How wrong am I?

I think that’s all it would take to start a coworking space in Indy right now and I think time is a more important variable than quality of space or amenities.

Obviously the variable missing from this equation is people, but people don’t need funding. People are the funding. If you get the right people to frequent the space other people would follow.

Let’s call what I propose above the “minimum viable product” version of a coworking space in Indy. I know nothing about real estate but I have to assume there is an open space in Broad Ripple within walking distance of the avenue that’s been vacant for a depressingly long time. I also have to assume there are some desks, chairs, and maybe even a conference table just sitting around and some previously promising company that has gone out of business or since down-sized.

I haven’t tried to crunch the numbers so correct me if I’m woefully ignorant, but I think this could be established with very little funding, I’m going to even venture a guess and say less than $100,000, maybe much less. I think this is especially feasible if you can get a short term deal on a lease to prove that there is actually a market for this before you commit to an inescapable monthly rent payment which drastically increases your financial risk. (maybe people experienced in commercial real estate are laughing at me right now, but that’s why they’re not starting a coworking space).

If you think investors like “pre-order” signups and potential revenue, well, they absolutely love current customers and current revenue. I’d build something first and then try to raise a significant portion of the money.

I’m not trying to pick on Indy Coworking 3.0 aka Union Workplace. I don’t know anyone there (although I’d like to and I’d love to hear from them in the comments). I’m just musing on what’s the quickest way to get me and a lot of my friends out of the coffee shops we work in all the time, and into an office. I can’t remember when I first heard about them, but I think it was over a year ago and it seems (from the tweet above) they’ve been plagued by funding delays.

Who reading this would be willing to pay just to have a place to go whenever you wanted with desks, chairs, great internet connection, a room to make private phone calls, and most importantly, really smart ambitious people?

Forget all the style and amenities, who is interested in being an early adopter based on what I just described above?

I’m going to pose this question to everyone I see at Hubbard and Cravens this Friday. Maybe I’m wrong.

Indy needs a co-working space, a place that can be a hub of technology startups at their earliest stages, a place that host events like Hackers and Founders which at 110 RSVP’s to it’s latest meetup, keeps outgrowing the spaces it chooses.

Not only does Indy need it, but I think Indy would pay for it, and embrace it with so much buzz and word of mouth that anything other than grassroots, social media marketing a la @brewhouse style would be all the advertising it needed.

I remember at a board meeting at Powerset Peter Thiel asked us how the morale of the company was going.  Like all founders at board meetings, we said it was going great.

Peter said “let’s prove it.”

What we did is offer the following:

1. Anyone can voluntarily, permanently reduce their salary by one or more strata levels,
2. For each competency level forfeited you get XX,XXX more ESOP shares.

That’s from Steve Newcomb, the founder of Powerset, in a post that contains the most thorough, nearly step by step advice on implementing good hiring practices and culture at a company that I’ve encountered.

It’s long but worth the read.

For those who don’t know what Powerset is, Microsoft bought it for $100 million and it essentially became Bing. Steve Newcomb wasn’t the guy I met or insulted though. That co-founder of Powerset was Lorenzo Thione, and I insulted him as at a gay piano bar in New York called Marie’s Crisis.

After drunkenly begging the piano player to play “Gary, Indiana” (It was musicals night and that was the only musical song I knew any of the words too, plus, my friends and I were all from Indiana. No one in the bar was happy about this song choice.) my friend told me a guy he was talking to was from the Valley and that he’d started a company.

That’s all I knew. I had no idea who Lorenzo Thione was or what Powerset was. I can’t tell you exactly how that conversation went except that I didn’t hesitate to tell him that I thought starting a search engine was a dumb idea. I didn’t mince my words.

At that point in time, I was skeptical of anything that sounded like a “me too” idea to the point that I acted supercilious towards anyone not working on something innovative, and in my first 2 minutes of talking to Lorenzo, that’s how I assessed the situation. (Remember, I was drunk enough to request “Gary, Indiana,” and even that doesn’t begin to describe my state of inebriation. Also, I think there were a lot of new search engines in the news around that time like Cuil and WolframAlpha which really did disappoint)

I probably talked down to this guy for a good 10 or 15 minutes and he just heard me out. He never once took a shot back at me or even really acted annoyed.

He asked about me and I told him I had just started a company and was working on it full-time. He asked where I was from and I told him Indianapolis, and the only thing he had to say about me was “You’re trying to start a company? Then why are you in Indiana?”

Well, somehow I stumbled back to my friends apartment after that conversation. In the morning, I remembered just enough of Lorenzo and Powerset to do a Google search.

At this point, I still had no idea I was talking to anyone of any significance. For all I knew, I was just talking to another entrepreneur at the same stage as me in starting a business.

But then Google showed me that I was actually talking to a guy who had helped build one of the most powerful natural language search engines ever built.

Foot in mouth. Open palm to forehead.

Sometimes I think what a wasted opportunity that night was, but usually, after I cringe from nostalgic embarrassment, I just think how much that event cleared away a bunch of my unhealthy bravado. There was a lot more bravado clearing as I proceeded to start my first company, but never again was so much cleared in one swoop.

First off, did you know Aaron Patzer is from Evansville, Indiana? I had no idea, and considering how often I link to and post his stuff, I should have known that.

Anyway, some of my big takeaways:

“About 8 or 9 months before we launched Mint, we started a personal finance blog. We didn’t really have much money at this time, so we couldn’t hire any writers. We did the blog mostly ourselves. We went around to all the other personal finance blogs, and we said, “Would you like to write a guest post for us?” Half of them said yes, as long as we linked back to them.”

“Then we emailed those guys and said if you put a little badge on your site that says, “I want Mint,” on your blog, or wherever, we will give you priory access. We got 600 people to put a free banner ad for our site on theirs.” 

“Then we launched at TechCrunch 40, and about 6 weeks before, I hired a PR firm, which I think is very important.”

“We also hired designers with a very specific skill set. We hired people who had a computer science background, where they could come up with the idea in their head, and render it in Photoshop, program it in HTML and CSS, and do a bit of a usability/user experience product management roll, sort of three roles combined into one.”

Few people know this, but Author Solutions located in Bloomington, Indiana publishes more titles per year than ANY other major publisher, and by a long shot.

How do they do it? For starters, they don’t discriminate when it comes to authors.

Author Solutions is in the business of helping authors self-publish their books. They can help with almost everything whether its editing, creating a cover, printing, commissioning illustrations, setting up a website, getting distribution, email marketing - you name it and Author Solutions probably offers a service to help your book succeed.

This is a big deal, especially when the publishing industry’s world has been flipped upside down by BOOMING ebook technologies like the Amazon Kindle and the Barnes & Noble nook.

What’s more, in this internet age of the “user is in control,” self-publishing is the ultimate example of independence. Traditional publishing companies are just “the man” who is keeping you from sharing your thoughts with the world, and with the low cost of internet marketing and print-on-demand technologies, who needs them?

Followers in the publishing industry are very aware of Author Solutions influence. When someone publishes that many titles how can you ignore them? And while its true that a huge majority of their titles never see any commercial success, more traditional publishers are starting to look at self-published successes to find their next hit.

Take for instance Author Solutions’ recent partnership with Harlequin. Harlequin is essentially using AS to help find shining stars that would otherwise go overlooked.

(See More + Video After the Fold)

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