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Ask HN: How does your (startup) office look like?

13 points by fara ↗ HN
Luckilly we are 3 in our startup and the 4th partner is about to join us full-time. In our country rent contracts are for at least 2 years so we are looking for offices which are suitable for 8-12 people. So I was wondering how do your offices look like (size, space, layouts, desks). If you have some pictures to share they would be more than an inspiration to us. Of course ideas are more than welcome also.

6 comments

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iamclovin
We (http://gameplanapp.com) work from a spare room in @andycroll's apartment. It's very functional, we do pair programming so it's great for focus, and we launched our MVP in 3 months so I guess it's been going great so far.

P.S. Shameless plug - you can read more about us at NakedStartup http://nakedstartup.com

krisneuharth
Very cool app. I just spent all last week writing something just like this in Django for a game my friends made up. (I'm not a competitor, it was just for fun). We have organized tournaments a few times a year and are looking to grow our sport in the next year. I like your site since it scratches an itch I had so here is some totally unsolicited feedback: 1) I would suggest you allow people to add custom sports, 2) change fixtures to "Events" or "Matches," being from the US I had no idea what a "fixture" is, 3) please create a way to delete my account, 4) please create a way to delete my organization since now my own sports site is going to be competing with this custom public site once it gets crawled, 5) create a way to make the "public" site hidden until it is ready, or even has teams, data to display, and 6) create a way to do automatic team picking from a pool of players like a "draft". Great start, if you have any additional questions, hit me up at the email in my profile.

Just out of curiosity, do you plan on on having an ad supported freemium model or will this be solely subscription based?

quizbiz
Summer: The dining room table in a condo provided by my summer job boss. Otherwise, dorm room.
mindcrime
My startup office looks exactly like my living room for some strange reason. Part of it also looks exactly like the spare bedroom in my apartment. And the "break room" looks just like my kitchen. Weird, huh?

All joking aside, my spare bedroom doubles as my office/lab/library, but I do most of my work in the living room. Right now there's a gaming chair sitting in the middle of the floor, in front of the TV, and there are stacks of books off the the left, another stack of books on my right, a big pile of magazines behind that stack of books, and behind me is the dinner table, which is doubling as a repository for more books, magazines. notebooks, scraps of paper, etc. On the walls around me are a total five big whiteboards, and in the corner is one of those cheap metal & fiberboard tables, with a pile of PC hardware (some in use, some waiting to be used, and some waiting to be thrown out) on it. In the other corner is a big pile of old Sun boxes, most of which I should probably just pitch in the bin, since I'm probably never going to use them at this point. Cloud Computing, ya know? Slicehost / Linode / EC2 have kinda removed my need to keep a lot of physical hardware around.

Oh, and there are two mountain bikes and a BMX bike in another corner of the room, taking up space. That's my world these days.... computers, books, magazines and bicycles. And notebooks, lots of notebooks... I still like to brainstorm on paper a lot of times. One of those artist style notebooks (blank/unlined paper), a drafting pencil and a box of colored pencils and I'm set.

kineticac
This is where Fanvibe first started, in my living room: http://flickr.com/gp/kinetic/Y2ceC3

Check out the photos! our first purchase was a foosball table ;) We also had one of our interns working with us in the "office"

We since moved off to Dogpatch Labs in San Francisco, which became a bit too distracting to code in everyday, so I usually just work from a small home office that has three walls of windows =)

JoeAltmaier
Former mortgage company office in down-on-luck building with 50% occupancy. Bargained landlord down to $700/mo. Already network-wired because of all those mortgage officer desks. Manager's office turned into conf room, nice perk.

Previous occupants split in the middle of the night, leaving mortgage records stuffed in filing cabinets(possible scammers?) and furniture! All ours for free. Not the records; those we shredded.