

Dogpatch Labs by the Numbers & Founders - dell9000
http://ryanspoon.com/blog/2010/11/27/dogpatch-labs-from-founders-perspective/

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We've been mulling this over for a while, but we now recommend to startups we
fund that they not work out of coworking spaces. A startup needs its own
territory, however crappy.

The most successful startups seem to have a very concentrated flavor of
themselves. That effect is diluted if a company is working out of someone
else's space. If you try to imagine early Google or early Facebook working out
of a coworking space, you just can't do it. They wouldn't have stood for it.

Another problem with working out of someone else's space is that you won't
seem as impressive to investors. Investors often like to visit startups in
situ. You don't seem as real if you don't have your own space.

Workspaces seem to fall on a continuum, and it's hard to say precisely where
the cutoff is. The test is whether the space feels like your own. But there
are a lot of borderline cases. E.g. it's ok for several startups to share an
office.

~~~
alexknowshtml
I'm bummed that you've began blanketly discouraging your companies from
working at coworking spaces, instead of encouraging them to find the right
coworking space (& community) based on their needs.

I also find it interesting that you'd qualify multiple startups as sharing an
office as acceptable, but other shared arrangements as not. I've actually
experienced the opposite effect, where having a more diverse (as in, not just
startups and their own echo chamber) membership leading to the discovery of
new insight and opportunities that wouldn't have happened if multiple
industries weren't being given an opportunity to work side by side.

If you're talking about shared office spaces, then I agree.

A coworking space, however, shouldn't simply be renting cheap space. They
should be working hard to foster a community of members to grow and contribute
to that space, and share benefits of everyone's contributions. I have to
imagine that this comes with a lot of similar benefits that getting involved
with YC seems to provide. Shared space is just the battlefield for those
interactions. I might be making unfair presumptions, but from an outsider's
prospective, YC seems to provide a similar context/battlefield with its
investments.

I'm the co-founder of a coworking community space in Philadelphia called Indy
Hall. What I think is important about coworking spaces is that they provide an
opportunity for people to get to know each other on a personal basis before
the working relationship takes hold. This leads to stronger potential co-
founder matches, and overall, a higher probability of people that need to find
each other finding each other.

In terms of ownership, we work hard to encourage our members to take ownership
of the space that they inhabit. All of the best things about working at Indy
Hall are things that our members decided should be there, and we helped make
possible.

Coworking simply isn't about space, though it's easy to mistake it as such.
Coworking is about context, and an important context in terms of organic
innovation and the spread of ideas.

Steven Johnson's recent book, "Where Good Ideas Come From", explores places -
not necessarily spaces, but places - where throughout history innovation has
happened. He cites places like salons in London and cafes in Paris, and the
roles those places played in true renaissance periods. The common thread was
that those places tended to be populated by people with half-baked ideas, and
they provided a context where it was possible for those half baked ideas
(Steven calls them "slow hunches") to bump into each other. It's that
serendipity that is often mistaken for a "genius" or eureka moment. It's that
serendipity that leads to the magic you think you can only hope for.

At a real coworking space (not just a shared office, of which there are many
who are mislabeled as coworking), interactions are designed to facilitate
those possibilites, and accelerate that serendipity.

~~~
pg
The difference between multiple startups sharing an office and a coworking
space is that in the former case there's no third party whose space they're
in. It's their space.

I'm sure there are advantages to coworking spaces. I just think the
disadvantages outweigh them, at least for YC-funded startups. They're already
part of a community of startups, so they don't need to seek one in the place
where they work.

