Using Starbucks As Your Office? Here Are Some Tips From Om Malik
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Directly from the book (don't worry, it's CC):
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They showed me a coffee shop stretched out to warehouse scale. There was a long, foreshortened espresso counter up front. The rest of the concrete floor was dotted with wooden tables, dozens of them, all different shapes, spaced evenly through the field of gray. Every single one was occupied. Men in shiny suits and long coats—one in white New Fleet livery—milled from table to table like customers at a flea market.
[...]
All of the tables at this coffee shop were reserved for new internet companies. The price was a nine percent stake in your new venture, but you’d happily give nineteen or ninety-nine. With a table, you got, in addition to the simple, precious space: a thick, luxurious fiber-optic connection to the internet; a server or two or sixteen in the data center next door; and, most important by far, the attention of Octav Erdos.
I saw him at a table near the front. He was tall and wide, bald, wearing gray overalls. He could have been an auto mechanic. He was blustering at the semicircle of skinny faces around the table, tracing his fingers in little spirals, drawing something in the air. Everyone was nodding.
Octav was more than an espresso impresario. He was also the director of Black Danube Ventures, and he spent every waking hour of every day here in his camouflaged incubator, migrating from table to table, advising, cajoling, berating. Sometimes even coding. When you got a table, you held on to it. You crowded as many people around it as you could. You took shifts in sleeping bags. And you subsisted on Octav’s pitch-black brew.
When a company got sold, or graduated into an office of its own, Octav ceremonially smashed an espresso cup across its table. The dinged-up, dark-brown tables were the lucky ones.
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The story is set, of course, in San Francisco.