Tim Brown is an award winning designer and CEO of the Palo Alto, CA design firm Ideo. He’s got a really thought provoking piece on design thinking in the June issue of the Harvard Business Review (sadly, it’ll cost you $6.50 to read more than this excerpt if you don’t have a subscription). I was pulled in on two levels — first, the process he describes is highly collaborative — it’s very coworking-centric. Second, I totally concur with his belief that design isn’t something you slap onto a product, place, or process after the fact just to make it pretty. Design is, or should be, part of the whole package. Not to say that form follows function, but rather function and form, when considered simultaneously, result in a much better overall experience for the user.

This is precisely why LaunchPad Coworking is being built the way it is. Our whole team is invited to offer input on all aspects of the process. Which is why our architect, designers, IT, general manager, and writer might all sit in on a meeting to discuss something that, on the surface, one might think should be handled by just one of the above.

As coworking has evolved, and as it continues to catch on, there sometimes arises the question of whether coworking is more about the people or the place. Those who argue that it is first and foremost about the people hold that community must be the emphasis and that these people will eventually form the space into what best suits the community. For me, it’s about both people and place. I want nothing short of inspiring when it comes to the physical space not only because I love beautiful design, but also because I believe a thoughtfully-considered environment fosters creativity and feeds productivity. I offer as example Jerome Chang’s Blankspaces in LA. Jerome is an architect and it shows.

Brown holds up Thomas Edison for examination, pointing out that he “wasn’t a narrowly specialized scientist but a broad generalist with shrewd business sense,” one who “surrounded himself with gifted tinkerers, improvisers, and experimenters.” He notes that today’s design thinking is “a lineal descendant of that tradition.”

So what is design thinking? Brown offers a number of examples of the applied process that range from a project that improved nursing shift changes in a hospital to coming up with a bicycle that appeals to non-road-warriors who prefer a fun occasional ride without all the gears and bells and whistles. In the case of the former, the team included a strategist who was once a nurse, an organizational developmental specialist, a techie, a process designer, a union rep, and members of Brown’s firm.

Together they analyzed the problem of inefficient shift changes that left nurses cranky and patients feeling neglected. In the end, they came up with a system that changed both how nurses deliver information to each other and how they record and track it. Sounds simple enough, but the change in attitude that resulted — happier nurses, more confident patients — had a tremendous impact. Now these changes are being rolled out across other hospitals run using the same system.

In the example of the bicycle Brown offers a more concrete example of what we typically think of when we think of design. To ultimately get to a well-designed, tangible result — a cool bike — designers were part of the thinking behind the process from the get-go. And rather than guess or dictate what customers might want, the team analyzed data collected from surveys. The resulting product lends itself nicely to Brown’s observation that such success is not the result of some fully formed idea that seized one genius but rather “the result of hard work augmented by a creative human-centered discovery process and followed by iterative cycles of prototyping, testing and refinement.”

Design thinking is to me — as we’ve designed software, space and graphics — finally an opportunity to do things right, to address that whole form/function balancing act. Because while some people choose to apply design at the end of a project, I think it’s equally tempting to start with design and risk getting sucked down Bells and Whistles Lane. To avoid the pitfalls of each of those scenarios, we’re using design thinking to ask not only what the space will look like, but how life will be better when one uses the space.
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And I think it’s really important to remember that every business is unique. Sure there are best practices. But turning those practices into a great experience is another level of design thinking, one that necessitates case-by-case analysis, to insure case-by-case best results. What works in Austin might not be as successful in another city.

Without design thinking, we wind up with something like Microsoft Vista — bloated, cumbersome, fatally flawed — a designed-by-committee, overly busy collage of crap. Whereas Apple’s OSX Leopard, is sleek, intuitive, beautiful and — equally important — functional and fun. Likewise, without design thinking you get HEB and Safeway, grocery stores that hardly inspire the sort of memorable experience that you want to gush about to others. But with Whole Foods, you wind up with a place that draws excited customers who know they’ll get a certain experience, a feeling, in addition to whatever products they wind up purchasing.

That sort of coveted experience isn’t a result of dumb luck. It’s a result of design thinking, a process that includes customer experience from the start, to make certain they are getting what they want and need, not merely what some bigwigs somewhere think they need.

Way back in December, before we found and happily settled in with Texas Coffee Traders as our local coffee vendor, we went out on a search. And along the way, visiting with another vendor, we had a day of coffee education. This included bean knowledge, roasting facts, latte foam art pointers, the ins and outs of cupping and, for just a moment or two…

Interaction with a Clover!

