I wonder what happened to the concept of the garage startup that Silicon Valley's foundation is famous for? Too much money from profits and not enough people or ideas to invest in?
Paying for an office space is an extremely inefficient use of resources, especially when plenty of cafe space - or just, you know, your living room, kitchen - or garage - are useful even for teams of 20+ because will be rare to need everyone in a single space at once, and then you can just rent something larger for that event.
I kind of have a challenge with myself to work towards launching the fastest growing projects/platforms using as few resources as possible. whether I'll reach that goal is moot, though - it's more or less a mantra for me to pay attention to whether I am rushing or not.
>I wonder what happened to the concept of the garage startup that Silicon Valley's foundation is famous for?
Killed by housing costs and a mature industry.
Who can rent most of a house right out of school (HP), or bang around in their childhood home (Apple) in SV? Not only are the costs prohibitive, but most residents are from somewhere else, so no childhood home in existence anyway. Moving to SV is done to parachute in to the success that previous generations had to create for themselves.
Oversimplifying a bit, but the point is that both the economics and the demographics have swung way far away from "scrappy young geniuses" to "Ivy League careerists." It's almost a different universe, and would be completely distinct by now had Starbucks not been invented.
Maybe it could work for founders, but as an employee I would absolutely not sign on to a company whose space is a garage. First of all, it signals precariousness and non-seriousness. Second, I can get a job at any number of companies in more comfortable settings, so why shouldn’t I?
Maybe part of the difference is related to supply and demand: potential employees have other opportunities, so why should they make sacrifices for companies they don’t own more than 0.5% of?
Right, so following the leading metric for your decision basing it on off of if they mostly run out of a "garage" is a terrible idea; adding the two Apple founders into the equation, assuming you have the opportunity to get to know them and their ideas and plans well enough, would be an important part to the equation of deciding where to work.
Only if you believe that you can distinguish lucky founders from normal founders with sufficient precision to beat the odds. Personally I wouldn't trust myself to do that.
Of course, you can only do what you're most comfortable with - which should depend on your understanding of as many pieces to the puzzle possible, that's how we understand risk/reward, and how we hopefully make calculated decisions.
If they were in a literal garage and I could have gotten another job paying 300k or more in a real office with free food then yes, I definitely would have avoided them.
Of course you're allowed to choose your preferences and priorities, how you make decisions.
There are also of course very nice garages, attached to nice houses - and very talented people who can maximize the resources available to them at any moment because they have a very clear plan to understand the strategy, path they must take. Keeping costs low by reducing real estate costs is in part why fully decentralized companies exist and work so well - they can scale very efficiently, however I believe that fully decentralized in the long-term won't work due to limited fluidity; spatial organization is important if not critical in certain respects.
My feeling is it's an aspirational good, like a BMW. Many of the people starting these companies are not really serious and are just waiting for another ship to eventually come in. It's the new unpaid internship of the upper middle class.
Paying for an office space is an extremely inefficient use of resources, especially when plenty of cafe space - or just, you know, your living room, kitchen - or garage - are useful even for teams of 20+ because will be rare to need everyone in a single space at once, and then you can just rent something larger for that event.
I kind of have a challenge with myself to work towards launching the fastest growing projects/platforms using as few resources as possible. whether I'll reach that goal is moot, though - it's more or less a mantra for me to pay attention to whether I am rushing or not.