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Willow Garage Founder Scott Hassan Aims To Build a Startup Village
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?
Live there? I offer to move there and help set it up! :)
I wouldn't mind access to a small room if I stayed really late one night or wanted to bang something out over a weekend or few days.
But live there full time? I don't think so. Seems like it would be the LAN party that never ended.
If you're doing the math, that's 1750 in dog feet.
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Except that you would rarely see new people.
More innovation happens by accidents, mistakes and misunderstandings. Or the ever silly questions of the newcomers.
Without inflow of new people, the "village" would suffer mental rot pretty quickly.
In a sense, a maker fairs are already better "startup villages", IMO.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Yeah it would really be suck to be isolated in Menlo Park. You would be so far away from Stanford, Silicon Valley, San Francisco, the greater bay area, Napa/Sonoma/SantaLucia, Santa Cruz and Monterey, Lake Tahoe, Yosemite. Think of how long it must take for the pony express to get across the Sierra Nevadas! There would be nobody to talk to but the same coworkers, day in and day out. No wonder the housing is so cheap there!
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Morlock will stay out. Wells, buddy, looks like you were right about this.
Now, where's my time machine?
I'd rather live in a mixed community, one where I'd encounter lots of different types of people on an everyday basis.
But different people are so annoying! :-p Seriously though, it would be nice to have a bunch of friends and peers in the neighborhood.
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Please please please.
That's an appealing idea, but I don't think it's true. I've read before that innovation generally comes from the experts in a field and the "happy accident" type of innovation from naive newcomers is more myth than reality.
Not in my experience, though.
But of course professional pride kicks in even before the first round of applause fades, and after that it is "of course it was very very hard work!!!"
Then again, I probably define innovation very differently than someone focused on an incubator village and start-ups. I'm thinking more along the lines of Bell Labs [...]
That's precisely the type of innovation I was talking about. (Facebook thingies happen by throwing stuff against the wall and seeing what sticks. When lots of people do it simultaneously, there is a chance that some of it sticks.)
The thing about big R&D centers is that nobody really sees what's going on behind the closed doors. Behind the closed doors in the most "productive" labs you would find chaos and disorder - precisely the environment where errors and accidents occur. But it certainly takes dedication (to field or problem) to actually make out of that a "Eureka!" moment.
Otherwise, if innovation was that easy to achieve by simply good planning, then it would have been done a long time ago.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Assuming this project succeeded; I can only imagine that this would be another center of self absorbed web techs and recent college grads. People aiming to make 'apps' that will 'change the face of X' and 'rethink how we approach Y'. Yet, these 'apps', will offer half baked solutions to problems that were solved before but now require you to login to a site to work with.
I could just be jealous of high pay for awful work though.
Eat sleep die
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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I'm seeing a lot of people getting into startups, not only in the US but the rest of the world. My facebook feed is filled with my friends founding a startup. And some of my previous bosses are funding startups.
However, the problem I am seeing though, is most of these startups is not the next Tesla or doing something innovative, they are just trying to create a new social media app or some new game. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but my opinion is that startups should be about trying to solve a problem. Just like friendster, it got created because the guy just broke up with his girl and wants a way to easily find dates.
On a side note, given this flood of startups, why is it still hard to find a software development job that gives a decent pay? Can it be that these new startup trend is just another way to get people to write code real cheap?
I'm imagining this scenario.
Start Up Boss : Hey you want to join a startup that is like mashable but only better?
Guy : Yeah cool... <and starts coding some HTML5 stuff and JavaScript.> Here boss all done!
Start Up Boss : Wow cool. You know, it would be better if we can integrate this with some legacy code. Since, you are so awesome, can you write me some services to communicate with our mainframe application preferably using json.
Guy: Yeah I can do that... <starts keyboarding some codes>.. ALL DONE BOSS!!! Take note, I've done all this stuff and got time for 2 hours of sleep. I'm really awesome.
Start Up Boss : Cool! Here's your first month's paycheck for 2K. However, there's some new direction that our startup is taking and we need to let you go.
Except that you would rarely see new people.
Why not? Why would there be fewer new people in this neighborhood compared to any other? The only difference would be the people in this neighborhood would be a more interesting.
Except that you would rarely see new people.
