Things Startups Do and Don’t Need

(This is based on a pair of lists by Chris Dixon. I don’t agree with some of what he says, so I’m compiling my own list. This is not an exhaustive checklist, but an exploration of what makes the spaces I’ve worked in productive or not.)

Location is everything, both on a macro (the region—Silicon Valley, New York, or the Research Triangle) and micro (the neighborhood, the daily activity of the city) scale. It’s important to be near other bright, innovative companies. The office should be easily accessible by public transportation. There should be a variety of places to eat (both sit-down and takeout or delivery) nearby. Maybe even a bar to get drinks with coworkers after a long day. Jane Jacobs might be of some help here.

Offices need natural light, but not direct sun. It should be bright but glare-free. Operable windows are a must if there’s no mechanical ventilation. There should be plants in the office for better air quality, and a park nearby when potted plants aren’t enough.

Heat should be comfortable and adjustable. You’d be surprised how much the temperature can vary in a large room, so if the building has radiators, you may need fans to evenly distribute the heat. The office should be heated all night. (Here’s a hint: get programmable thermostats with timers. Set the heat to shut off at times when everyone is usually gone, but make it simple to manually override the setting if someone is staying late.)

For a startup to succeed, people are going to have to want to spend a lot of time at the office. This doesn’t necessarily mean pool tables and foosball tournaments, but a place away from the desks with a couch and a TV is great for a quick nap after lunch or for playing Rock Band after work is essential. Don’t skimp here. You want a setup that is (just slightly) better than your own living room. The kitchen area is slightly less important, but there does seem to be a high correlation between programmers and coffee geeks. I guess that means a good coffee maker is essential.

Your office should be visually pleasant. You don’t need expensive art, but you need something on the wall, even if it’s framed posters. Blank white institutional walls simply will not do. Best office I’ve experienced in this regard: Tumblr’s. (It helps to share space with an animation studio.)

You need to have fully redundant Internet connections. My current office had subscribed to Towerstream, which broadcasts a WiMAX signal from the Empire State Building. It would have been a perfectly acceptable Internet provider in Los Angeles or Phoenix; but whenever it rained, the signal would cut out. We had entire days of zero productivity! Broken Internet is completely unacceptable for a software startup. We have Verizon now, but even a wired connection can cause trouble; it’s best to have a backup.

As for equipment, invest in a battery backup for your network gear when you can. If a circuit breaker trips or you lose power to a portion of your office, you don’t want it to be the portion that everyone relies on to get work done. Large monitors pay for themselves in increased productivity. I get twice as much done in front of my 23” Cinema Display as I do on my laptop’s 15” LCD in the same amount of time.

In general, I believe that you get what you pay for. Aeron chairs got a bad rap for being frivolous luxuries, but they really are five times as comfortable and ten times sturdier than the $200 OfficeMax chairs that break after four months of use. I like buying things once. I also like chairs I can actually sit in for five hour stretches. Apple monitors, on the other hand, have always been overpriced. Save a few hundred bucks and go with the Dell.

Your office needs to be quiet. This is important. I don’t mean you need an elementary school librarian shushing you if your voice rises above a whisper, but conversations shouldn’t carry across the room. Open plan offices are bad at this, and the solutions to acoustic problems in large offices—carpeted cubicle walls, dropped acoustic tile ceilings—tend to double as massively efficient soul crushers. Programming is a verbal task, and background conversation—even music with lyrics—can easily disrupt a programmer’s state of flow.

The open-plan-vs-private-offices debate will rage at least as long as the tabs-vs-spaces debate, but I’m in Joel’s camp on this one. Maybe it’s personal preference, but I simply can’t get anything done when I have phones ringing and five conversations going on around me at once.