Building San Francisco’s broadband and wireless connection to the world.
Contact:
Lane Kasselman, Strategic Media Advisor, AT&T
lane@kasselman.com
www.att.com
Building San Francisco’s broadband and wireless connection to the world.
Contact:
Lane Kasselman, Strategic Media Advisor, AT&T
lane@kasselman.com
www.att.com
Check out all the beautiful people! (Thnx to Julie Blaustein)
On Wednesday night, we had a different kind of event which brought our “crib” out of our “start-up” comfort zone to the delight of our 300 loyal SF New Tech fans in the audience. Andreas Weigend moderated a panel discussion about an interesting inflection point in our web world – the Social Data Revolution. Our friends @ btrax in a Part 1 summary of the captured some of the magic around the panel’s discussion on how to design ways of interacting with people and how to construct metrics for using social data. Read it here http://ht.ly/43vOS
We saw The Armada Group, White Space Strategy, Tracking202 Inc, GetContact.Info, Epic Frag, Changemakers Publishing and Writing, zapon, and a few dudes looking for work on stage last night.
See what they were saying during the 60 Second Spots.
Join the leaders of the Social Data Revolution and create amazing possibilities for your startup!
Continue Reading
Hey all! Well, tonight’s event is all sold out and Mighty is expecting to be rockin’ tonight.  To capture all the action on-line on USTREAM, you can watch us on https://sfnewtech.com/live/. If you feel like interacting with us, use the #socialdata hashtag and/or login to USTREAM. See you there or on-line!
Do you have any burning questions about social data? We may be able to help! Go ahead and tweet them with the #socialdata tag and we’ll try to answer them LIVE at our Social Data Revolution on 2/23.
What did Changemakers, OnCompare, Quora for Russia, Fordela, Cloudkick / Rackspace, BeMyApp WeekEnd have to say last night?
See what they announced from stage during our 60-Second Spots by clicking here!
btrax, Inc. is a San Francisco based creative agency serving global markets for over 6 years. Our team has a wide range of experience from handling UI Design, User Experience Consulting, Social Media Marketing, Branding and Identity, Startup Prototypes, Mobile development, to website localization for the Asian market.
Contact:
Brandon K. Hill, President/CEO
brandon@btrax.com
www.btrax.com
“I don’t want good students. I don’t want Ivy League kids. I don’t want the typical rank and file that go off to IBM or get pulled into Microsoft and Google because they got an internship via their career center.
I want kids that spent their time doing things that live and breathe algorithms. I want the students that enjoy programming competitions and breaking into each other’s computers. I want the kids that cracked a copy of Photoshop not just because it was cheaper than buying it – but also because it was fun.
I don’t want computer nerds or even software engineers. I want hackers.”
These were the words from my friend Jen, a recruiter at a very-well funded startup in Silicon Valley. Jen’s comment highlights a growing trend in Silicon Valley – the popular embrace of the hacker in establishing and maintaining a culture of innovation.
If the Bay Area economy was akin to a baseball game, the technology and startup entrepreneurs are wearing their rally caps and driving in the jobs. As the startup industry grows, led by founders and powered by angel and venture funding, community has become the glue to hold it all together.
Whether it’s a high-profile departure from Facebook or a graduate from MIT, there is a lot on the line in starting a company, and there is tremendous value in surrounding yourself with others who have the same passion and work ethic.
Founders are joining coworking spaces and venture-backed incubators, sharing offices with larger companies, or leasing office space. There are myriad ways to establish your company’s headquarters, but the common denominator to opening an office is community.
At the GigaOM Net:Work Conference in Mission Bay, we held a coworking workshop in which leaders in coworking discussed the new phenomenon. Julian Nachtigal, the mind behind pariSoma which is quintupling in size in San Francisco’s SoMa district, and Jeremy Neuner, CEO of Nextspace with two locations in SF and Santa Cruz.
The message was clear: co-working thrives around community, where entrepreneurs can share best practices, network with various industry professionals and rent a desk to plug a computer in and get to work. If you don’t know what a co-working space is, read this Quora thread.
“Coworking got a jumpstart during the economic crisis and crisis equals opportunity. Lean startups of 2-6 people with early stage seed funding can’t afford to have their own office, and we offer them a solution,” says Julian.
Coworking spaces in SF are growing at rapid paces, with The Hub at the San Francisco Chronicle Building expanding (See San Francisco Chronicle story), SOMA Central taking more space at 153 Townsend, and Rocket Space opened a large 50,000 square feet in SoMa to fit 500 people geared to later stage startups. See my blog post on the launch of RocketSpace.
