December ‘21

This article first appeared in Startups Magazine. I will dig up the link at some point.

We've always rather struggled to spell out what CodeBase is. We latched onto 'incubator' for a while, but it never felt quite right. We think of ourselves as a tech community, with the focus around building a strong startup community through events, programmes, and mentorship. And a huge part of that community is shared space, both digitally and physically. In 2014, we opened our first colocation space in Argyle House, the building consistently voted ugliest in Edinburgh. We expanded our footprint within the building until we had nearly 100,000 square feet of space, with about 100 companies working within it. We opened buildings in Stirling and Aberdeen, with strong local communities building up around them. These spaces were buzzing with people, working hard and making serendipitous connections. We were described in an official government report as having ‘... created an atmosphere and “vibe” where start-ups want to be.’

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CodeBase Edinburgh, in all its glory.

Cut to March 2020. Nervousness had been growing around covid for a few months. Tech twitter in particular seemed to be hyper aware, with VCs and startups already predicting a major shift in how the world operates. A big question was growing in the back of team CodeBase's minds - will we have to shut down the offices? It came in stages - reduced hours in the office, non-essential people not coming in, and finally it happened - we had to send everyone home.

Some of the startups based with us faced immediate financial hardship, as belts began to tighten globally. We've seen many of our tenants go out of business or not be able to pay rent before (they are startups, after all), but this was a huge shift. We've been fortunate to have had a waiting list to get space with us for the last five years, but now we were facing down the real prospect of these offices not getting refilled.

Globally, the discourse turned to whether or not offices were even needed any more for knowledge workers. Twitter and Shopify announced they were going to enact a permanent work from home policy, and cancelled their office leases. Locally, many companies did the same, at least for the rest of the year. We saw a big uptick in licences not being renewed.

We weren't alone, and for many it was too much. It was really sad to see Tech Hub close its doors - I always looked up to them as a strong community, and learned a huge amount from the way they operated. Sadly, we're going to see a lot more colocation spaces ceasing to exist.

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Our hotdesking space now - before, there’d be 50+ people crammed around desks, the hum of conversation, the smell of coffee drifting through the air.

But during this time, what was curious was that some of our tenants weren't just keeping their licences - they were taking more space. Some have grown significantly in the last six months to take far larger offices. I couldn't believe it at first - access was limited and as such so was much of the benefit from having more space. But what has been made clear to me is some folks are playing the long game - the waiting list I mentioned often applied internally, and some companies didn't want to miss the chance to snap up an extension to their office.

One of our largest tenants moved out during the Summer. A month ago they wrote to us asking if they could rent a smaller space, as soon as possible. They wanted a place they could get together, look at a whiteboard, eat lunch together, and have some real human contact. They wanted to at least have the option to connect in person. Many of us miss that connection.

This flexibility I suspect is where many startups will land in 2021. On the one hand, it'll be clear that many of their staff can get some benefits by working from home. On the other, they'll have dipped their toes in the world of remote and found it's actually quite difficult to get right. Startup success is a function of the culture they foster, and culture is a tricky thing to get right without the peripheral vision afforded by (at least occasionally) sharing a space. We're only human after all.

That's not to say there aren't loads of great organisations that have been built remotely - GitLab, Buffer, and the entire open source movement to name a few. But we have to not pretend that it's easy. It takes work, and the playbooks for doing it right are still being written. For many of the startups we know, it's just still too risky.

What this means practically for us is experimentation and nudging the space we have towards flexibility, while maintaining safety from covid. For instance, our hotdesking area is still closed, and likely will be for the foreseeable future. Likewise with our physical events space (although our online events are booming). But as with the tenant mentioned previously, we're going to see larger companies take on smaller private spaces to allow a few of the team to get together.

And with all this comes education. We're going to be spending a lot more time helping startups understand government regulations for their space and how to make it safe (on a budget). When you're starting out, you don't know what you don't know, and being able to lean on a community to wrap your head around best practice in covid protection is a huge bonus.

But mostly, what we’re going to be doing is listening to the startups. Office space has historically been a large, slow moving industry, and right now things are changing faster than eve. Whatever the new ways of working and business models of tech hubs like us are, the key thing will be to keep our ear to the ground and build something that startups actually need. And we’re happy to share those learnings, so if you ever want a Zoom call to discuss the future of space, let me know!