December 30th, 2008 by tony
Our home for the last 14 months, Gramstand, has closed its doors. We’ve had a great ride with Gramstand over the last year, with lots of tasty drinks, more than our healthy share of grilled cheese sandwiches, and a lot of great days coworking with friends.
Gramstand was a great staging area for New Work City, letting us get our community together and run small events in their basement.
I’m really heartbroken to see it go, but in talking to Richard, the owner, I’m confident that we’ll see the magic return again one day, maybe even stronger and better.
CooBric was already on auto-pilot since New Work City opened, so the closing of Gramstand means that CooBric will be in hibernation pending new space and new leadership.
If you know of a great cafe in NYC which might make an ideal venue for a casual coworking community, let me know!
In the meantime, coworking continues to grow and thrive. Thanks to all at Gramstand and everyone who has participated in and supported CooperBricolage over the last two years!
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August 26th, 2008 by Alex Linsker
Last Wednesday was our fifth Little Bookwriting Workshop.
Alex (”101 Things I Learned in Organizational Democracies”) and Tony (101 coworking stories) read each other’s book drafts and gave comments. Lee finished his outline (”101 Bad Clients and What to Do About Them”) which we made together as a group. Jenny edited a book by Matt on busking in the subways. Zohar (”The Gift of Stress”) and Scott (a resume workbook) revised their books together. William dropped in, and Nichelle did too.
Are you putting off writing a little book? The incredible “101 Things I Learned in Architecture School” started our inspiration. Hang out in our cozy cafe basement space and work with other writers-to-be. Share your wisdom and your questions with others. And most importantly, get to write!
At the very least, writing a book is a way to get your ideas on paper to inspire others and promote your business. Bring your own book idea, and some paper/laptops.
We meet most Wednesdays. Drop in 1-5pm. See you there!
Tomorrow will be our sixth workshop. Join our Facebook group.
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August 14th, 2008 by Tony Bacigalupo
We had a great and diverse group of 10 people at the Where Are the Geeks? Meetup today at Gramstand.
Some quick paraphrased notes on what was discussed:
Is there actually a shortage? Who is the audience?
Tony: Start off with hypothesis: is there, in fact, a shortage of development talent in NYC’s startup scene, or simply a surplus of would-be entrepreneur?
Will: Yes, definitely a shortage. Companies are recruiting even mediocre developers, and paying them well.
Gary: When talking about finding developers to work on startups, it’s important to carefully define the right audience. Many people are perfectly happy working for a company for a salary, and aren’t interested in taking the entrepreneur route.
Evolution of the relationship between employees and employers
Will: Recruiting trend has been toward contractors with lots of short jobs. Makes them very tough to place because companies invest heavily in employee training.
What holds college grads back from going entrepreneurial route
- Parents
- Heavy loans post-college
- Risk / fear of failure
Failure, and tolerance thereof
Will: 90% of startups fai in large part because people must be more well-rounded than they realize. Best way to become more well-rounded is to gain experience through failures.
Carl: Failure needs to be acceptable and embraced. According to Paul Graham, failure is only tolerated in San Francisco and Harvard Square. Perception in NYC is that failure is not as well-tolerated.
Will: Making failure OK won’t bring developers to the Alley…
Bill: …but it helps with agility.
The CEO and the CTO - marriage counselingh3>Tony: Does the relationship need to change? Do CEO’s and CTO’s need to learn to respect each other more?Will: They need to respect each other’s importance and understand the critical role each side plays.
Takeaways
- Entrepreneurial dating event - highlight the importance of a healthy relationship
- Further explore Indie Internship
- Continue to look into ways to improve infrastructure
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July 30th, 2008 by Tony Bacigalupo
We’ve now got free starfish stickers in a jar at Gramstand, so now patrons of Gramstand can grab a sticker, slap it on their laptop lid, and find other folks in the cafe with the stickers and start talking to them!
I have no idea what will happen, but my hope is that people will be able to better identify one another and start talking to each other without the need for a middleman.
Many people have come to Gramstand looking for fellow coworkers but didn’t have any way of knowing who was who… this should help address that problem.
Come on by and take a sticker! Find someone else who has a sticker on their lid and introduce yourself. Ask what they’re working on. Tell them what you’re working on. Then let coworking do its thing!
