Ugh. HR (even just payroll, but also various disclosures, insurances, etc.), lawyers, physically printing and getting people to sign large numbers of forms, etc. all are annoying and have very little room for positive differentiation.
Picking out an office and furnishing it also sucks, but at least you might do particularly well on it.
Agreed, it very quickly starts to erode an early startups' most precious resource: time. We've taken to outsourcing what we can, as most do, but it would be nice to see how some people get it out of their way quickly.
We outsourced our HR, and although I don't know all the gritty details because my CEO cofounder is taking care of it, I know he likes it a lot.
Although one quibble I had with it was that they gave us a standard policy handbook to have signed by employees which was ridiculous and out of touch with the realities of tech startup (ie employees shouldn't use their work computer to send personal emails, etc). We sent it back to them and they were accommodating.
I'd rather outsourced HR than no HR. When the people you have a grievance against are the people you need to file grievances with, you're better off just leaving.
(I'm talking things like having a raise agreed in writing, and then getting paid significantly less. And, when questioned about it, the owners saying "oops, yeah, should have told you, we decided we can't pay you that")
Why hasn't one of the incubators or a startup solved these problems? Between apartment phase and some reasonable maturity point (20-50 people?), one could have a reasonably large building or set of nearby buildings that's subdivided from companies of various sizes. It would have the benefit of: Centralized food acquisition either with community eating or distribution to each unit; centralized administrative services; pre-furnished units which simplifies moving; and big company benefits such a onsite gym, dry cleaning, etc.
Presumably such a entity should also provide centralized arrangement of benefits, payroll, legal documents and other issues. An extreme form would be to have this management company run resource companies that make all hires on pass-through basis and submit a single consolidated bill to the main company each month.
Why wouldn't this work? I can think of only three reasons though I'm not convinced any of them are true: Insufficient supply of sufficiently homogenous companies (e.g. software startups); sufficient diversity of preferences for customization, particularly with regard to location to create insufficient density; or fear of poaching due to close proximity to other companies that require the same skillset
There are a lot of coworking spaces which also offer private offices. I think the idea is that once you outgrow that, and you hit 10-20 people and a Series A, you want to customize and have your own space.
What my dream office is is a standalone building, light industrial style, in Mountain View, Palo Alto, or Menlo Park, with gated parking, and ideally a mile or less from public transit. Onsite generator, fiber, etc., and a way to split the building into public event space for 100 or so people, and offices, with private offices for everyone, with courtyard-type spaces for the groups of offices. 300-500 square feet per person in the "office" area.
The smaller buildings on Plymouth in MV, or Pioneer Way, or some of the office parks in Menlo, would all be fine.
I doubt most other startups want this -- they all want shared spaces with big open plan offices in nice buildings in downtown SF, it seems.
As long as there are a reasonably small number of variables, this could be done scalably. The coworking spaces seem to relieve the space and furnishing concerns but don't fix the HR and legal paperwork headaches.
You mention that by Series A, companies want to customize. Is it more a function of wanting some of their own common space or a desire for individual expression?
You can outsource most of this stuff for $500-1500/mo, and maybe $200/mo per employee if you go PEO. You can pay your lawyers more to do all the paperwork and just bring it to you to sign.
At least in silicon valley, the annoyances still exist but don't rise to the level of huge opportunity to fix, since the current solutions solve them pretty well, and the pain-per-customer is finite (you only really set up payroll once, etc.)
It's just annoying. The real pain points remain 1) finding great people and hiring them 2) managing teams 3) product 4) customers 5) funding. Office space is the only minor issue which ever rises to the point of serious, and it's only exceptionally bad if you're looking in Palo Alto (SF and even MV are fairly ok). Admin overhead isn't on the list.
(unless you really want to solve it, but there are a lot of reasons why startups aren't great customers. Only really in the Bay Area and maybe NYC is there high enough density to come up with something, and since most of this is regulated per-state (and per-city in NYC and SF), you'd probably want it to be locally focused.)
Picking out an office and furnishing it also sucks, but at least you might do particularly well on it.