Xobni Discusses The Perfect Startup Office and They Still Suck My Ram

The Xobni team has a good article about their office and how they went about looking for space and what’s important in a space. This story comes out of San Francisco which is a bit different than NYC but nevertheless it has some good content.

Some notes from the article:

• The first rule in real estate also applies to startup offices. You need to be in a great location. You want to be close to public transportation.
• We typically order in food for lunch and go out for dinner even though we have a fully stocked fridge and snack cabinet. You want to be in a place where this is possible without excessive travel; the hours after dinner are the most productive hours for writing code.
• We have rooms for 3-4 people each. This is about the size of an engineering subteam will have. Being around people who are all working on the same thing encourages communication about the right things, but keeps interruptions down.
• We also have a quiet nap room with a comfy couch. Taking naps at the workplace sounds unprofessional, but it does make everyone more productive.
• You only have one back and if you spend a lot of time in a chair, it better be a nice one. That’s why we spend money on Aerons, which we buy used from Craigslist. Everything else is Ikea.

One thing they leave out is making sure you have room to expand for at least the short-term. Moving into a place only to need to move again in a few months can be very costly and time-consuming. They also leave out the fact that they are well funded and that this isn’t the bootstrappers setup.

I was really looking forward to using Xobni after their TC40 demo. It was one of the more well-received demos and I went home and installed the product. The idea is to make Outlook smarter. So far I haven’t found the tool to be of much value. But it sure does suck ram. Anywhere between 5-20mb at any given time and it sits in memory even when Outlook isn’t loaded. Why? Not only that but loading Outlook takes 5x longer now than before Xobni.

I will most likely be uninstalling Xobni soon. It just hasn’t shown me enough value for the cost.