Great to be in the University and thanks to Geoff and Michelle for inviting me to talk here.
I’ll get straight to the point, I’m here to talk about money… :)
I’m here to talk to you about money and programming
about working in co-working spaces and how co-working has changed the way companies are formed
and are made successful.
and also how we work,
what is important
I’m also going to talk a little about entrepreneurship,
plus the value that coworking can create for communities
Some of you here will, at some point in your working life pass through a coworking space as an employee or a maybe a founder of a startup.
So what I am about to divulge will hopefully open your eyes to the benefits and pitfalls of doing that.
I’m Paul Harwood I am a reasonably successful software developer / entrepreneur.
Like most entrepreneurs I have too many ideas and too many projects, not enough time.
Been doing it for about 16 years now and seen a lot of things, a lot of change.
I love startups, I love the ideas, the energy and the buzz you get
and when I see in other people starting up, gives me a buzz too
I moved down from Bristol last year where I ran a few startups, I sold a company - or exited as they now say in the startup community,
I was also the organiser there of South West Big Data that now has around 270 members.
I’ve run some great events there
with the Lead technical people from a number of cool organisations like CERN, LinkedIn, Guardian, McLaren and more
Bristol is a fantastic place to live and work.
It has a world class tech community and loads of opportunity for talented individuals.
So, being a tech entrepreneur - why did I give up such a vibrant community to move to Swansea (where I was born)?
Good question.
Swansea has lots of opportunity, it is a fantastic place to live if you want to live well.
More importantly it’s cheap.
Cheap to live, the burn rate is much lower for companies, rent is cheaper and staff costs are lower.
giving you more of a chance to make money and make the cut.
the cut being - lasting for two years
I now run a cloud based video transcoding service called Ultimate.io, and a few other side projects.
Ultimate.io will replace drives in the media industry as bandwidth increases.
We are working with some major players in the sector already
and have some exciting times ahead this year. Shortly we will also be recruiting!
I also run techhub with two other guys
(Anyone heard of techhub?)
i’ll talk a little about techhub.
Techhub is a global brand
Locally, we are a Non profit CIC (community interest company), the directors do it for the love of it,
for the sheer excitement and love of facility management.
TechHub Wales is based in Wind Street, (know wind street?)
in about 4,000 sq. ft
one floor with an event space, meeting rooms, a coffee machine
table tennis table, arcade machine and a free bar.
We are about to take over the whole building, which is three floors and around 12,000 sq ft.
Startups pay £150 per month per desk, or £400 per year for flexi membership for everything,
you get the usual suspects, fast internet, lots of cool events - good speakers, nights out
We are also due to host the Swansea hackspace - with lots of arduinos and raspberry Pi’s 3d printing etc.
- so… Short History
Me, Matt and Adam, Jay the office dude. James Knight from TechHub London, Elizabeth Varley one of the original founders of the TechHub global network.
I met Matt and Adam last year at a co-working space called indycube on the high street.
We are all entrepreneurs with our own businesses.
Matt approached TechHub initially and then we convinced them to base themselves here after a number of rebuffs
They turned down a number of cool cities in the UK like sheffield to come here as their third location after Manchester and London.
We raised some money from our brilliant sponsors and the welsh Government - who are very supportive and opened the doors in December.
And we haven't disappointed - we started techhub 4 months ago
Incredible growth, mainly because there was not a clear focal point for small high growth potential tech businesses in the area
The companies are varied, some small as one and as big as 10 people in all sorts of sectors
We have companies that have had successful funding rounds on seedrs
and others that have won global startup competitions
and some that are paying their way by working and running startups part time
so theres a big mix
All our startups get access to the global network of TechHub properties
These are the cities techhub is based in - this list is going to grow soon to include New York and a few others
When you are a member - you can go to any one of these places and grab some space to work
and more importantly - network.
Which brings me neatly on to the meat and bones of this talk.
Co working.
Co working is a phenomenon that, for me
is pointing a big fat arrow at the future of workplaces in society.
With an emphasis on social, fail small, win big - they are vibrant, exciting places.
Governments are now seeing the coworking, open space template as a viable strategy for agencies.
Big companies have embraced this methodology as a way to innovate
and big companies have spawned from people who meet in these spaces, who sit next to - or over the desk from their future business partners
all very romantic
But, coworking is all about one thing, money.
