I registered geekbeach.org (no site there) a few years back with the hope of one day doing this same thing in some random tropical setting.
I wonder how many people (aside from me of course) would be happy to know about a spot on Nusa Lembongan with guaranteed fast internet, reliable power, a nice slice of white sand and a really nice reef break just outside the lagoon.
Would anybody here take the effort to weasel a working holiday to such a place? Any SV startups that would pick up the whole shop and set up on the beach for a month or so?
It's been raining here in the North of England for six months straight. If I get enough love for the idea here, I might just have to book a flight and start scouting locations.
You have to be careful, as most places will have strict regulations against working while on a tourist visa. Thailand won't even let you volunteer, and they will deport you if they catch you. If you have anything that looks like an office, and you have "tourists" in there hacking, you could get in a lot of trouble. Don't know what the rules are in Indonesia, but you should definitely talk to a lawyer first.
Having said that, I've been in Thailand for a while, and the same idea keeps popping into my head. If I were bootstrapping a company, I would much rather fly with my partners out here for 6 months than try to rent an office in SF. I can see one major problem with the execution though: people are going to get beach fever for the first month or so, so don't expect productivity to be very high. You might want to schedule a few weeks of partying in, just to get it out of their systems.
1) entering on a 30-day landing permission (for TH) or 90-day landing permission (most other places)
2) performing work for a company based in another country
The tourist visas require signing a document that you're only in the country to spend, sure. But that's mostly designed to make sure that money flows into the country, not out of it.
Officially any kind of work is not allowed. Thailand is very thai centric, only thais can own land, citizenship is difficult to obtain, and business is fairly similar. Malaysia is far more business friendly in that regard.
Yes, I've done this. I would add that it's also very easy to get at least unlimited 2G Internet access in Thailand or Malaysia, especially Thailand. Bali/Indonesia seem to suck for connectivity as there's a serious bandwidth shortage out of the country. There was a previous attempt on HN at doing this in an organized fashion that didn't take off a few years back.
Regarding bandwidth, I have a CDMA mifi router with a local telecom that works anywhere in Thailand except Bangkok (3G deployment in Thailand is a long and sordid tale). I get about half a megabit up and down anywhere that has a cell tower, which is just enough for voice skype and doing server administration on my linode slice over ssh. It even works in Laos as long as you are close to the Mekong. :)
Yeah, when I was in Thailand last year 3G deployment hadn't really started as the government hadn't issued licenses yet. Glad to hear that's changed. Have they instituted bandwidth caps? That was the nice thing about the 2G connections; I could run a solid 50 kilobytes per second whenever I wanted off of a DTAC Happy SIM, buy a week of service at a time, and not worry about running out.
I pay 800 baht a month for unlimited bandwidth with CAT. The government still hasn't gotten the licensing issues sorted out, which is why CDMA is still the only game in town. Meanwhile the rest of the world is rolling out 4G. Amazing Thailand...
Sounds awesome. I'm actually going to be in SE Asia for 5 months starting in 10 days (to start working on my own software product) so I'm already converted and can definitely see the value in this :-) Being surrounded with like-minded people in a coworking space on the beach in Indonesia to hack your next big thing? What else?
Also, for the visa thing, it's not really a problem unless people want to stay there very long. Speaking about Indonesia, they are now granting tourist visas for 2 months. Should be plenty enough!
I've been doing contract work from abroad for the last 2 years (first Brazil and now SE Asia), but right now I'm rotting in a hotel room in Chiang Mai going out of my mind with boredom. I sent you an email at the address listed in your profile, let's chat.
Whoops, email bounced (update your profile), so I'll just post here for anyone else that gives a shit:
I've spent the last 2 years doing contract work for a few different startups while I've traveled, first in southern Brazil and now here in Thailand. I've spent a few weeks each in Saigon, Hong Kong, Singapore, Vientiane, and Phnom Penh, but I keep coming back to Chiang Mai as I think it has the best combination of low cost of living (it's absurdly cheap here), access to infrastructure, and tolerance of resident foreigners (notice I said "tolerance" and not "acceptance"; more on that later). Singapore and Hong Kong are far easier for a European or North American, but the cost of living is about 2-3 times what it is in Bangkok, which itself is easily twice as much as a smaller place like Chiang Mai.
My first few months here I kept wondering why nobody has set up startup incubators here. The cost of living is so low it's almost a joke, and the environment can be amazing if you know the right places to stay (and which places to avoid). Of course it would be beneficial to be in San Francisco and have coffee with 5 different VCs in the same day, if that's the route you are taking, but I personally prefer the idea of the lean, bootstrapped startup. So why would you cram 5 guys into a tiny apartment in San Francisco and eat ramen noodles 3 meals a day while you develop your prototype, when you could be eating in restaurants and living in a nice, furnished apartment with a view for less than half the price? How many single engineers would jump at the chance to spend 6 months hacking in Thailand? I know I certainly would (and I did!).
