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Is there anybody here who actually uses these spaces? How do you justify the costs? If I was an early investor in a company, and I learned that they were spen

• JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
  Amazon using doors as desks back in the day is in stark contrast to startups using WeWork space now.
  • HeWhoLurksLate 7y ago
    Amazon using doors was an expensive thing to do that they mainly did for the image it brought them. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21133408 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21133408
    • JohnJamesRambo 7y ago
      I agree it is cheesy but at least they were trying!
    • ericd 7y ago
      I don't think it's that expensive? Hollow core doors are cheap (~$30 at HD), flexible, huge, durable, and feel nice. I love my door desk.
      • knolax 7y ago
        They hired people to build the desks. The labor cost probably puts them in the red, especiaplly b/c of the scale.
      • jdavis703 7y ago
        How can something be flexible and durable? As someone who accidentally punched a hole through a hollow core door, I can definitely say I’d never consider placing expensive equipment on one.
        • speedplane 7y ago
          > As someone who accidentally punched a hole through a hollow core door, I can definitely say I’d never consider placing expensive equipment on one. Why would you place expensive equipment on a door?
        • ericd 7y ago
          I meant flexible in terms of what it allows you to do (although it does flex a bit as well). But to your question, ductile (non-brittle) metals tend to be more durable than brittle ones.
  • jumpingmice 7y ago
    A full-size exterior door as a desk seems like an impossible luxury to me now. I'm a high-ranking engineer at a famous, rich company and I'm well-paid etc but my desk is 24"x44". The conditions under which modern software companies expect "knowledge workers" to exercise their mental abilities are absurd.
• meddlepal 7y ago
  > I would be furious. Most likely you would not care. It is hard to quantify what is a waste of money as an investor because you're 60,000 feet above the day to day happenings. If the employees are happy with the situation do you care? You can yell at the CEO and try and have them work in a cheap dingy garage but if they are miserable and productivity takes a nose dive are you going to be any happier? That's why you stay out of it as an investor, you don't actually know any better because there is not enough data to make that kind of judgement. Anecdotal story: I worked for an early stage startup backed by a large reputable VC. We worked for two years in the VC's conference room. One of the senior partners forced us out of their office and to spend money on office space we did not need because they did not like the look of our large ugly flat screen monitors (40" they were great). Meanwhile a few other startups stayed in that same space for several years because they worked on pretty Apple 20-something inch monitors that looked proper for the space. So... who knows, VC's are not immune to irrationally stupid decisions. I will say one of the things WeWork always had going for it was locations. I'm more familiar with NYC and Boston but there were WeWork offices 5-10 mins away for South Station in Boston and Penn Station in Manhattan. It makes it really convenient to recruit when you can say your office is right next to a major transportation hub.
  • speedplane 7y ago
    > VC's are not immune to irrationally stupid decisions VCs don’t care about expenses, they care about growth. Actually it’s worse than that, they actually want high expenses (with accompanying growth), so the startup needs to come back to them and ask for more money. The second a startup turns profitable and doesn’t need VC money is precisely when the VC stops making money.
• marcinzm 7y ago
  The biggest cost for a startup is going to be employees. Unhappy employees are likely to be less productive and more likely to leave. Assuming they even decide to join once they see the space they'd be working in. That's all expensive.
• cavisne 7y ago
  Investors want to minimize silly reasons for startups to fail. I've never seen a startup shutdown medium post that started with "We have a great team and our product has seen huge uptake, unfortunately the cost of our coworking space has overwhelmed us". On the other hand plenty of startups fail because they cant hire the right talent. Wework is in locations, and has an atmosphere that most tech workers if not like, at least are used to. Especially ones who are happy to work in an early stage startup (and if that one doesn't work you've made a lot of connections with other ones in the office :P). Additionally investors don't want startup founders to spend weeks negotiating leases for offices, fit-outs etc.
• blhack 7y ago
  Self replying because the edit window has closed. Fair points, all, thank you for making them. I guess from what I had read about the costs of wework offices, it would be in the same realm as everybody renting themselves lamborghinis every weekend to build company morale, or something like that. It just seems like an outrageous luxury, with questionable utility (some luxuries, for instance a pleasant office, nice equipment, etc. are obviously really important)
  • speedplane 7y ago
    Boring uninspired office space costs roughly $200/month/person in non-prime major metro areas, plus you need to manage the space itself. “Luxurious” WeWork spaces cost roughly $450/mo/person in major metro areas, and require almost no admin work. The extra $3k/year/person is not nothing, and certainly some companies won’t pay that, but in many cases it can be reasonably justified if it helps you attract better talent and reduces time devoted to office space admin work.
    • blhack 7y ago
      Wework phoenix is $700/person/month. A 5 person team in a tiny shared office is $3000/mo. Some of my friends rent nice offices in boring industrial parks for less than that, and have 6 private individual offices, 2 bathrooms, plus a conference room, a kitchen, and a large meeting area that would normally have cubicles or whatever in it (it's got a couple of rows of desks/monitors), and a storage room.