Nerd Fort
nerdfort.com
nerdfort.com
I wonder how many people (aside from me of course) would be happy to know about a spot on Nusa Lembongan with guaranteed fast internet, reliable power, a nice slice of white sand and a really nice reef break just outside the lagoon.
Would anybody here take the effort to weasel a working holiday to such a place? Any SV startups that would pick up the whole shop and set up on the beach for a month or so?
It's been raining here in the North of England for six months straight. If I get enough love for the idea here, I might just have to book a flight and start scouting locations.
While I wonder about the price (could bootstrapped startups afford it, especially counting the air fares?), I can see this being very successful.
Details here: http://expatsoftware.com/articles/2006/12/chamonix-branch-of...
In SE Asia, I guess you could go 2 ways with pricing. You could look at what the backpackers pay (~$10/night or $200/month for a room), and go with something comparable so that you'd get some overlap (and thus end up with Swedish girls hanging out at the pool). Or you could go for the "Surf Camp" model, where you charge $4k/week to people who have too much money. Personally I'd probably lean towards the first model if it were up to me.
Mostly I'd be looking for something that paid for itself, kept me on the beach, and kept a bunch of interesting people around.
I thought most of the north was a relatively hacker-free zone.
We even have a nice (but still small) group over here in Lincs, the true tech deadzone..
We can recreate this video but with macbooks instead of drums and EFF-style rhetoric instead of rastafarian preaching:
Also, for the visa thing, it's not really a problem unless people want to stay there very long. Speaking about Indonesia, they are now granting tourist visas for 2 months. Should be plenty enough!
I've spent the last 2 years doing contract work for a few different startups while I've traveled, first in southern Brazil and now here in Thailand. I've spent a few weeks each in Saigon, Hong Kong, Singapore, Vientiane, and Phnom Penh, but I keep coming back to Chiang Mai as I think it has the best combination of low cost of living (it's absurdly cheap here), access to infrastructure, and tolerance of resident foreigners (notice I said "tolerance" and not "acceptance"; more on that later). Singapore and Hong Kong are far easier for a European or North American, but the cost of living is about 2-3 times what it is in Bangkok, which itself is easily twice as much as a smaller place like Chiang Mai.
My first few months here I kept wondering why nobody has set up startup incubators here. The cost of living is so low it's almost a joke, and the environment can be amazing if you know the right places to stay (and which places to avoid). Of course it would be beneficial to be in San Francisco and have coffee with 5 different VCs in the same day, if that's the route you are taking, but I personally prefer the idea of the lean, bootstrapped startup. So why would you cram 5 guys into a tiny apartment in San Francisco and eat ramen noodles 3 meals a day while you develop your prototype, when you could be eating in restaurants and living in a nice, furnished apartment with a view for less than half the price? How many single engineers would jump at the chance to spend 6 months hacking in Thailand? I know I certainly would (and I did!).
And now the downside: Asia is VERY, VERY different to any other place in the world. It sounds stupidly obvious, but the magnitude of the difference takes a few months to sink in. Thailand is full of some of the friendliest, most accommodating people in the world, but the culture just doesn't have a place for foreigners as anything other than tourists. I lived in a small village in the northeast for five months, and even though everyone there knew my name, they would only refer to me as "farang", or "foreigner". Could you imagine what kind of reaction you would get if you walked around New York saying to all the immigrants: "Hey, foreigner!" You would be labeled a bigot and ostracized, at best, and probably receive a well-deserved punch to the face. And if you ever have a girlfriend here, everyone will automatically assume she is a prostitute, which makes it really difficult to get a date with a nice girl, as you can imagine. Singapore and Hong Kong are a different story, as they have a much longer history of cultural and ethnic integration, but living there is just as expensive as any big city in the U.S., if not more so. I am making a lot of gross generalizations, and I should point out that I don't speak the language very well, but this has been my personal experience here. As always, YMMV.
Sorry for the rant. If anyone wants to contact me, my email is in my profile.
Also, there's this, in Central America: http://www.cocovivo.com/
My best advice is that you just book a ticket to Bangkok or Singapore, and start hanging out with people in hostels. It's excellent.
Having said that, I've been in Thailand for a while, and the same idea keeps popping into my head. If I were bootstrapping a company, I would much rather fly with my partners out here for 6 months than try to rent an office in SF. I can see one major problem with the execution though: people are going to get beach fever for the first month or so, so don't expect productivity to be very high. You might want to schedule a few weeks of partying in, just to get it out of their systems.
1) entering on a 30-day landing permission (for TH) or 90-day landing permission (most other places)
2) performing work for a company based in another country
The tourist visas require signing a document that you're only in the country to spend, sure. But that's mostly designed to make sure that money flows into the country, not out of it.
For example theres things like my second home: http://www.mm2h.gov.my/
Membership is £165/$264 a month. However this is the top rate, you can pay £25 a month for 'mates' membership, which means you aren't guaranteed a desk, but you can go there and find a place to sit wherever the hell you want, 2 days a week. It's an odd pricing structure but it must work for them because from what I've heard it's always busy.
Never been there myself. We just have our own little office.
They host some sort of hacker drop-in-centre called "Build Brighton" down there at night time apparently, which I've been meaning to check out. Apparently they made a MIDI exercise bike once...
One of the 'acts' involved someone waving a chair at a laptop while wearing a gimp mask[2]. That person later turned out to be one of my lecturers who had been teaching us to write softsynths. Good times...
[1] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Live_coding
What's your email? I'm interested in setting up some sort of part-time thing, especially if there's a few others around.
If I wanted social contact, I'd (a) start or attend meetups, and (b) work out of a coffee shop or the library. I wouldn't pay a $100-$150/mo(!) premium for it.
$200/mo sounds like a decent price for this, though, especially if I wasn't super-committed to my company.
I would find this valuable if I was self employed. I'm the type of person who currently has the choice to work from home or the office every day, and 95% of the time I choose the office.
I'm not advocating avoiding like-minded people; that would be silly. I'm saying there are ways to get that benefit without shelling out cash for it, and, for that matter, the control and stability that comes from having a 6mo or 1yr lease instead of a month-to-month arrangement.
If it's so hard for you to get the networking and cross-pollination you need that you have to pay $150/mo(!) to get it, I have bad news about how hard it is to acquire customers, partners, and investors.
An office is as bleak as you make it.
One thing that bothers me about coworking spaces is the "anti-office" mentality that assumes the world would be a better place without any kind of working privacy.
The amount of serendipity & opportunity that comes out of coworking - when the coworking community is run properly - is incredible.
I moved to Philadelphia from Vienna, Austria for the community at a coworking location (http://indyhall.org). It's not because I lacked for bodies.
HTH
Damn...
Netflix? Hulu? Tons of other interesting startups like this place? I'd pay them twice if I could get them here.
Even BBC is not broadcasted in my country, you see. (Ok, I'm not starving at least.)
Usually I would agree with you on keeping the contact info and address separate somewhere up at the top, but in this case I think this approach works. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Until I know that it's safer than my bomb shelter, I am not leaving.
This should definitely be your first stop.
A buddy/former co-worker of mine works out of there, and he seems to really enjoy it.
- http://treehaus.ca in Kitchener, I think they've been around a while;
- http://threefortynine.com, a new space starting up in Guelph
I've been thinking of renting out an office just so I have somewhere to go to and work in a daily routine.
Working at home all the time is not as grand as some people might think it would be.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Fernando_Valley
"The Valley" has different meanings to different folks.