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July 22nd, 2008 by Tony Bacigalupo
Our friend and longtime coworker Alex Linsker is working on a book. He’s taking inspiration by an amazingly well-written, well-illustrated, concise, and eminently useful (if you’re an Architect) book: “101 Things I Learned in Architecture School“.
Hang out in our cozy cafe basement space and work with other writers-to-be. Share your wisdom and your questions with others! And most importantly, get to write! At the very least, writing a book is a way to get your ideas on paper to inspire others and promote your business.
Alex will be working on his book idea, “101 Things I Learned About Organizational Democracy.” Bring your own book idea, and some paper or a laptop.
Event Details:
Gramstand
214 Avenue A
New York, NY 10036
Wednesday, July 23 from 1-5pm
RSVP here.
See you there!
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April 23rd, 2008 by Tony Bacigalupo
Mike Muller wrote up a great piece on the NYC Coworking scene in the Gotham Gazette. It covers both the global coworking movement and the local scene and does a great job introducing readers to what’s out there right now and how they can access it.
One fact worth noting is his research into how many people work from home. He cites a 2006 US Census survey which indicates that 4% of New Yorkers works from home.
Out of 3,597,547 workers aged 16 and over, that’s 143,901 people.
Wow.
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April 16th, 2008 by Tony Bacigalupo
We launched the New Work City site two weeks ago, and have had some fantastic response. Since many of the people who’ve signed up on the site weren’t yet familiar with the existing coworking community in NYC, we decided to have an event so everyone could get to know each other and so we could talk about our progress.
I also tried to make sure the discussion wasn’t one-way. It’s easy for me, or Sanford, or others to talk at length about coworking, but it’s important that everyone in the community be able to participate equally. There were a lot of new voices, and, they each had something important to contribute to the discussion.
As we went around the table, there was an obvious common thread: people are working at home, and it’s driving them crazy.
I noticed another pattern as well: coworking consistently attracts upbeat, self-motivated, interesting, intelligent people. And the enthusiasm among them is universal.
The main takeaway: the people who showed now all know each other a little better, and are now part of the community. And now they’re ready to help build New Work City and NYC’s larger coworking world.
We’re now hoping to have a critical mass in time to sign papers for June 1st. We’ll soon have letters of commitment drafted, so we can have a tangible list of how many people are seriously committed to joining and supporting our space. Starting with that, we can have a much better expectation of when we’ve hit our critical mass (by our current estimates, we’d need the equivalent of 21 full-time commitments to be able to move into the Balcony space– this can be broken down into different levels of membership, but it’s our basic target).
We’re off to a great start, but need to continue to get the word out to more people who’d be interested in this space. So if you know someone who you think might be interested, let them know!
More good things are in store for both CooBric and NWC. Exciting times!
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April 12th, 2008 by Sanford Dickert
As you know, a few of us (led by Tony) have been working hard to close on a space in NYC for coworking - and we have enjoyed some incredibly positive responses in the last two weeks that have helped us craft a working proposition for New Work City (things to come). In this search, a number of hard lessons have come to pass that I think should be considered in terms of facts and figures:
- Back in April of 2007, Darren Herman announced his desire to make a similar thing to our dream, and 45 days later realized the challenges that accompany this task and decided to pass on the idea.
In a separate conversation, Darren shared with me his challenges - especially the need to have a tight management on costs and a strong operational group to ensure delivery of the service and space.
But on top of it all, the challenge of running a space like his (and very similar to NWC) is a near-total dedication of core people to deliver 24/7/365. This is not a startup or a restaurant or some company that you might be able to turn off for the holidays - this is a social good, a service that often requires non-stop attention to the needs of the community.
Darren has been a terrific source of information and has helped us move forward through some interesting challenges.
- Recently, NYSIA closed its incubator amid difficulties getting continued of government funding to run the space.
In talks with Angelina Jao, there were many lessons that were captured in the efforts to build the Incubator - instructively, events that brought community members together into a common space.
I believe some of the challenges NYSIA had had to do with the cost of the space (55 Broad is a Class A building with excellent services) and a very high square-foot cost structure (services layered on top of the basic real-estate cost).
But, as we learned, another challenge was that NYSIA was more in line with a full-service office space, not necessarily a community space - like the one Darren was creating and NWC has our eyes on.
- Over a week ago, I attended the NY-Israel Tech Meetup at Blank-Rome (organized by Yaron Samid from Pando) where I luckily met Cheni Yerushalmi, one of the founders of Sunshine Suites.