And now the downside: Asia is VERY, VERY different to any other place in the world. It sounds stupidly obvious, but the magnitude of the difference takes a few months to sink in. Thailand is full of some of the friendliest, most accommodating people in the world, but the culture just doesn't have a place for foreigners as anything other than tourists. I lived in a small village in the northeast for five months, and even though everyone there knew my name, they would only refer to me as "farang", or "foreigner". Could you imagine what kind of reaction you would get if you walked around New York saying to all the immigrants: "Hey, foreigner!" You would be labeled a bigot and ostracized, at best, and probably receive a well-deserved punch to the face. And if you ever have a girlfriend here, everyone will automatically assume she is a prostitute, which makes it really difficult to get a date with a nice girl, as you can imagine. Singapore and Hong Kong are a different story, as they have a much longer history of cultural and ethnic integration, but living there is just as expensive as any big city in the U.S., if not more so. I am making a lot of gross generalizations, and I should point out that I don't speak the language very well, but this has been my personal experience here. As always, YMMV.
Sorry for the rant. If anyone wants to contact me, my email is in my profile.
How do you find contract work? I'm on vacation in Australia for 3 months but would like to do some contract work to take care of expenses like buying a surfboard, tent, possibly a used car, etc.
All of my work has come from referrals from previous clients in the U.S., but after 2 years it is starting to dry up a bit. I need to get my blog up to date and start improving my network, but getting work abroad is the same as getting work at home: get on the phone and start calling everyone that you've ever worked with.
I would suggest malaysia instead. It might be %20 more expensive than indonesia/thailand, but they have very good 3G internet deployment throughout the entire country, beautiful beaches, better roads and infrastructure, better english, they're the hub for air asia and most importantly a sane visa system.
I'm genuinely interested in this, I work from home so this would be perfect for me (I'm also in rainy old England, although I like England!) my only problem would be I'm terribly unsocial so wouldn't fit in well, but I'd love to attend something like this.
I actually took a team to an off-season ski chalet in Chamonix one summer, and it was surprisingly affordable. Airfare included, it came out to less than we'd pay for cubes in LA. Possibly even less than $200/desk/month, considering the place rented for $800 euro per month and slept 10 comfortably in 6 bedrooms.
In SE Asia, I guess you could go 2 ways with pricing. You could look at what the backpackers pay (~$10/night or $200/month for a room), and go with something comparable so that you'd get some overlap (and thus end up with Swedish girls hanging out at the pool). Or you could go for the "Surf Camp" model, where you charge $4k/week to people who have too much money. Personally I'd probably lean towards the first model if it were up to me.
Mostly I'd be looking for something that paid for itself, kept me on the beach, and kept a bunch of interesting people around.
If you visit any backpacker beach in the world, you'll find people who've been there for ten years. Some of them own bars and bungalow complexes. Nearly all of them are living on tourist visas.
There's something like this in Brighton on the south coast of the UK called The Skiff.
Membership is £165/$264 a month. However this is the top rate, you can pay £25 a month for 'mates' membership, which means you aren't guaranteed a desk, but you can go there and find a place to sit wherever the hell you want, 2 days a week. It's an odd pricing structure but it must work for them because from what I've heard it's always busy.
Never been there myself. We just have our own little office.
They host some sort of hacker drop-in-centre called "Build Brighton" down there at night time apparently, which I've been meaning to check out. Apparently they made a MIDI exercise bike once...
One random memory from Build Brighton that just came back to me; when I was at uni we once went to a demo of live coding music[1] at a club, put on by the aforementioned hackerspace.
One of the 'acts' involved someone waving a chair at a laptop while wearing a gimp mask[2]. That person later turned out to be one of my lecturers who had been teaching us to write softsynths. Good times...
This is very much something that i've been looking for, except in the Manchester area. Do you know if there is anything like this up in Mancs? MadLabs (i think they were called) tried something then promptly ended it. I think their value proposition wasnt as well refined as 'the skiff' hence the lack of demand, but it looks like the brighton guys have got their business model worked out very well.
I'd easily pay that if there were a similar thing nearby (I'm in deepest Lincolnshire). I'd be paying £400-500 per month for a small office around here. Plus VAT. Plus rates..
I saw the link to Office and Company in Pasadena. The rates are a bit steep for me at $325/month. I've also been to Blank Spaces in Santa Monica. Are there any folks out near Caltech that be interested in sharing a space or just working together? I usually work at home now and I wouldn't want to do co-working everyday of the week; I find I focus better outside an office environment. But I think spending a day or 2 every week with fellow developers and designers sounds fun and interesting. Ping me if you like the idea of part-time coworking.
Yes. I'm in Old Town Pasadena but it's hard to justify that rate. There's enough coffeeshops around here, and it's unclear whether the space has a "community" or if it's just freelancers.
