The benefits of shared office space

SmallBusiness.co.uk visits Techspace London to learn about the working habits of promising technology start-ups.

Techspace London is a co-working space based in Shoreditch which aims to provide a collaborative atmosphere for young companies with big growth plans. Here, we speak to a few of them.

David Galsworthy (Techspace Co-founder): “It started from when Alex and I were looking for space ourselves.”

Alex Rabarts (Techspace Co-founder): “We looked at all these sort of small, shoebox size offices and they didn’t really have the atmosphere that we wanted to work in.”

David Galsworthy: “We pay a lot of attention to design elements of the place. We’re careful about how many desks we put in, so that we we give it a really nice environment, which can foster the growth of a community through that.”

Phil Ellis (Techspace Manager): “We try and kind of include as many companies that are doing interesting things within the community as possible. So we’ve got the Troupe guys. We’re running that product through both spaces.”

Mike Bartlett (Troupe Co-founder): “We had been in others before and noise was actually a big issue in bigger open plan spaces. Techspace is a little bit more intimate, you just feel a bit freer to work together as a team, in an environment like this, rather than these sort of big open plan factories.”

Phil Ellis: “We’ve also go the Sedition guys…”

Rory Blain (Sedition Director): “They’ve got some good guys that they’re working with who are very proactive about bringing the kind of people they want into the companies, and making sure that there’s an interaction and dialogue going on between those companies. Those things really are all I’m looking for.”

Paul Sprinz (Stripe): “We were attracted to tech space because we were looking for somewhere that was flexible and a shared space but was unbranded. We didn’t want to go down the kind of traditional managed office space route.”

Rory Blain: “It’s a great place to be in terms of sharing information, sharing knowledge, and getting the kind of support you might want to have inside a startup.”

David Galsworthy: “I suppose there’s the fact of the ‘co-founders in residence angle’, that we really do use the space for our own businesses.”

Further reading on shared office space

 

Ben Lobel

Ben Lobel

Ben Lobel was the editor of SmallBusiness.co.uk from 2010 to 2018. He specialises in writing for start-up and scale-up companies in the areas of finance, marketing and HR.

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