Alex Cook from Rentabilities on Startup Culture at MassChallenge

Rentabilities, along with over 100 other teams, recently moved into the MassChallenge offices in Boston!

Joseph F. Fallon graciously donated an entire floor of office space to MassChallenge.  Imagine this – over 100 startups all working together on one floor, overlooking Boston Harbor and the City of Boston…
The stage is set for an innovative, fun, and never-before-seen culture here at MassChallenge.  Here’s why.
Breathtaking Views of Boston

No explanation really needed here… how awesome is this view!?!
The World’s Biggest Continual Whiteboard… Ever.
That’s right!  IdeaPaint and MassChallenge have teamed up to do something crazy. Last week IdeaPaint came to the 14th floor and applied their whiteboard technology to the entire inside wall of the 14th floor. Once the space above every door is connected, the Guiness Book of World Records will be visiting the offices to officially recognize the achivement as the biggest whiteboard ever created by mankind.
Check it out!
Ping-pong, Foosball, Pool Table, & (Sponsored!) Beer
Ping-pong is a favorite among the Rentabilities founders, so we were pretty excited to see a table in the offices.  There’s also Foosball and a Pool Table… all of which we get to play while looking out onto the harbor and watching Codzilla speed by.  For those of you wondering when the ping-pong will be ready… we stayed late on Friday and put it together!
Boston Beer Company (Sam Adams) also is adding something important to the culture here at MassChallenge: beer. That’s right… beer for all of the events has been donated to us – all we have to do is pick at the building’s loading dock and carry it to the 14th floor!
MassChallenge FourSquare Challenge
I’ve been working with Conor from Localocracy to design what we’re calling the “MassChallenge Foursquare Challenge”.  I’ll write another blog post on that later, but here’s the basics: whoever is the major of MassChallenge gets a free pizza from everyone in the office on Fridays.  Whoever is second gets two slices from the Major.  As of today I just overtook Conor’s majorship – looks like he better come in this weekend
Rentabilities Community Renting Experiment

We’d like to promote and add to the culture here at MassChallenge… so we’ve created what we call a community renting experiment. It’s just for fun – it’s not the primary idea or goal of Rentabilities.  The idea is to create a community (all MassChallenge teams, for example) and then share and rent stuff between each other.  So we’ve brought ladderball, some frisbees, hand tools and more and everyone in the space is invited to “rent” this stuff for free. Check it out at http://rentabilities.com/masschallenge!
Happiness and great culture are part of what makes great companies, and MassChallenge has set the stage for serious innovation in Boston.
We’re really looking forward to getting to know the teams, mentors, sponsors, and supporters of MassChallenge.
-Alex Cook, a founder at Rentabilities - a company that makes renting easy. Finding and booking rental products is a time consuming process.  Rentabilities has built a rental search engine that helps you find and book anything to rent - from kayaks to bounce castles - in just a few clicks.
The team has also been working on a full software package for rental stores which allows any store take rental reservations in real-time and has processed over $500k during its beta with two clients in the Boston area.
 
This post has been re-posted with the author's permission. To check out the Rentabilities blog, click here.