What's your email? I'm interested in setting up some sort of part-time thing, especially if there's a few others around.
jch@whatcodecraves. I misspoke about Blank Space's location. Glad to hear that you guys are opening up in Santa Monica though. Ideally, I'd want to do something within walking or biking distance.
Price is about 20% higher than the per-person cost of our first office in Chicago's Monadnock building, but our office didn't have the amenities. Is this roughly what co-working spaces cost nationwide?
A membership in a coworking location in DC runs about $300 month, and you don't have a dedicated desk, at least in the place that I was a member. However, the social interaction of the place and other amenities made it worth the cost (if for no other reason than all the referrals I got through there).
This sounds suspiciously like the kind of thing people are inclined to tell themselves because hanging out with the geek crowd at a coworking space sounds more fun and more ego-gratifying than getting some bleak office somewhere. Starting a company gets bleak. Deal with it. It only gets bleaker if you don't.
If I wanted social contact, I'd (a) start or attend meetups, and (b) work out of a coffee shop or the library. I wouldn't pay a $100-$150/mo(!) premium for it.
$200/mo sounds like a decent price for this, though, especially if I wasn't super-committed to my company.
I'm really having trouble following your logic. Are you advocating working in a bleak environment just because it's cheaper? The implied contract of a place like this is a desire to interact with other professionals on a daily basis, that's very different from strangers at starbucks.
I would find this valuable if I was self employed. I'm the type of person who currently has the choice to work from home or the office every day, and 95% of the time I choose the office.
Yes. That is what I am advocating. Or, to hit my sentiment more precisely: I'm advocating not spending 50-75% more per month on working space simply for the benefit of hanging around like-minded people.
I'm not advocating avoiding like-minded people; that would be silly. I'm saying there are ways to get that benefit without shelling out cash for it, and, for that matter, the control and stability that comes from having a 6mo or 1yr lease instead of a month-to-month arrangement.
If it's so hard for you to get the networking and cross-pollination you need that you have to pay $150/mo(!) to get it, I have bad news about how hard it is to acquire customers, partners, and investors.
I don't know about other people, but I don't really care about the environment when I am working - be it coding or designing or researching. All I need from the envolironment is for it be quiet and have good lighting.
Agreed. Plus, you need all the quiet time to focus and concentrate that you can get. I've found coworking spaces to be full of distractions. Spend your non-working time socializing/networking instead of your working time.
One thing that bothers me about coworking spaces is the "anti-office" mentality that assumes the world would be a better place without any kind of working privacy.
I hope it's obvious that I agree strongly with that. It'd be hard to imagine a bleaker space than we started out in (the unventilated warehouse attic of the Haymarket Square building in the West Loop). It was still fun to have a space.
I'm not looking to appear picky, but please break out the contact info & the address. Right now, prospects are required to thoroughly read the text, even if they're sold and want to sign up right away.
If prospects are already sold on it, would they really mind reading through the text (which is nicely styled and not that much of a read)?
Usually I would agree with you on keeping the contact info and address separate somewhere up at the top, but in this case I think this approach works. Correct me if I'm wrong.
I'm moving from California (where I work mostly in-office) to Austin (where I will continue to work the same job, but 100% remote), and I have been looking for things like this in the Austin area.
Conjunctured already filled up their main space and since expanded to another location. The people I know there love it and many would give up their apartment before they gave up their co-working space.
This is pretty cool as there isn't much like this in the SFV. It would be nice if there were some photos so we could see what it looks like. I've been to co-loft in Santa Monica a couple times and am hoping this is similar. It would be nice if they hosted some meet-ups like co-loft does as it would be a much closer place to nerd out for people that live closer to SFV.
I work out of http://workbarboston.com in downtown Boston right across the street from South Station. $275 per month for a desk, more for a private office, less for 8:30 to 5:30 access only.
Hi guys, Im not associated with nerd fort,so Im not able to provide any photos. Posted the link because I thought it would be useful to other hackers (and liked the design as well).
The AC is more of an incubator - that is, they provide their residents with a lot of resources (business contacts, advisors, even training), whereas coworking places typically don't have the same connections.
I wish there were more options like this, and not just in US. Even if you are a freelance or a one man startup, working alone isn't always as good as it sounds.
cool idea. fortunatley in some places you can get an entire private office with door for about double that. more space & quiet, less "co-" so not sure if clearly better or worse
I wonder how many people (aside from me of course) would be happy to know about a spot on Nusa Lembongan with guaranteed fast internet, reliable power, a nice slice of white sand and a really nice reef break just outside the lagoon.
Would anybody here take the effort to weasel a working holiday to such a place? Any SV startups that would pick up the whole shop and set up on the beach for a month or so?
It's been raining here in the North of England for six months straight. If I get enough love for the idea here, I might just have to book a flight and start scouting locations.