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Willow Garage Founder Scott Hassan Aims To Build a Startup Village

Posted by timothy on from the it-takes-a-startup-village dept.

Tekla Perry (3034735) writes "Scott Hassan, founder of robotic research lab Willow Garage, is behind a large real estate development in Menlo Park, Calif. He reportedly plans to create an incubator village with 18,500 square meters of workspace and another 18,500 square meters of living space on a 30,000 square meter site, combining the advantages of a garage startup environment (what could be more convenient than working where you live) and an incubator (access to other smart entrepreneurs and ideas)." Would you want to live in this kind of environment?

2 of 62 comments (clear)

  1. Not really by CODiNE · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I'm working at home and I think it can easily lead to burnout. I need to figure out some kind of mental partitioning scheme. PLUS being surrounded by workmates 24/7? Yikes.

    I know startups aren't exactly paragons of balanced living, but burnout is already a problem with them. Perhaps the physical use of space will help avoid it.

    --
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  2. In Short? No. by ndykman · · Score: 5, Interesting

    While there are many things about startups that are attractive, in the end, it's just a job, not a lifestyle. It's best to work to live, not live to work. These efforts to create all inclusive environments for programmers will just lead to burnout when the bubble pops. And yes, it is a bubble. We don't need yet another mobile social enabled whatsit pieced together quickly.

    If this was an environment to create new formal verification tools or other revolutionary software tooling, then I'd be interested. Right now, it seems we are going a bit backwards. It's harder to create a nice UI on the web than it was on the desktop more than ten years ago. In the last few years, this is the first time that my job is becoming harder. For the longest time, editors got better, debuggers got better, frameworks got better and there were more tools for the job than before. Now, there's no real commercial breakthroughs in static analysis, security, formal verification, domain specific languages. It's all just mobile apps with no depth. Sure, this has driven some new useful stuff (say, Hadoop), but when big data is just for marketing and ads, what's the point?