When the tech firm Yipit moved last month from General Assembly, a communal office campus on 20th Street and Broadway, to its own loft space on 18th Street and Fifth Avenue, its 14 employees simply grabbed their coffee cups and MacBook Airs and did the job on foot.
Arriving at their new home, they milled about, admiring the water-cooler, and the breath mints in the bathroom, and then got down to work, requiring no more than a power source and a pass code for the Wi-Fi. By the time the two guys from Moishe’s Moving Company arrived with a half-dozen boxes of office sundries, Yipit was back in business. There had already been a staff meeting, conducted while a handyman knelt in the rec room setting up a Ping-Pong table. All told, the move took about 10 minutes.
With a recent $6 million Series-B (or second round) financing deal, and plans to double its workforce in a year, Yipit sits in the mid-to-low range of New York’s thriving tech spectrum, below the behemoths, like AOL and Twitter, and the happily mid-sized, like Foursquare and Gilt Groupe, but above the sort of start-ups that had been their neighbors at General Assembly’s shared tables.