On The End of Offices
Ryan and I have been wandering San Francisco, working fulltime out of coffee shops, hotel lobbies, and bars for the past 2 months or so. Sometimes we have been joined by other LoveMachine teammates for meetings or just fun. After giving it careful consideration, we’re going to strive never to have a central office, regardless of how many people are working at LoveMachine. It’s definitely the future – I predict that many companies are going to give up offices, here are some of the reasons:
Internet Anywhere: Wifi or wireless IP access is pretty much everywhere, meaning you can always be online. We carry Verizon cards that are like $50/month and give us good access even when there isn’t wifi. It’s just really simply now to be connected from anywhere, certainly for work. This wasn’t true even a couple years ago.
No more servers: All the LoveMachine servers are in the cloud – on Amazon’s EC2 servers, or Google. This includes email, intranet, calendars, development machines, etc. Again, this wasn’t possible a couple years ago. No more racks of physical hardware. I can’t fathom why a startup going forward would have a server closet.
Fun and Inspiring: Try it. Work in a hotel lobby (our favorite so far is the W in SOMA SF). Great people-watching, feels so fun to get free coffee even though you aren’t staying there. And without the crutch of being in an office, you actually feel like you need to get something done. Plus, you actually work less hours and get to see your family and friends more.
Memory Palace: There are lots of good references to read more about this, but there is a well-observed phenomena where meetings and conversations that happen in a novel location are easier to remember later. So actually the worst-case-scenario is having a recurring team meeting in a fixed meeting room! On the other hand, there are probably 2,000+ different locations available to LoveMachine just in San Francisco. It’s already a big advantage – I can easily remember meetings with people by keying to the location where we were sitting. This is a tangible competitive advantage.
Better use of Capital: In San Francisco, a startup office with room for 10 people is going to cost something like $5,000 per month for the rent, cleaning, bandwidth and other admin costs. So that’s like $500/month per person. Why don’t we just give everyone a $500 monthly budget for food and coffee and not have the office? Let’s see… would you rather “Our office is at 350 Brannan Street, we expect you to be there by 10 every morning, and we don’t cover parking”, or “Here is $500 you can use it all on coffee or maybe save it this month and instead get a hotel room at the Phoenix for your teammembers to party in all day.”
Less Meetings. It’s a lot harder to schedule meetings when you don’t know how many seats will be at the table in the next cafe. Good! People in general have far more meetings than they need to, and even clever atttempts to reduce meetings will not deter them. At Linden Lab, I used to make sure that we didn’t have too much of the office dedicated to meeting spaces. But then we built Second Life and started having all our meetings there. Foiled again!
Very cool!
Sounds like an excellent decision
[...] Second Life creator Phillip Rosedale is starting a new company, The Love Machine. It’s a set of collaborative tools for companies to help people work smarter, a typical goal of any workgroup solution. But what’s different is his fundamental premise, which is summed up in a recent blog post of his: On the End of Offices. [...]
Philip,
very true:-)
The future of work is definitely not in the office. Enabling humans to strive to their full potential through providing the “right” spaces where the necessary “social field” for exceptional work can evolve.
CoWorking is just the beginning – sharing desktops.
Going further with CoCreation, CoInnovation and CrowdSourcing.
There is more to come in the time ahead – happy to connect and collaborate on this issue across cultures, languages, countries.
Best regards from Dresden, Ralf
Well although I’ve been guilty of this at times, I do stay at hotels often enough to rationalize that we are staying “equitable.” It’s bad karma though to have fun at other people’s expense. Think about it.
Great post!
Nothing more to add than that
Trapping people in offices between fixed hours is inhuman. In order to humanize the situation, people start playing attention-exchange games, which they then confuse with actually working.
One of the big attention-exchange games is “going to meetings”.
If you free the people from this tyranny, it means they can concentrate on being productive when the time is right and in the environment that suits them best.
This has to be the way of the future!
Internet Anywhere: Just woke up and writing this from a cement block kitchen lookign through the window at a blue meditrranean sea over a village of 40 ppl on the south cost of Crete island in Greece, over a communal wifi network relayed from village to village over antennas APs made in USA and ending up in one single ADSL like 25 kms up the mountain and installed a fewm months ago , just before I arrived with my backpack and laptop after 25 years in beautiful (but cold BC (western Canada) spending 20 years as manager for a North American Indian Community.
less meetings: spent 20 yes mostly sitting in offices driving at times 5 hours on snow and ice in winter to go to meetings that lasted 2 hrs maybe, as people were still refusing to do it over phone or net: Compleet waste of time and productivity leading to frustations spending all that time on roads or in an airplane. Also lead to me being slighgtlly overweight and some health problems.
Fun and Insipiring: Most importantly : Human. I have always insisted that out staff BE allowed to have an emotionnal and real life at work, with major flexibility. We can’t really separate work from the rest of our lives. our lives impact our work leading to loss of productivity and creativity , forcing someone to stay from 9 to 5 in an office cubicle alone when he/she going through a marital breakdown ain’t going to be productive. But take him for cofffe and listen to him..let him spend the day relax and think, he will repay with years of hard dedication to the project.Most of our staff worked there for over 12 years.
Heart is not just about happiness: it includes hurt and pain that are intrisic part of love and need to be allowed to be expressed. I used to cry at times in my office, Later I had employees thank me for showing them it was ok to be human.
So I susbcribe to you ideal and beleive that’s the future of course. Though I spend the last few days checking ELance, Guru, etc… and realised that the bids are very low..and competetion is fierce. sighs..need to figure out a way to feed myslef hard when my skills are not that tangible and cant type over 2o wpm wth 2 fingers.
I am an SL addict as well and wondering if it throught sharing those electrons that Philip or me Philippe have been in sync as far as leaving things behind in November 09 and starting afresh , small and in complete new territory or country)??? Collective Unconscious??
If I knew coding or programming I would help out..I am rambling away, and today is a big day for me as the head village workers are finally here after 3 months to hook me up with running water adn I may be getting my very own Wifi micro repeater on top on my old one room stone house that i call bedroom.
Electricity is changing this village and our lives! Good luck with everything I may drop in once in a while and BS a little and if you tired of SF come over here share some of my bandwidth at the beach
[...] LoveMachine. His first goal is to create work group collaboration software that starts with a unique point of view on what makes teams work together [...]
Love it. I’ve just recently finished reading REWORK, by the founders of 37signals. They make a similar strong case for abandoning the “old” ideas of a central office.
Way to go Philippe Batini.
Eventhough I’d love to do all my work from anywhere but the office, I still find it reassuring that I have an office to ‘fall back on’ when I feel the need.
Sure, working from anywhere sounds like a great place to be, but an office enviroment still provides somesort of a comfort zone for a lot of people. I like to associate my office with my work. I don’t want to start associating places where I come to relax, like coffeeshops, with work.
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Thanks for sharing, this is a fantastic article.Thanks Again. Cool.
Links are dead, might want to update them
[...] – can bid on the current jobs. This means they have a very lean staff. Also, they have no official office space. No rent. No electricity bills. Lovemachine’s servers are in the cloud. When they want to [...]