Unless, of course, new people go there all the time. There is a way to fix that problem.
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?
Whatever happened to that "startup house" in Kansas City? Much the same idea. Google PR made a big deal about how a 1GB network connection made it possible for a house in KC to do big-time development.
There are already a few places like this in the SF Bay Area. They're mostly sweatshops for producing appcrap. Now if the Willow Garage guy was doing robotics again, it might be interesting. But Willow Garage robotics tanked, and the people involved mostly went off to a "telepresence" startup which sells a Segway-like teleoperator with a camera and screen. It's controlled from an app, of course.
Seriously people, stop it with the Startup Religion. A start up is nothing other than a new company with likely bad funding or heavy mortgages that employees underpaid and overworked people who usually know nothing about actual product creation or business development. Meanwhile the media treats these like houses of worship, fawning over entrepreneurs, and so on. Wake up.
A startup village is inherently stupid. Once a startup company gets a product going and is no longer a "startup", then you want as many employees as possible to STAY and finish the product and build the company, not have them jump ship or be forced to move out because the housing is reserved for only startup devs. Also when work is over, GO HOME! Do not live the lifestyle because the lifestyle is a lie. Don't follow all the other cultists.
Yeah college, if they pay your rent and take all of your ideas for themselves.
VCs have finally figured out how to treat technology and creativity like a company town from the 1890s.
You write sixteen apps and what do you get
Another day older and deeper in debt
Google don't you hire me cause I can't go
I owe my code to the incubator whores.
[...] comes from the tried and true cycle of hypothesis --> test --> evaluate.
Ah. The science. The scientific process. But science is precisely the example of the branch with closed environment, discrimination and elitism, which abhors and rejects any innovation or change. Unless it comes from a prof with a fat grant, of course.
That's why, for example, computer science, effectively branched off and doesn't use the scientific process. Likewise, most of the industries: the scientific process is way too expensive and way too wasteful when applied to tangible things. Some areas do it because all low hanging fruits are already gone and there is simply no alternative. But again, due to the costs, it is applied in a very very limited fashion.
In the end, in this particular context, it is OK to ignore science because your definition of innovation is simply different. Heck, you measure "innovation" in number of published papers.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
Incubators are generally a disaster since they're not actually meant to start businesses. They're designed specifically to take assist ventures in acquiring venture capital and then using a lock-in to the agreement to suck that money back out.
Incubators are a total disaster. The only advantage ever has been that they provide the coffee pot. You'll have to make your own coffee elsewhere.
Just that - why California? One of the most business-hostile climates in the world, but people who live there can't imagine anything else?
Enjoy life! This is not a dress rehearsal.
Couples of years ago I invested in startups doing apps as at that time the app market has yet to mature
After the 'angry bird' phenomena when everyone and their dog wants to get in, I started to divest
Now, I still invest in startups, but none of them are in the "app business" - the app market is a fools' gold right now
I am not saying that there is no more new idea in the App space - what I am saying is that with so many people getting involve, the _noise_ level has gotten so loud it even genuinely clever ideas might not get noticed anymore
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...slap bang in the middle of the most expensive real estate in the US.
Brilliant!
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Most of the planet does, it's not our fault you're still using a measuring system that seems designed for little children.
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Scott "Bridge Burner" Hassan is a well-known ass-hat in the Sili Valley robotics community. He guided Willow Garage into a controlled cratering, and the spin-out agreements of the companies that have come out of Hassan's previous ventures have contained undigestible poison pills driven by Scott's greed. Hassan has PO'ed enough of the VC's on Sand Hill Road that he is *forced* to go it alone now with strange schemes like this where he can indulge his misguided greed. Scott Hassan is number one on my list of people that I would never, ever, allow to influence a start-up I was involved with.
Given what I know about Hassan, I predict that this is simply a slave camp disguised as a honey pot. Scott will own everything. The slaves will own nothing. Apparently, Hassan is disatisified with the rate at which he is accumulating personal enemies, and now wants to start manufacturing personal enemies by the warehouse-full.
Did not a willow garage spinoff recently have to close after failing to work things out with Willow in the series A process? This is a great idea, but Scott Hassan needs to show he is founder friendly; otherwise, watch out.
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