The column’s name is a horrible play on words, but I do believe that “upstart” is a far more accurate word than start-up. Start-ups today vis-à-vis the older, larger behemoths, perform the same role in the economy that upstarts do in society. They rise with speed and behave in a seemingly arrogant fashion, nipping at the heels of old money.
And just like the nouveau riche, start-ups look very different. The workspace, especially. Office design for long had been about allowing employees to do their work with enough privacy and little disturbance, and about acknowledging hierarchies. Hence, cubicles and cabins. Sometimes, allowances were made for ergonomics and aesthetics, but it was mostly about function. If there were a dozen companies doing the same thing, you could be fairly certain that all their offices would look alike.
In the past couple of decades, coinciding with the rise of start-ups, reams and reams have been written about how to make workspaces cooler. Buzzwords whizzed past — ‘open offices’, ‘serendipitous encounters’. You know that analysis into office spaces has peaked when a Harvard Business Review article has a sub-heading that goes ‘Recognize office space as not just an amortized asset but a strategic tool for growth’.In larger companies, especially those with a Silicon Valley affiliation, rejigging workspaces is a constant process. I spent nearly eight years at Yahoo, and over the course of those eight years, cubicle walls progressively reduced in height every couple of years before eventually disappearing altogether. Each rejig is usually accompanied by angry emails by workspace-conservatives who have problems with the breaking down of walls. Start-ups have no such inertia to worry about. So the best of workspace research, or more accurately, the latest fad in workspaces, makes way into their offices from the get-go. Okay, small correction. Not all start-ups, but funded start-ups only. Because these snazzy designs do not come cheap.
The rest get by, thanks to co-working spaces. Then there are some altruistic entrepreneurs who are willing to allow smaller start-ups to use some of the excess capacity that they have. And there are also those opportunistic entrepreneurs who see this as one more revenue stream, usually more dependable than whatever their original business model was.
But these plug-and-play solutions do not often fit into a lot of start-ups’ plans. So, they hustle. The house you rented as your office came with some basic furnishing? Great.
The dining room is our meeting room, the sofa is where we brainstorm. We will throw in a few bean-bags too.
Sometimes, there are considerations of who you are going to entertain in your office. Our start-up, Buildkar, sells construction materials online. Given that the industry we operate in suffers from a large deficit of trust, a good chunk of our customers want to meet us at our office to make sure that we are not a fly-by-night operation. So it was imperative for us that our workspace conveyed permanence.
Our first iteration of office décor was the equivalent of having invented a time machine. You could not tell our office apart from a typical small Bengaluru company of the 1980s. We could have even named ourselves Sri Manjunatha Enterprises and nothing would have been amiss. We realised, however, that our customers wanted us to be the modern way of doing things in an ancient industry. So out went our reception area, and down went most of our cubicles (formed by fabricated panels bought from Shivajinagar), and we were very soon a bright, open office, for the most part.
In this weekly column, we discuss the start-up workplace. Thejaswi Udupa heads product and technology for an online building materials marketplace
