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led the San Francisco-based company’s $20 million Series A raise, which included participation from and . Landing also announced a $10 million debt facility.

With this funding, Landing has raised a total of $45 million. Former Shipt CEO put in $15 million of his own money to get the company off the ground last year.

His premise behind starting the company was that the dynamics of renting had been “essentially unchanged for decades.” (, a grocery delivery service started in Alabama, was for $550 million in 2017.) Smith calls Landing an example of an emerging category: “Living as a Service.”

In a , Smith wrote how Landing was born out of his own moving experience:

“In 2016, as we were scaling Shipt nationally, my family and I moved to San Francisco. When I arrived, I was immediately struck by how difficult it was to rent an apartment. From countless phone calls and coordinating movers to furnishing an empty space and setting up utilities, it was a massive inconvenience and extremely tedious. Of course, I’m not alone in feeling that frustration.”

How it works

Landing works directly with property managers and apartment owners to offer studio, one and two-bedroom apartments in neighborhoods with features such as easy access to public transportation and shopping. Renters pay $199 a year for the ability to pick up and move whenever they want within the Landing network. They only need to provide a 30-day notice if moving to a non-Landing property. Otherwise, only a three-day notice (when moving to another Landing property) is needed.

The company says it takes care of all the hassles that come with renting, such as setting up utilities. Users move into a fully furnished apartment that has “a kitchen stocked with essentials” and an on-call concierge service. Basically, the apartments are turn-key and move in-ready. Think all-inclusive for apartments. (Landing even designed its own line of furniture.)

“We’re seeing a growing mobile workforce in need of more flexible living solutions that empower them to embrace opportunities as they arise–no matter where they’re located on the map,” he said. “Landing is the first company addressing this.”

The company has brought about 300 units online since it was founded last year.

Landing plans to use its new capital in part to further expand into new markets. Currently, it’s in nine cities: Austin, Birmingham, Ala., Boston, Chicago, Los Angeles, Nashville, New York City, the San Francisco Bay Area and Washington, D.C. By the end of 2020, the company’s goal is to be offering apartments to its members in 30 cities.

“You should never be locked in a lease,” Smith told me. “Renters should have freedom and flexibility. Isn’t that the point of renting?”

Investor POV

For Greycroft Co-founder and Partner, Landing is unique in its flexible living membership offering and it meets an important need.

“People’s needs for living are changing–they want to balance flexibility, stability and quality,” he said.

It should be noted that Greycroft also backed Smith at Shipt. As did Maveron. And this funding proves that VCs often back founders as much as they do ideas.

“Bill’s proven success creating premier consumer businesses, such as Shipt, brings us great confidence in his ability to introduce and scale an exceptional product to the market, breathing new life into the real estate industry,” said , co-founder and partner of Maveron, in a written statement.

Landing is not the first flexible apartment startup we’ve covered. In October, I wrote about how New York-based , a tech-equipped apartment rental company, raised $50 million in a Series B round co-led by and .

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Here’s back in August:

A couple weeks ago, Medium replaced its “recommend” feature — a little heart button at the end of each article — with  that you can click as many times as you want […]

Now, those claps are actually going to mean something. Medium pays authors by dividing up every individual subscriber’s fee between the different articles they’ve read that month. But rather than doing an even division between articles, Medium will weight payments toward whichever articles a subscriber gives the most claps to.

The piece goes on to note that the setup certainly feels abnormal and that the payout mechanism is opaque. Fair enough. But I have to admit that I hope Medium figures out something useful with this new experiment. The Internet needs it.

After the Medium news dropped, I opened a cluster of tabs with the intention of writing something serious about the topic. I founded a company with some friends back in the day that did something similar (we , , and in record time), so the topic is near to my heart. And as a regular reader of as much stuff as I can get my face in front of, not to mention a writer who is useless in nearly every other way, I want online writing to make economic sense so that there is more of it.

But time flew by, and I missed the window on getting that piece done. A Chrome crash cycle wiped out my tab cluster and, alas, the moment passed. Until today.

Here’s Some Ads With Your Yext Earnings Report

Yext, a company that we’ve covered here at Crunchbase News a few times, reported earnings yesterday. To gain some more context on its earnings, I did what any other writer would do and researched.

However, to find out why Howard’s company was taking a ding despite strong numbers, I had to riff through the shitty underbelly of online content. To make it through, it was necessary to fend off popups and requests for permissions.

Even though I adblock but unblock liberally, no defense was enough. And then this happened all at once:

That is a request for permissions to send me notifications, an email sign-up request, and some other trash on the right.

Staring at that particular mess, I couldn’t help but wonder if this is where we hoped the Internet would get to by 2017. I doubt it. Who wants 1997-style Internet clutter to be our forever normal?

Enter Medium

The above example — you have your own, I am sure — highlights why I nearly want to wish Medium well. Doing so would break my habit of not wishing companies that have luck, but if Medium can figure out a better way to get more people to help fund journalism and other online writing, I won’t cry.

Even if it isn’t enough to save Medium, per se, or its valuation, the Internet isn’t doing so well, despite some success at publications of the highest profile’s ability to garner large subscriber bases.

Meanwhile, the vaunted hated won’t work for most publications. Pushing slightly-related videos that autoplay with sound is anti-reader and will eventually implode as a strategy. It’s also not a move that is led by reader demand.

Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall had the best and :

Is your favorite website laying off staff or ‘pivoting to video’. In most cases, the root cause is not entirely but to a significant degree driven by the platform monopolies – in this case, Google and Facebook – taking a bigger and bigger slice of the advertising dollars. It’s going to their profits and being taken away from publishers who of course are also trying to maximize their profits but do it through paying for journalism.

So that’s not going to last. (Not to mention that video is incredibly hard and expensive. .) Presuming that the pivot to video fails, publications that have been happily cutting off their noses to delight ephemeral ad budgets will still have to figure out how to make their online writing make money.

Medium, Pls

If Medium fails to monetize and eventually shuts shop, its demise would just be another startup’s failure. That happens all the time, and it is simply part of the creative destruction that powers what’s next.

But if Medium does manage to grow paying for reading stuff online—especially in a way that could foster new talent, support small publications, and the like—we’d all be better for it. Medium is hardly the first company to try content subscriptions, but as a platisher — — it perhaps has a unique shot at financing all sorts of writing.

Or it might not. What’s good is that this question will keep being asked until it is answered. My little company was a quick failure. Medium may be a slow success. But, eventually, there will be a way in which micropayments work for online content.

I that I had just joined the Medium subscriber pool while writing this and the response was mostly snark. We’ll see.

iStockPhoto / siraanamwong