Anyone find apartment setting not ideal for start-up work? | Hacker News Reader

Anyone find apartment setting not ideal for start-up work?

9 pointszaidf16 comments

I know sitting in the apartment coding all day, eating cookies while watching the Daily Show sounds like a dream moment. But it was one of the first lessons I learned when I entered college: it doesn't work for me.

I like to take each morning as a new work day--shower, hit the library, make calls, hit a class or two, continue work on start-up.

I'm assuming YComb doesn't provide office space. So I'm curious if there have been YC companies that came together to get some space to create a collective work environment away from their apartment?

This past session (w2007) several of us have been working from home (Weebly, Zenter). OTOH, the crystal towers situation is quite nice, it beats any office i know of hands down. Several other startups chose to go to an office b/c they were used to that (heysan), so i think it goes both ways.

I find that even though my desktop environment is geared toward productivity (i.e. I can switch quickly between vi, the shell, firefox, etc), I actually get more work done from on campus when I VNC to home. That is, I waste less time doing things like reading random posts on this site, and actually do what I set out to do. Even now, I have a homework assignment due in about 10 hours that I can't bring myself to work on.

So I must agree that at least having some sort of separate workspace must help somehow. I think the real root problem, however, is to layout a schedule for yourself and follow it. Going to an office forces you to do that; writing a schedule down and being committed to following it could feasibly accomplish the same goal.

Note to self: make a schedule.

I don't know how long you guys have been working from home but I'll provide a little insight from someone who's been doing it mostly for about 12 years. I've been working at home with various projects/jobs since I was about 24 (36 now). For the first 2-3 years, it was all part-time of 2-4 days a week but, for the past decade, it's been full-time.

I tell you - even 12 years on, it is still hard to do. I do a lot of traveling as a consultant and trainer and these are usually Monday through Friday gigs. When I get back to the "office" and start to work again on Monday, I've totally lost the groove lol. That's it - it only takes a week of me getting out of the mindset of working at home to lose it. When I come back to the office on Monday, I want to read reddit, catch up on all the stuff I missed and I almost always find that Mondays have a lot of wasted time in them lol.

It took me probably 2-3 years initially to get the mindset down and learn how to separate work from play. Distractions are huge at home but, for a 20-something with no significant other, they are less so. Now, I have a spouse and a fun little three year old at home - those are more distracting than all the strip clubs and PS3s in the world lol. But you manage.

Last bit - I would suggest that, when you are looking for a spouse/significant other, make sure that person is okay with a comment like, "Honey, I'm going into work now. I want you to think as though my office is 30 miles away from you and you can't just walk in and ask me a question. Send me an email or phone me if you have a question. Also, don't ask me stupid shit during the day because I'm dealing with complex stuff and inane prattle takes me out of the mindset I need to work." If you have a great spouse who understands this, you'll be able to work from home much more efficiently.

At such an early stage, I think an apartment works quite well. My cofounder and I share an apartment (with a couple other friends) and things get done. Integrate your startup with your life because the startup is your life if you're serious. But it really depends on you as a person. If it's just that you're somebody that needs to be supervised/forced in a specific environment to be productive, then you might reevaluate your ambitions in starting a company.

I don't see it as black and white. Everyone has their conditions under which they work at their optimal level.

Identifying those conditions and finding a way to make it work I think is more important than forcing yourself to work under difficult conditions SIMPLY because you are a start-up. There is a huge misconception that just because you are a start-up you HAVE to make your life difficult. It already will be difficult; if you can find ways to make it easier you absolutely should!

I'd agree. The more environments you can work in the better, but often will power is as much about being smart enough to give yourself the ambient conditions you need to succeed as it is about just mandating how you are going to behave.

This only goes so far though. Daniel's probably right that you're in trouble if you require another person to motivate you to do work, but I don't think that's what you meant in the first place.

What I said may have come off more stringent than I had intended. Of course there are optimal places; that's a given. I mentioned an extreme case: absolutely requiring very particular conditions to work, an office for example. I'm saying that startups greatly benefit from adaptability, and if you can hack away in your apartment (integrated with living), it likely will be the most productive stage of your company's growth.

I can't work effectively from home. To many distractions to devote large blocks of time. I'm up in Seattle so I ended up renting out some industrial space from ActivSpace (http://www.activspace.com/) for $250 a month. It's not a large space but it serves my needs nicely. Two desks, couch, fridge, white boards, and we can paint on the walls if we get bored.

This really is a personal choice. We were lucky with our startup because we got desk space at the Obvious corp building in South Park (Obvious are the guys behind Twitter, Evan Williams et al). It's a fantastic working environment with lots of smart people around and great productive atmosphere.

However there were certain days when I actually found myself getting into the zone of productivity just sitting on the couch and working my laptop. If you find yourself in one those zones is it worth breaking it just because you've programmed yourself to think you're more productive in an office/library/wherever? I don't think so.

While there are just a couple of you working on your startup, I think you should just work wherever you think you'll be most productive that day. The majority of the time I work at Obvious, sometimes I work on my couch and sometimes in a random coffee shop or bench somewhere nice. I can only do this for so long before we start hiring and then we all need to be in the same place so I may as well make the most of it now.

I get where you're coming from. I just recently graduated and moved into an apartment complex with fewer college kids which definitely helped as things are quieter. I think whats ideal is to work out of a small house where you can live just with your co-founders. But the issue is cost.. Renting a house is usually considerably more which will increase your burn rate.

I think it is pretty key to work out of the same place where you live though. Separation of living and work is not ideal for a startup, and PG even talks about this some. Your life needs to BE your work; They need to coexist.

As far as distractions go, I think this is another reason why living with a co-founder is so important in the early stages. Its kinda like a checks and balances. You both keep each other in check and on track.

I can see pg's point about making startup your life. But I think you can still have startup as your life even while you work out of your office until 11pm, come to the apt, grab some food over some TV and work few more hours before hitting bed.

That's how it is for me anyway and it has been more productive than staying in apartment all day.

Again this is something that must vary from person to person. So I'm not necessarily out to do a philosophical debate about whether one is better than the other.

An apartment works well if your co-founders are around (as roommates, or in the living room with a big table)

But it's important to have the right kind of crowd around. If you are hard at work and all your rommie does is play XBox all day (no fingers at you pranav!) then it gets crazy.

So definitely depends on the roommate situation.

I'm doing this right now ... have a 1 bedroom and getting work done on the dining table! And it works great!

I've found that too. Sometimes it's hard to get into the flow while 'working from home.' An office that is seperated somehow can really make it easier to work.

I know I found (during my Summer of Code work last year) that I had to get out of the house to get any real work done. It's well-known advice to have a separate "work" area of the house if you want to succeed at working from home, and I'd have done that if I had a spare room.

The first thing that comes to mind is cost. You're already paying for the apartment. If you can avoid it, why pay for office space as well?

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