
What If You Combined Co-Working And Daycare? - dzink
http://www.fastcompany.com/3025741/work-smart/what-if-you-combined-co-working-and-daycare
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nairteashop
I've actually been working out of this space for the past few weeks. Don't
have kids but I see everyday how amazing it is for all the people who work
there who do. The daycare is sectioned off so there isn't a whole lot of noise
or distractions from the kids.

If you're based out of SF, freelance / work remotely, and have kids, I think
this is a fantastic setup.

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marquis
Looking at the photos it doesn't seem there is a lot of privacy unless you
permanently camp out in a conference room. I'm on the phone pretty much all
the time, would this not be a good fit, for when I'm in SF?

~~~
rhizome
This is a failing of most coworking spaces in SF, and I imagine its a question
purely of economics. I'd like to see (or hey, get funding to start) an open
plan office that at least has the option of high-wall cubicles. I also think
there's a bit of a gold rush in that commercial real estate owners figure they
can just take a big open room and throw a bunch of tables down and charge
everybody $300/mo to huddle together.

However, there are also several hackerspaces that have woodshops and whatnot,
so it seems like a short hop to think that if computery people can work as
part of a multidisciplinary office next to a bandsaw, why not work alongside
daycare workers? Maybe there are some legal issues in sharing in this way, but
by splitting a big open office into a daycare side of a wall and an internet
one, maybe there's a way.

~~~
marquis
I wonder how a landlord in SF would feel about using a residential address as
a shared office: much more affordable than downtown real estate and maybe the
bonus of a garden for the summer. I expect that happens a lot unofficially..

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pbreit
Uh...residential real estate is hardly "much more affordable" in SF. In fact,
office space in soma is likely still cheaper than residential here (not sure
why you'd want to be downtown). Also, probably illegal if not zoned for
commercial

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radicalbyte
My wife and I both work full time in demanding jobs, and we have a 4-month
old.

I'm in the process of setting up a business with a friend for pretty much one
reason - we want to work full time and be close to our kids. Part of the plan
involves either having a daycare section in our workplace, or our workplace
being a couple of minutes walk from our daycare.

It's 2014, I want to be able to play with my son during my coffee breaks and
lunch. And I'm sure as hell not dumping the responsibility for my kid on my
wife..

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sitkack
I solved this by getting more wives.

~~~
junto
I'm struggling to keep one wife happy. You must be crazy! :)

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Patrick_Devine
There was a place that did this in Menlo Park/Mountain View a few years ago
called Cubes & Crayons. They really tried to make it work, but ended up having
a lot of problems and eventually threw in the towel. Their daycare was decent,
but the office side of things didn't cut the mustard.

And that, I think is the problem with the business model. It's hard to make
both the day care, and the office space work, and one side is probably going
to suffer. Do you focus on the day care, which is a larger market, but has
high turnover (kids grow up fast), or do you focus on the smaller flex office
space where you can potentially hook people for longer? The flex office space
might not be a good idea because many people might just work from home
instead, and are really just looking for someplace to park their kids for a
few hours so they can get some work done. Cap that off with having to follow
additional regulations around running a child care facility, and it makes for
a pretty tough business.

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JshWright
Right now I'm a dad who works in a similar situation, with a few notable
exceptions (my 'coworkers' are my dog and cat, and the person taking care of
my daughter while I'm working is my wife).

In my opinion, one of the major advantages of working from home is that when I
want to take a break, I get to go hang out with my daughter. I really wouldn't
want to trade that for anything... The downside to our arrangement is that my
wife is very limited in what she can do, career-wise. A space like this would
open up a huge number of alternatives for us, with very few tradeoffs (aside
from the cost, which is conspicuously absent from the article...)

~~~
prawn
Wait until your daughter learns to come and knock on the office/study door and
call out for you!

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JshWright
Heh, I'm hoping that by the time she has the strength and dexterity to open
the gate at the bottom of the stairs that she'll also have the cognitive
ability to understand "Daddy's working".

~~~
iamwithnail
Mine has both... (At two.) it's v difficult to deal with "not work, daddy,
come play. Come play!"

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t1m0
I think a daycare that's close enough to mom that she can go nurse her child 2
or 3 times a day is going to be a simpler solution. Nursing is the crux
problem. I'm a dad, but I have never heard any mother speak kindly about
pumping. It's a huge logistic pain, and quite unpleasant for most moms.

~~~
lotharbot
Nursing is a big problem/benefit, but far from the only one. There are a lot
of other problems that can require a parent's personal attention for a few
minutes, and having an essentially zero commute time would greatly simplify
dealing with those. And spending a 10 minute break playing with the kids can
at times be much more refreshing than anything you can do at a normal
corporate site.

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emperorcezar
I hope to see more innovations like this pop up as our "demographic" starts
shifting away from the 20 somethings and into the 30 somethings.

~~~
sneak
There's a whole new breed of ca. 19 year olds with macbook airs who use
javascript and mongo and don't know what syscalls are, and they outnumber us
five to one. I wouldn't hold my breath.