Instead of being competitive about his offering or threatened by our vision, Cheni has been incredibly forthcoming and we have had a couple of meetings where we have discussed his vision and our vision of NWC and the challenges faced.Cheni brought home (for me in particular) the importance of understanding the challenges that exist in this cost structure and the need for slavish dedication to operational costs and services for an enterprise like Sunshine.
And while I may not share in Cheni’s aesthetic style for some of the common areas, he has had six years of on-the-job training which has brought to light a number of constraints that are not often thought of when an endeavor like coworking is undertaken and desires to expand. While I may not personally like the Suite structure that Cheni has built, I do see the benefit and vision that he has and completely recommend it for people who connect with it.
- We also met with John McGann from Nutopia and discussed a number of the lessons he has learned from building from his original vision back in the late 90s.
John has been incredibly generous with his insights and thoughts and helped us flesh out the finances for the space and given us a real-life point of view of the associated costs and concerns that await any space such as this.
My personal favorite kernel of truth came from a simple analogy he presented us - how people tend to work. His model was in terms of how people tend to study is essentially how people tend to work - they either:
- study by themselves - in their dorm room, in a cubicle or their research office
- study in a controlled community environment - quiet library or study room
- study in a more dynamic community environment - coffee shop or external study hall
When looking at the options in the marketspace, there are lots of the first (MicroOffice, TechSpace, Sunshine Suites), a couple of the second (paragraphNY) and a perceived availability of the latter (Starbucks, coffee shops in general).
But Nutopia, Darren’s vision and NWC are sorely missing in the marketspace which is more closely aligned as a mixing of the three.
- David Rose is launching a space at Rose Tech Ventures for $700 a desk (outside of SparkSpace incubator, IMHU), which is with the intent of cultivating serious entrepreneurs in a space where others can share.
In David’s situation, he has a direct benefit to the space - access to entrepreneurs who can cross-pollinate and a built-in marketing savings by having a group of NY Tech Ventures providing word-of-mouth marketing and foot traffic for potential deal flow for David and Rose Tech Ventures.
All of this reporting is meant to give you an insight into our efforts on moving forward with NWC and sharing with you - our community. Tony spends about half of his days working on this effort, with the intent of making it happen. We have been investigating options that help reduce our risk and merge our vision with symbiotic offerings as well.
At present, we have at least two organizations that are talking with us about a co-sharing of a community space, and one organization has expressed interest in sponsoring a “incubator”-like space if we can offer solid details on how and why. (more…)
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April 2nd, 2008 by Tony Bacigalupo
For the past few weeks, several of us have been working hard at efforts to establish a dedicated coworking space. There’s been a lot of interest, and we’ve got a lot of people and small businesses who are eager to get a space established.
These efforts now have a name. That name is New Work City.
New Work City is the name of the new coworking space we are putting together. While there is a strong level of interest right now, we will need more interest before the space can move forward. Once we hit the tipping point, we’ll be in a position to establish the space!
We’re hoping to move very quickly, in part because several of our members need to move their businesses very soon– and they can’t wait to get the space open!
So if you’re interested, add your name to our Membership Interest form.
We are also soliciting sponsorships. Sponsoring our space will be a fantastic way to show support for entrepreneurship in New York, and will help connect you with the vibrant NY independent and entrepreneurial community. You can list your interest for sponsorship here.
I’m really excited about all of this and especially about the enthusiasm of the early responses. Much more soon.
Also, it should be noted that CooBric will continue to run and grow– we’re continuing to build the community at Gramstand, which has grown nicely lately, and we look forward to both CooBric and New Work City growing and doing more awesome things together in the future.
These are exciting times!
Tony
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March 31st, 2008 by Tony Bacigalupo
While you can come cowork at Gramstand any day of the week, we thought it would be helpful to designate special days when you can count on someone being there who’s working on something specific.
Matt Cooperrider, a CooBric’er who’s helping an initiative to get a .nyc top level domain created, is kicking off this idea with “Grassroots Tuesday”. He’ll be there on Tuesdays working on his projects, and encouraging other people with similar interests to join him.
To help facilitate this, we’re also adding a Twitter account to keep up to date. Follow @CooBric on Twitter or check the wiki for details.
If you’d like to do something similar, email me (tony at coobric dot com) and we’ll hook you up.
Are you coming to Gramstand regularly already? What are you working on? What kinds of people would you like to work alongside?
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