“Community is the biggest part. People by nature are social. At coworking, entrepreneurs prove their product, raise funding, then choose when to scale and branch out to larger office space. But the community that was started at places like pariSoma lives on,” Julian explains.
Entrepreneurs may leave the co-working, but the coworking certainly doesn’t leave the entrepreneur.
Coworking works in tandem with the office market. “My dream would be to have every person working at NextSpace start an office of their own and grow to be the next Facebook.” Says Jeremy Neuner.
“The trend bodes well for the city because small businesses are expected to contribute significant numbers of jobs in the current economic recovery.†See the full SF Business Times article on coworking, “Tech startups dare to share”.
Owen Thomas, Editor of VentureBeat, tweeted to me the other day, “Silicon Valley used to be about cheap office parks. Now it’s about gathering brains, shortening commutes, and providing for play.” Entrepreneurs are seeking out community in an office space just as they do at a coworking space.
Community is the main reason South of Market and Palo Alto have become the epicenter for startups. The vacancy in Palo Alto hovers around 5%. Similarly, vacancy in South of Market shrinks every quarter and rates have grown to $40 per RSF at the high end. In my article on VentureBeat, I show the tremendous activity going on in SoMa and Palo Alto despite the rising rates.
Companies like Twiliohave opened their own office, but did not isolate themselves in the process. They shared the office with another startup in the beginning, and they have used their office to give back to the community. Take a look at the pictures from the SF New Tech Holiday Party, hosted by none other than Jeff Lawson and the whole Twilio gang at their headquarters on Folsom street.
My client, Thumbtack, a leading marketplace for local services, opened a beautiful office this month in South of Market and wants to encourage groups to work from their space. They have a full kitchen, open layout, loft space and a cook that visits their office two times a day to cook them meals. They certainly will have a great community within their own office! Check out their ad!
2011 is ripe for another tech boom, and the lean startup method with smaller starting offices and coworking spaces will make it sustainable. The Bay Area is on the verge of an exciting year, and more lights will be burning late in coworking spaces and startup offices alike.
We are having a Coworking Unconference event to start SXSW in Austin Texas as well! So if you are planning on going to SXSW, sign up and join the conversation and the movement!
Justin Bedecarré is a real estate advisor for technology and media companies at Cushman & Wakefield, a commercial real estate firm covering the Bay Area. He has represented firms from Fortune 100 to startups in media and technology, including Broadcom, Thomson Reuters, AKQA, and Hearst Corporation, to name a few. He writes a blog on the intersection of technology and commercial real estate at www.BayAreaComRE.com. He can be reached via email at justin.bedecarre@cushwake.com or at About.me, @jtbed on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn and Quora
Hey Everyone! Here’s the USTREAM for the opening 2011 SF New Tech event featuring: ConsumerBell, DemDash, Topicmarks, TokBox, ConferenceHound, Hashable and more, in case you weren’t there.
We will be streaming the next event on 2/9 @ sfnewtech/live. Catch us there and interact with us on USTREAM using the #sfnewtech hashtag. See u live or online!
Hummer Winblad Venture Partners was founded in 1989 as the first venture capital fund to invest exclusively in software companies.
Contact:
Lars Leckie, Managing Partner
lars@humwin.com
www.humwin.com
John Lin and The Cypress Group at Morgan Stanley Smith Barney work primarily with technology entrepreneurs and executives to identify solutions that address both their personal and professional financial needs. Our objective is to provide value added advice and services to our clients within the startup community, so that they have more time to focus on building their companies.
Contact:
John Lin, Wealth Manager
john.s.lin@mssb.com
fa.smithbarney.com/thecypressgroupsb
Backblaze online backup provides the easiest way to protect all your data.
Built upon the unique Backblaze storage cloud, the service automatically backs up all data for consumers and businesses for just $5/month with unlimited storage. Start your free trial now.
Contact:
Gleb Budman, CEO
gleb.budman@backblaze.com
www.backblaze.com
Software Product Development firm that works as innovation partner for ISVs, SaaS, Consumer Facing Sites.
Contact:
Matt Perez, COO & Co-founder
mperez@nearsoft.com
www.nearsoft.com
The ultimate all inclusive shared office space for tech & new media companies with between 1 and 30 employees.
Contact:
Duncan Logan, Founder & CEO
dlogan@rocket-space.com
www.rocket-space.com
We work with founders, executives and investors to grow high performance companies. Creating actionable business plans to build out operational, marketing and leadership strategy.
Contact:
Kevin Waldron, CEO
kevin@waldronconsultinggroup.com
waldronconsultinggroup.com