A sickly-looking man, walking like a zombie, crossed my path in the middle of the road as I drove through Skid Row to get to office. While waiting for him to pass, I looked to the left and only to find more disturbing scenes: a few homeless people in a tent shooting drugs up their arms and a soup kitchen filled with people whose despair-stricken eyes were staring right back at me.

But it didn’t matter. I parked my car and went straight to work.

A Homeless Person in Skid Row

A homless Person in Skid Row

Every morning, I drive through Skid Row to get to my office. I used to find it disgusting but now I’m sort of numbed to it. Even though it is not so pleasant, our current office location offered some tactical advantages for us. This essay discusses how a startup should be thinking about its early office locations and why it makes sense for us to be where we are today.

How to find your first office location

For technology startups in its infancy stage, a good place to consider is your home or garage. It is a no brainer; there is no cost involved and definite it would save a ton of time from commuting. This would be suitable for a founder who is comfortable with the idea of working from and living in your home. I have heard from people that this could be either very distracting or very efficient. It really depends on the person.

However, if a startup were growing rapidly and you needed to have a team in your home or garage, this is less than ideal. The formality, or lack thereof, can sometimes be problematic. I have witnessed situations where employees came to their boss’s home to work but saw the boss in his pyjamas. How awkward! Moreover, noises and unfocused discussions tend to get out of control when there are more people in a small tight space.

We went through this phase in the beginning when our company first relocated to Los Angeles. It’s cost-effective but informal. The downside is that we did not have a presentable space to meet customers.

Now if you have some money to lease a small space, read on here

A next natural choice, if you have some capital to spare, is to situate the company inside one of those co-working spaces. This is often very convenient and inexpensive. There are nice conference rooms that you could use if you needed to have meetings with external partners or customers. Usually, these places have a good vibe and communities tend to form. Therefore, it would be a great place to get external feedback from others – this helps tremendously with product iteration, to say the least. The best part about working at these space is that you don’t need to worry about basic utility bills and wifi. You can just pay as your team expand and your company require more room. Sometimes, there is even free-flowing coffee and beer!

We moved to a more traditional, on-demand office space rentals right after our first funding. It was nice, clean and very professional. Although lack the community feel of a more modern co-working space such as WeWork, we still think it’s a good fit for us at that stage. The receptionist staff was very presentable and courteous. We could rent out the boardroom by the hours for meetings with potential investors or town hall meetings with staff. My only complaints were the occasional terrible wifi speed and their nickel-and-diming each and every expense. In any case, the corporate image we presented through this rental office was fitting to our brand at that point in time.

One good alternative is to look for incubator programs out there which grants free physical space if you were accepted into their programs. This would be an excellent opportunity to build out your human network and meet more people, in addition to getting free rental. In my previous company, I took this approach with a startup in Beijing.

So, does that mean you should not get your own space? NO! The problem with not graduating from these co-working space is that things become more complex with a larger team. Under these circumstances, you would need to be really good at controlling your company image, organizing your team around the given space and ensuring computer servers and equipment sit properly behind YOUR OWN firewall. All these things would be immensely harder to manage if you were to work within the confines of a co-working space (I mean, you could do it but you would need to shell out big bucks to pay the co-working company so that they can customize things for you). Therefore, it still makes sense to do some research to find your own space eventually.

Having your own office is a dream come true

Office Front

View from coffee shop No Ghost Bears nearby

A major consideration would be affordability. We just went through this exercise and this was how we did it. During our initial search, we reviewed properties in LA tech hubs. We balked at the idea of paying high rents at prime estates at some of these places (Venice, Santa Monica and Pasadena). We needed to have a flexible space which we could expand if we needed to. After searching high and low, we ended up looking at downtown Los Angeles. There is a diverse choice of real estates to choose from; major banks and big firms are typically in the high rises on the west, homeless shelters and soup kitchens on the east (Skid Row) and lofts for young, creative people nestled in between. After doing a little shopping, we settled for something next to Skid Row and it turned out to be wonderful!

The location we picked was situated on the edge of a up-and-coming Fashion District. There were a couple of remodeled apartment nearby so a lot of young people live in the vicinity. Naturally, lunch spots nearby were fabulous (especially Mexican food). Our rent turned out to be very reasonable and we were given a giant loft space. Based on our design request, our landlord partitioned the office into several areas with see-through conference rooms. We also had a sink put in so employees could prepare their lunches. Our office was initially very barren so we had several team building activities to help decorate and make the office feel warm. The building came with rooftop access so one could go upstairs to get a change of scene if needed.

How does all this make sense for us

One major positive impact that we felt right away was that recruiting became a lot easier. Even though Los Angeles is a sprawling city, downtown Los Angeles is still quite central and totally accessible by car, bus and train. Not to mention USC and UCLA were not too far from us, which made it perfect to hire interns.

More importantly, being in this location lets us get a lot closer to our clients. Many of our clients have shops in our neighborhood. The simple gestures of walking by and saying hello can do wonders in terms of understanding their needs and building on that relationship. There is no better way to understand your customers than by being in their proximity.

On the flip side, there are distasteful things we had to live with. The scenery changes drastically as soon as you walked a block south west from here. Every morning I have to drive through streets full of druggies and crazy people in order to get to work. “Un-Pleasantville” is literally right next door. The other thing I dislike a lot is that young people who live nearby like to walk their dog without picking up after themselves. So avoiding dog poo bombs is a daily routine.

At the end of the day, by being close to our customers and working next to a terrible neighborhood humbly reminds that we still have a lot of work to do in order to make a dent in the universe. That’s the best blessing in disguise which I am sure would help us in the days to come as we continue to grow.