~~~
microcolonel
17 y.o. here (no MacBook, and no MongoDB for now mind-you); I'm very excited
for possible innovation in parenting, and I hope there's at least a healthy
subset in the HN community sharing that interest.

The coffee shop kids will keep coming though I guess, maybe we could find a
way to get them on track while we wait for the first batch to mature.

~~~
foobarian
I was gonna guess that you also must know about syscalls, but judging by your
username maybe you're more into message passing. ;)

~~~
microcolonel
It was a phase, multiprocess debugging is every shade of hell on one rainbow
with a pot of self loathing at the end.

I changed my IRC nick to microcode after microcolonel, unfortunately HN
doesn't afford that luxury.

P.S. Most message passing APIs require some system calls, nay?

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here
In Seattle, [http://elliescoworking.com/](http://elliescoworking.com/) \-- I
know it received lots of interest and support a few years back when it was
first being tested. It looks like this may have transitioned away from
childcare for the time being into
[http://www.worksprogressseattle.com/](http://www.worksprogressseattle.com/)
Jessie is extremely friendly and I'm sure has quite a bit to say about her
experience.

~~~
scottkrager
I worked from worksprogress for a few months when I first moved to Seattle,
good space and location and Jessie and Marnee are great.

In talking with them about the childcare side of things, they ran into a lot
of regulation that just proved too much at the time.

Childcare is highly regulated and childcare and workplaces even more so
apparently. They said that many of the laws they were running into were meant
to keep larger industrial organizations in check back in the day. Companies
used to offer very sub-par "childcare" for line-workers and if a child was
having a problem (sick, injury, etc) it wasn't in the best interest of the
company to inform the parent (who would have to leave the production line).

I didn't think those laws would apply to a co-op type office where everyone is
working for themselves.

When I left in December, there was no childcare running, just the co-op
workspace (which I would highly recommend).

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protomyth
If I was going to build such a building, I think I would base it off the early
education training rooms that schools like NDSU have. They have one way
mirrors and observation rooms. I would assume any workable suggestion needs a
staff or else it would be chaos given different children's schedules. Also, it
would be a pain for the children.

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RK
Employee memberships could be an interesting option for companies that aren't
set up to do on-site daycare and willing to have remote-ish people.

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ynniv
We had one of those in Atlanta for a couple of years, but it appears to have
changed owners and become a regular preschool a year ago. I don't see a post-
mortem on the web.

[ [http://john.do/bean-work-play-cafe/](http://john.do/bean-work-play-cafe/) ]

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kendalk
I have read that having a company daycare makes attaining insurance difficult.
You are bringing on a large liability by having children on the property, and
insurance rates will reflect that. The concept sounds nice but there are
significant financial risks.

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thomasfl
My son is 9 months old, and I take care of him two days a week while his mom
goes to work. I've solved the problem in a way, by working long hours and in
the weekends. In time we'll see if it's worth it. The kids are only kids once.
I have two other kids from a previous marriage, the oldest recently began
studying at the university. He seems to like spending time going to cafe's
with me, so it's still not to late to catch up.

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pbreit
I couldn't find much pricing info. Anyone know?

~~~
nairteashop
In case it helps: I work here on a monthly "cafe plan" for $325/mo, which
means I can take any available seat in an open "cafe" area. A dedicated desk
is $525/mo. Full pricing for this location is here:
[http://nextspace.us/nextspace-potrero-hill/](http://nextspace.us/nextspace-
potrero-hill/)

Daycare costs extra, but unfortunately I don't know how much (I don't use the
daycare facility), and it doesn't seem to be on their website either. My guess
though is that it'd be comparable to other daycare places in SF, so basically
another $1000-$1500/mo?

~~~
roel_v
For full time day care? That's awesome. I (we) pay that for 2 days/week here.

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hkarthik
This is a great idea for folks in urban spaces.

We live in the suburbs and did something similar for about a year. My wife and
I both work from home full time, and when our second daughter was born, we had
an in-home nanny take care of her for the first year.

We could take regular breaks during the day to visit with her, check in with
the nanny, and help out with a feeding or two.

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iamwithnail
Quite up for scoping and seeing if we could set up one of these in London, if
anyone else is interested....

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loladesoto
i think a co-working + daycare space is a great idea. i've seen entrepreneurs
try building product while staying home with their kids and it's very
difficult to get into the 'zone' (and not feel riddled with guilt over it).

one model that i tried with my former CTO, who had a baby while we were
working on a product, was to take turns watching the baby while coding.

/disaster

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legulere
Having a Kindergarten at your workplace was quite common in the GDR. Sadly
this wasn't adopted in West Germany.

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smoyer
Then you'd have a "no-working" space.

~~~
sunir
Why? Many companies have on site daycare. It helps parents who need to commute
by saving them a trip and the stress of arriving late to daycare on the way
home.

Clever pun though.

~~~
smoyer
"Clever pun though"

And that's all it was intended to be ...