Or is it?
The reason I said I was going to talk about money at the head of the talk is
not for the reasons you probably thought
You could argue that work is simply about money, but that is an incredibly simplistic view of why we work.
...Why we are motivated to work.
Look at long distance running,
why the hell do people do long distance running?
Is it because they are in love with the pain of blisters or the aching muscles, perhaps the chance of dying of heart failure?
No, people want to win, but more than that they want the chance to win.
statistically there are not many winners, so why bother?
This is true in racing and in business.
People love to achieve, achievement being the stuff of work.
Money is a byproduct of work, that’s why I would argue that your achievements and ultimately your workplace is probably more important than your wage.
It has certainly been that way for me over the last 16 years.
Work (depending on your theoretical or sociological standpoint) is the act of creating value for yourself and for others,
doing something for the shareholders, the boss, the community and getting a reward in the way of wages, profit or just gratitude.
I have two kids, my eldest girl is 5 and she goes to Oystermouth school in Mumbles
girls - they are _my_ shareholders (i don’t mean that really - they don’t have offshore accounts),
and a few weeks ago she came home and said: What do you do when you go to work dad?
(My partner asked me the same question but for completely different reasons with an emphasis on the word DO.)
My daughter was curious, probably off the back of
“my daddy does this…what does your daddy do”
conversations in the playground, where the kids compare dads.
So...
I was stumped. Because...
At that point I realised my work is actually quite vague and very, very specific at the same time.
I could say I’m the boss - but the boss of what?
I am not a policeman - who stops bad people doing bad things
I am not a doctor - who makes people better
I am not a painter - who paints things
So, I told her my job role in the simplest terms possible...
I told her I was a full stack developer / entrepreneur
- who does everything
She seemed satisfied with that.
Shes a clever kid.
You are all about to enter this marketplace in one way or another, (even PHD’s don’t get away with it).
Software practitioners are in some ways returning to the way people used to work on a local scale around a few hundred years ago - but now with a global focus.
Our products are created locally in small teams
can be distributed globally to billions of people - instantly.
This creates massive opportunity and an even bigger opportunity to fail.
This is why having other people around - having experience matters a lot.
Having peers that you can bounce off or even compete with focuses you and gives you a much higher chance of winning
But as I said - it is not _all_ about the winners.
So, who goes into work every morning whooping and hollering, high fiving your colleagues?
Not many people. Work is stressful, can be awful.
Can make you depressed.
Work is full of challenges and problems, just like long distance running fraught with risk
and if you are the boss - fraught with real danger that you could lose it all.
The sadistic thing is - this is what we do it for, this is what we enjoy.
Well maybe not enjoy, but winning against risks and challenges, making achievements are what we value over most things in life.
Co-working spaces are not always happy places, they are not full of people pulling off massive investment rounds every week, hitting targets every day you won’t see any Ferraris outside TechHub getting parking tickets they don’t care about.
Not just yet.
They can be highly political with lots of stressed out entrepreneurs.
But generally they aren’t - they are full of entrepreneurs smiling - pretending they are not failing massively.
This may all seem a bit fatalistic, but it’s true. But it is also why co-working spaces are crucial. Why thy work.
There is a sense in the space that we are all in it together
and _that_ is massively valuable.
Because lots of work done in startups can feel like and sometimes is futile..
Futile work is the killer here.
A lot of my life I would have made more money by going down the beach than sat in my home office working until 2am on products that would fail.
That is a real killer, when you see your work destroyed, not even looked at again.
But I do it again and again, am I insane? No I am an entrepreneur.
I find ways to make things work, I re-use and repourpose.
My main aim now after 16 years is to extract as much value for me and my family out of my working day, by making things ‘work’.
Does anyone know who Sisyphus is?, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same rock up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, and he would have to start again.
And you can think about this as the essence of doing futile work or work that has no real outcome other than to have to start again.
Being a software developer , a computer scientist a sysadmin or worse - any career in the software industry can sometimes make you feel like Sisyphus
It can seem like you are pushing one rock up the hill only for another rock to come tumbling down and so on and so on…
But the _only_ way to learn, is to push that rock up the hill and emotionally prepare for it to come tumbling back down, so that you can start again.
