New Twitter office: fabulous design by Sara Morishige Williams | Hacker News Reader

New Twitter office: fabulous design by Sara Morishige Williams

blog.michellekaufmann.com

23 pointsswombat38 comments

Uh oh. Irrational as it seems, seeing this decreased my estimate of Twitter's prospects. It has same kind of overdoneness you used to see during the Bubble in the late 90s.

No kidding. At least when Brin spent company money indulging his wife, it was on a genetics startup.

Or maybe that's just my engineer's aesthetic showing how little I care for objets d'arte in the workplace.

23andMe's pitch did seem perfectly reasonable at the time and it's a pretty good area to keep a money-losing startup going. It fits in with Google's overall mission, etc.

I was reminded of 24 Hour Party People and Factory Records swish designer table (somewhere around £20k iirc)

Yes your comment is irrational. The percentage of funding spent on the offices is likely small. This made you worried about their prospects, and not recent (hard to measure) stats about flat growth?

[imho, they're doing fine, but had a bad few months. As far as execution, they are releasing a lot more a lot faster than they used to - but is it the right stuff?]

i don't see any overdose in this office. Some colorful walls, bird vinyls(except embedded ones) and ikea inspired simple furnishing shouldn't be such expensive.

I remember reading about ID software's office ( or j. carmakcs) back in bubble days where gigantic marbles allover the place, but i might be wrong with the company.

Rather than Ikea inspired, it's more like they have the type of furniture that Ikea cheaply copies.

Those stools pictured cost $550. Which I guess isn't bad when you compare it to a new Aeron for $999, but you can probably get Ikea's nicest stool for $100.

Did you see the bit about the DJ booth? That part pushed it over the edge for me.

id Software was always pretty darn profitable; you may be thinking of Ion Storm, John Romero's infamous exercise in cash-burning.

Well, they have to catch up to Facebook's overdoneness.

http://www.contemporist.com/2009/10/28/facebook-headquarters...

Looks like something that would cause Casey (from Pattern Recognition) a seizure.

Twitter is earning bupkis, which means that all this is being paid for by investors. How are they justifying this?

There's an argument that perception matters, I suppose. For instance, banks spend a lot on making their public buildings seem solid and impressive to bolster confidence in them, when so many of their products are built on air.

Twitter is similarly intangible, so perhaps they're trying to say that they're an impressive company by having an impressive building. If that's the case, I think this backfires, by saying the opposite. It all looks and smells (er, in a non-toxin fashion) of the Aerons of the late 1990s. Even Fog Creek held off on their developer-focused space until they could afford it.

Is there really no better return that could have been made on that cash? (Could it perhaps have bought a "Remember Me" checkbox that remembers me?)

> It all looks and smells...of the Aerons of the late 1990s.

I'll admit that ragged on all the Aeron-acquiring startups back in '97-99, too. Then I bought one (second-hand, of course) for my home office last year, and discovered that, much to my surprise, Joel's arguments are actually sound: I can work for more hours, with better focus/less discomfort, in a really nice office chair.

Ergonomics aren't just faddish indulgence -- they can really make a difference.

Now, a DJ booth, and hand-rolled rattan bench cushions...those are faddish indulgence. (I'm still jealous, of course.)

(Could it perhaps have bought a "Remember Me" checkbox that remembers me?)

Cool, so I'm not the only one. I was beginning to think it was some browser configuration or that I'm on Linux and not OSX or something.

Hm, at Amazon.com we had desks made out of door plates in brown cubicles. Also, we made money.

And before desks, they had... errr concrete floors (http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/bez0int-4)

But we're in Bubble 2.0!

>> "And how many offices have their own DJ booth?"

What? I can't quite see why you would need a DJ booth in a twitter office.

Looks like a good place for people to talk about how important they are. Not sure about being a good place for people to work and actually make stuff though.

The DJ stuff was left over from the previous tenant.

Who would leave that! Aw.

Myself and employees would be working on doors on cinder blocks if we were a billion dollar company burning money with no revenue. Karosene lamps, servers run by hampster wheels...

This kind of thing is bound to make people like the 37signals guys angry. It is truly sad that a non-business can afford to spend money like this.

Life is unfair. Time to work.

Not to mention the fact that the designer is the wife of Evan Williams.

The 37signals guys like it when they're angry. It causes them to write blog posts that get them lots of attention.

What does fairness have to do with capital markets?

Unfairness is a signal of inefficiency in capital markets?

Sure this office might help them hire great workers and it might make them more productive at work, or it might be a boondoggle funneled to the founder's wife because they've raised over $100M. If you were an investor in Twitter, would this office make you feel good about how your money is being used?

I agree with you that this is a discretionary cost which they have justified to themselves and the people whose money they are spending.

My objection was his claim of "unfair!". Invocations of fairness are the resort of people who don't understand a system.

You are right about markets, that's why I said life. What I meant was that these guys are like rich kids who get to spend daddy's (VC) money on expensive toys. Why? Because they built a "protocol". I wonder if anyone ever made money on an information protocol.

As far as working there is concerned, an employer with no revenue and $150M in debt doesn't sound very promising. Sooner than later, the hollow art decor office must come to haunt some people.

I'm not sure why everyone's assuming that this office cost fabulous amounts of money. Good designers can make tight budgets go far. The only really expensive piece I see in this office is the stone table - but if they spent wisely on the rest, why not allow themselves one big expense?

I mean, their desks are from Ikea for crap's sake! If they were looking to throw money out the window, they wouldn't have bought desks from Ikea.

It also shows they're spending more energy/thought into what people think, rather than putting that effort into their product.

How many new features has twitter added in the last year?

How about they spend the effort adding [share video] [share picture] on the web interface to twitter? How about allowing more than 140 characters and creating a trimmed version for the 7 people using SMS (Or send as multiple messages).

Those little stools? $1000 a piece. Extrapolate from there.

It all seems a bit precious to me and doesn't seem like a space where people actually do anything significant or challenging, other than send out tweets. I guess you've got to spend your VC money somehow.

Cool technology ..... Check

Sweet office space .. Check

Revenue plan ........

Are these the workspaces for "regular" Twitter employees?

http://blog.michellekaufmann.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/...

Seems like you'd be right on top of each other.

The dark colours and lack of lighting would make that a depressing office to work in.

What a waste of money for a company that isn't making any. Also, from the photos, it seems way too dark. I think I'd be depressed by about the 2nd week of working there.

I think I would quickly tire of working in that space.

Looks absolutely horrible. What a waste of money.

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