We recently moved to the Dexter Horton Building down the street on 2nd Avenue. We’re excited to get into the building, sharing space with Redfin, Skytap, Wetpaint, Corbis, and others.
After the 1889 Seattle Great Fire
Dexter Horton Building
The past 6 months we’ve been working out of the Madrona Venture Group offices, and getting fantastic support from the Madrona team.
Some of the things I learned in the move:
- Look for sub-lease options first. In our case, we saw much lower rates and more flexible terms on sub-lease than direct deals. Once you find a place, go for it. Even in this slow market, we lost the first place we liked to another startup.
- Know what you’re looking for. This is a catch-22, since you have to know your options before you can define your goal, but a few minutes of brainstorming with the team and visits to a couple of companies you respect can save you a lot of time. Everyone has an opinion. The more specific you are with your criteria, the better the broker will be finding options that work.
- Kitchen or no kitchen? Getting a small office with a kitchen proved very tough. Kitchen with a sink was tougher. We didn’t want to be washing dishes in the bathroom, so we needed a kitchen.
- Shared or not shared? A lot of companies have downsized and have space to share. We decided to go for our own space, but seriously considered sharing with a couple of companies we thought would be compatible with our culture. There are big advantages to sharing the infrastructure in both cost and headaches.
- Use a broker. Our broker, Rochelle Howell at Colliers, did a great job finding options to our criteria and encouraging some out-of-the-box options. What I learned is that in almost all cases you’ll be working with a building represented by a broker, so you should have one too. You lease something every few years, they do it every day.
- Have a lawyer review your lease. Even though we were doing a sub-lease and were given a PDF document that appeared non-negotiable, there were a number of key terms our attorney added to the lease that made it workable.
- Appoint a move coordinator. In our case, Scott Axworthy on our team has done a number of office moves and knew what needed to be done when.
- Get a designer. What you pay someone to figure out which colors, furniture, table layout, and lighting will pay off. If you’re like me, you’re not the one to choose which shade of blue for a wall. You’ll also be able to get some objective views since everyone on the team will have an opinion about everything.
- Watch the dollars. It’s easy to get tempted to spend on fancy phones, new furniture, and lots of cool stuff for a new office. It’s super important to build the right culture, and culture is affected significantly by physical space. But remember every dollar you spend on overhead you have to either earn (from customers) or raise (from VCs).
Once we have all the numbers, we’ll append some general parameters on our costs if useful for comparison.