Learning is a massive part of the whole experience and what creates value.
We care about the outcome. About the goal and we are prepared to risk it all to achieve that.
I remember when I was 13 and someone told me about “data entry” jobs.
I thought, wow, d-a-t-a e-n-t-r-y, I loved computers - it sounded futuristic, really glamorous.
Not really understanding that it just meant hours and hours of keying futile numbers and letters into a screen over and over again with very little reward.
No, I went and did a multimedia computing degree instead,
which meant hours and hours of keying futile numbers and letters into a screen over and over again
with very little reward.
The happy ending in all this is coworking...
Coworking is subtly redefining the word _work_ for people like us.
Small teams and companies are fast replacing software departments in megacorps all over the industry. Products produced by small teams of professionals are just as likely to be grown by Angel or VC money as they are departmental budgets.
Collaborative working is biting off chunks of revenue from the larger software houses and eating up huge software problems.
and they are often not trivial problems - they backed by global open source initiatives, hundreds of developers hacking on great problems
hundreds of rocks and hundreds of hills.
This is a big shift away from megacorp thinking,
Lots of important commercial and non-commercial initiatives they are founded in small spaces. Two guys here, a V.C. there add a sprinkling of crowdfunding and bam! a big problem solved and a heap of cash earned or a global problem fixed.
It happens quickly and it happens mostly because of coworking.
Megacorps won’t die of course, but their shape is morphing to the shape that the internet tends to - a distributed system.
It has been said many times that we are living through an industrial or information revolution. But I think the real revolution is in how this affects our lifestyles- our work/life balances.
Coworking spaces like techhub offer great opportunities to enjoy your work, to achieve together and network globally
They are very powerful places now, with future business leaders, future employers and employees integrating in a can-do environment.
In the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx, but the reality is that we've switched
and now we're in the knowledge economy.
Being a worker in a knowledge economy means no more pin counting, efficiency is old hat.
Computers do efficiency, they eat it up.
So what happens to the worker in a knowledge economy, when efficiency is no longer the goal?
In coworking spaces people share knoweldge, just like early universities - they are spaces for experts and artisans to come together and share their knowledge. In fact the only fundamental differences between universities and coworking spaces are
- a curriculum
- ownership of IP
Being a worker In the knowledge economy, sharing knowledge has a double effect.
It increases your reputation which also increases your opportunity.
Another reason why coworking spaces are easier places to find work for professionals.
Ironically most coworking spaces are ideologically contradictory.
They have capitalism in bags but tend towards communism in their practices.
Shared resources, shared knowledge and a common cause.
Everyone is created equal in a coworking space, the physical space is flat and distributed. There is no “important” bit.
But everyone is trying to break out into their own capitalist haven.
The office with the big desk and the door that says boss.
Well maybe no so old school anymore.
As we move to situations in which people have to decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to their work and their workplace
Work becomes more fluid, less structured and more about meaning. People thinking about work on the way to work and then they go home from work to work and so on, all of a sudden Marx becomes more relevant again.
So when we think about work, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to it -- meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc.
And the good news is that when you add all of those components and think about them, how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it in our workplace and for the employees,
I you create spaces where people are more productive and ultimately happier.
Being an entrepreneur in a space like TechHub is easy.
the definition of entrepreneur is
“one who organizes, manages, and assumes the risks of a business or enterprise”
But simply the origins of the word are much more revealing, it is a french word :
“entreprendre : to undertake”
It’s mostly about just doing things.
Thinking about things is easy, ideas are cheap, but being in a space of other people who are doing things becomes infectious.
And It has never been so easy to run a business.
With services like ebay and Amazon, cloud services, cloud hosting etc… we are living in an age of pushbutton businesses.
You could argue that because of computing we are all becoming entrepreneurs because our job functions encompass so much of what used to be split into departments years ago.
Computers mean that we immediately have many more resources to control at our fingertips and companies can be literally one person. We are all walking around like mini corporations with mainframes in our pockets.
Being an entrpreneur is easy,
being a successful entrepreneur is not so easy.
Sadly I have no answer to that problem, one day I might.
But ultimately
success can be measured in many ways,
but there is one way that can be counted and measured
money
alan watts quote
when i sold my first company I took a year out.
unlimited upside
first time in history the man on the street can access a global audience