the single most inefficient process you can dream of, and it’s going to all be replaced by software,” he proudly exclaims.

It all started when Freedman and his team (formerly of Y Combinator-backed startup FlightCaster; acquired in 2010), were looking for office space for their next startup, but became aggravated by the outmoded process that was office space search. Lacking a broker’s license to sift through listings, they were at the mercy of other brokers who were operating as if the Internet didn’t exist. Craigslist was a letdown as well, with most listings severely out of date and brokers on there engaging in bait-and-switch tactics.

The only companies that had relevant online listings were giants left over from the last dot-com boom, namely LoopNet and CoStar, many of their listings lack quality photos and data. The interface is a bit cluttered as well, lacking the minimalism and modernity of 42Floors. While browsing LoopNet is free, being able to use the site professionally (for brokers) requires an expensive subscription. Surprisingly, brokers had become complacent with that subscription and overall model.

This is also why, according to Freedman, the residential search startups took off earlier, since the data in that market was spread out over several competing listing systems that weren’t as locked-in and monopolized.

The co-founder became so enamored by the prospect of shattering the old system and conveniently finding his dream office that he took the requisite courses to get himself licensed as a full broker. Within months, he and his team had dissected the industry and built a website that would make finding office space transparent and direct for tenants.

While making the marketplace more efficient may be synonymous with killing the middlemen (in this case brokers), that’s not necessarily true. The company has been working with several large brokerages to replace their internal systems so they can feed data into 42Floors much more fluidly. “Brokers don’t need to go away, but the data needs to be liberated,” says Freedman, who sees the role of brokers evolving to be more of a consultant and negotiator.

To be clear, 42Floors is not serving the market for buying commercial properties. This is strictly about direct-to-tenant office space leases, although it will grow at some point to all types of commercial leases.

42Floors takes many design cues from the more established residential search sites, with a few enhancements. For one, their own professional photographers take all listing photos. Once on the site, the photos are joined by beautifully displayed data. The interface is extremely minimal and uncluttered. This really is one of the better listing sites you’ve seen. The site relies heavily on the Ken Burns effect, where still-photos are gradually panned and zoomed through a steadily paced slideshow. Freedman insists this is much better than 360-degree views for showcasing office space, and I’d have to agree.

A videography feature will debut later this year, but photography is the more sensible option for a majority of spaces, Freedman says. In fact, 42Floors is currently working on a mobile application (set to debut within the next quarter) that will allow brokers and landlords to take photos with their smartphones and upload them to the service directly. This is an interesting angle for the company and it will be worth observing how the trend plays out.

While all these innovations enhance the browsing and discovery of office space, the company will not be touching the transaction process at all. Once a company finds a space they like, 42Floors will refer a broker and then collect a 20 percent commission if the deal goes through.

In fact, this referral fee will be the primary business model once several quarters of growth have gotten the startup on steady footing. However, it will always be free to both browse and list space. The goal is for 42Floors to generate value by lubricating the market, reducing friction by making it free to list and view beautiful office spaces.

The company also plans to open a marketplace of services to help round out the creation of a dream office, with design and furnishing vendors on the list of eventual offerings.

The service is currently limited to the San Francisco Bay Area, where a panoply of office-hungry startups serve as a great testing ground for beta testing.

This will be the second time this team of entrepreneurs goes through the Y Combinator program, which they say was a “no-brainer,” citing loyalty to the program as the main motivator. In addition to all the important business insights gleaned from the startup boot camp, Freedman and co. insist that the real value is in the community, the people and the attitude. They could have raised more money from larger institutional names but were drawn to Paul Graham, the head of Y Combinator, who Freedman likens to a hard-charging college coach that “you just want to perform for.” Their own peers from the current batch of startups have voted them #1 in their group.

The company has so far raised $400,000 from Y Combinator, Start Fund, and a follow-on from SV Angel.

My parting thought on 42Floors is that it truly is astonishing how a direct-to-tenant modern web service for finding office space wasn’t done yet, and that launching as a startup for startups is a great play here. Just as AngelList has become the go-to social network for startups looking to fundraise, helping entrepreneurs make connections and fall back on the community during that difficult process, 42Floors can be the go-to social hub for startups looking to do the same around the office-space dynamic.

It’s also a great content-marketing angle for 42Floors to play: showcase hot startup office spaces, galvanize the community, promote their own service, and build an audience with authentic engagement. It may seem cliché, but we just haven’t seen this paradigm around physical startup spaces yet.

Front photo via Kelly Smith/Flickr