(2007-03-14) Coffee Shop Offices

Some tiny Start Up people don't even want CoWorking, they're satisfied floating from Coffee House to Coffee House. "The San Francisco coffeehouse is the new Palo Alto garage," declares Kevin Burton, 30, who runs his Internet startup TailRank without renting offices. "It's where all the innovation is happening."... The founders of Web video startup Dovetail Television were meeting there one day, griping as usual about how hard it was to find talented programmers. "I'm looking around and there's gotta be 50 people with laptops," said Brett Levine, 31, a co-founder and the company's lead programmer. "I got on a chair and yelled, "Hey, are there any Action Script programmers in the room?" People at the counter looked at me glaringly, but a couple of people looked around and raised their hand."... As for why they're there, Kelly said, "I'm visiting with my friends instead of being locked up in a big building in the South Bay."... Kennedy rented a desk at San Francisco's Obvious Corp., a Web company in South Park, so he could have confidential meetings... Venerable insurance firm Lloyds Of London was actually started in a Coffee House, Niall Kennedy points out... Almost every mobile worker interviewed said they try to buy something at least every hour... "This is just confirmation that StarBucks and its cousins are all really in the commercial Real Estate business," Dan Pink said. "They're giving very cheap real estate for a very pricey cup of coffee."

Charles Hudson notes One thing that the article didn't really touch upon was the idea that this kind of model doesn't really scale beyond a few people. Once you have a few people (more than you can fit around one small table at Starbucks), the advantages of having your own space probably start to outweigh coffeeshopping.