On Tuesday, I went to a networking event with Geeks on a Plane, who were visiting Beijing at the time. One of them, Mike Prasad, and I were talking about the startup community in Beijing and I mentioned that it was actually really nice to have the Geeks in town, because I also ended meeting other local entrepreneurs. I mentioned that there aren’t quite as many places and events for startups as there are in places like Silicon Valley.
Mike mentioned that Los Angeles didn’t have much community either a few years ago, but that he and some like-minded people got together to really push it. After enough time, they reached a critical mass and now the community is pretty lively even without them organizing everything. He encouraged me to do the same thing here.
From another side, I’d been thinking about coworking for a while. It’s nice working at home sometimes, but other times I really want a place to focus and people to talk to during the day. Coworking would be a great solution, but there’s nowhere in Beijing with that sort of environment. So, the combination of Mike’s comment and having tried out Xindanwei in Shanghai last week prompted me to decide that maybe what I should do is found a space for entrepreneurs and other interesting people here Beijing.
Ideally, in my vision, it would be part-workspace, part-networking/startup community. Once it’s a little established, I could even volunteer the space for events like a BarCamp or Web Wednesday group meetings.
In true ‘lean startup’ fashion, the first step I took on Thursday night was to write a survey to see if people would be interested, what amenities they’d need to be able to work there, and how much they’d be willing to pay. So far, 10 people have responded, and 7 of them even said they might be willing to reserve a month at a discounted rate up front to help get started. I figure that if 10 people respond in two days, there are probably a lot of other people who haven’t even seen it yet who would be interested as well.
So, since I’ll be pretty busy this month trying to launch Bespoke Row and 25Lux, Judy said she’s going to help take care of some of the details like figuring out how much rent will be, etc. Hopefully the numbers work out and we’ll be able to open quickly.
If you’re also interested in this idea, please add your input to the survey or add a comment below. It will really help a lot when we have to decide what the final implementation will look like.
Click here to take the Beijing coworking survey.
Updates:
- June 26, 2010: Update
- August 24, 2010: We’re making progress
May 31, 2010 at 1:00 am
That sounds so cool, Mike. I didn’t even know people did this. Good luck.
June 2, 2010 at 9:05 am
Thanks, Kendall. I hope we get can get it off the ground soon. See you at the reunion next month!