I’ve been fascinated with Vancouver’s WorkSpace ever since it was announced. Basically, it’s an office where instead of leasing a space of your own, you get a membership to a communal office, like a gym membership. It’s located in downtown Vancouver, or specifically Gastown. This makes it walking distance from Skytrain stations, just east of the core amenities, just north of one of the fastest-developing areas of the city, and just west of… well, don’t go that direction.
For $125 you get one day a week, plus evenings and weekends at your leisure. For about $100 per day, you can add an additional day of the week, up to $495 for full time access (it’s open 24/7.) It comes with a few hours of meeting room time, and they have extras like mailboxes, coffee, and complimentary statues of Paul Graham.
This would be amazing for a startup. Even if you had three guys full time, $1500/mo wouldn’t go far in downtown Vancouver. But at WorkSpace, it would include rent, power, internet, janitorial, and more. Plus, you’d have other geeks hacking away around you, available for collaboration or just geeking out.
I’ve been working from home some days a week for a year or two now, busing into the office other days. Although it’s really great to save 3-4 hours a day of commuting, sometimes I get listless or lonely working from home. It would be cool to have a place I could go where like-minded geeks were working away on their projects, but was only 20 minutes away. I wonder if there is anybody at WorkSpace who is there because it’s closer than their “real” office? Although it would be way cheaper than getting a car, a little voice in my head is saying, “you’re being stupid, go to bed. But first, have some cheese and crackers. Man, I love crackers.”