What the hell is a Clover? It’s an $11,000 coffee machine that allegedly makes the perfect cup, a feat accomplished cup by cup, bean by bean, degree by degree. Bean X, is roasted to level Y, and sent through the machine at temperature Z will make a cup totally different from the same bean, same roast level, sent through at a temperature just a few degrees different. What sounds like a new spin on six degrees of separation, a silly splitting of hairs, is actually big business to some self-appointed coffee aficionados who don’t seem to mind shelling out up to $7 per cup.

We didn’t have much time with the Clover we tried out, and none of us had an experience memorable enough to be, well, memorable.

Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, had a different experience when he tried his first cup of Clover brew. According to an article in the August issue of Wired by Mathew Honan, Schultz declared it “the best cup of brewed coffee I have ever tasted.” (Such an opening for a joke about how, clearly, he must’ve only been drinking Starbucks prior to the Clover to feel this way.)

So Schultz did what folks like Schultz and Gates and Dell can do when they find a toy they like. He bought the entire company. Yes, that’s right, Coffee Equipment Company, which introduced the Clover in 2006, is already a big sell out. And Clover designer Nander Nosler isn’t making any excuses or apologies for selling out, saying he’s fine with moving on, seeing as he’s a designer first and foremost.

The Wired article is impressive — just the fact Honan, an admitted “coffee achiever,” managed to squeeze four compelling pages out of the topic is something. And it’s pretty wild to learn about Starbucks’ plan — [they are] “willing to share custody…of the 250 machines already out there, plus maintain and repair them, but it won’t sell any more Clovers to independent cafes.” This, not surprisingly, has not set well with Clover’s early adopters.  At least one has sold his machines in protest.

SPOILER ALERT: Honan closes his piece with a stroll into a Starbucks that is equipped with a Clover. He orders a cup. He watches the barista prepare it all wrong. He tastes it and can’t differentiate it from a regular cup. And he concludes: “I finally pick it out: This coffee tastes a little bit like hype.”

I was reading Amy Sutherland’s excellent new book, What Shamu Taught Me About Life, Love, and Marriage, when I came across a tiny passage — the precise details escape me now — in which she writes about animals working together cooperatively. With my Heightened Coworking Awareness Goggles on, I made a mental note to, just for fun, take a look at coworking out there in the wild world of nature.

I recalled a story I reported, years ago, about a raptor sanctuary near San Antonio where injured birds of prey are rehabilitated and set back into the wild. It was researching this piece that netted me the experience of hunting with some raptors — I believe they were hawks. This particular type of bird came from a line of group hunters. And so they were taught not only to catch their prey, but share it. I watched as the trainer joined them on the ground, picking at a rabbit, and cut the bunny into pieces to give the birds an idea about eating together, teaching them, in essence, the importance of coworking.

So I wrote Amy a note asking her if she could shed a little light on coworking among animals, explaining to her about LaunchPad Coworking. She responded promptly not only with observations about animals working together, but also the pitfalls of isolation, which I particularly liked. Here’s what she had to say:

Well the grouper and moray eel offer an example of cross-species cooperation. Lionesses, wolves and African wild dogs all hunt together, and a fair amount of strategy goes into those hunts. So do dolphins and whales (they all blow bubbles to push a bait ball of fish up the surface). [And then there are] bees in a hive, all making honey, telling each other where to find such and such flowers (they do this with a dance).

The thing that coworking speaks to for me, is that we are social animals, and working at home in isolation goes totally against that. Zoos do whatever they can to make sure a social animal is not in an enclosure by itself. Then here we go putting ourselves in isolation. God, that’s what they do to punish prisoners.

Thanks, Amy. I hope you’ll come cowork with us next time you’re in Austin for a book reading.

Our friend and co-fan of coworking, Drew Jones of NotAnMba, travels to London often enough. He reported back, after a recent trip, that he’d visited a place called Le Bureau and that it sure was fancy. I checked out the website and sure enough, it looked mighty fancy. It also looked like, smelled like, walked and quacked like a high-end coworking place. Only I didn’t find the word coworking mentioned anywhere on the site. So I put on my Sherlock Holmes attire and sent an email of to Gemma Thomas, head of marketing for Le Bureau, to find out what’s up with the space. Here’s what she had to say.

Spike Gillespie: How long as Le Bureau been open?
Gemma Thomas: Le Bureau opened 18 months ago — we originally fitted out half of the space, which filled up fairly quickly. A freak flood set back progress slightly but we opened up the full space — with 99 desks — around six months ago.

Spike: Are you filling up?
Gemma: We are currently around 70-80% full. We are in the middle of a big marketing push at the moment and we hope to be full in the next month or so.

Spike: I notice that nowhere on the website is the word coworking. However, what you’re offering seems to mirror what some coworking spaces around the world are doing. Was it a conscious decision to not use coworking? If so, will you tell me a bit about that?
Gemma: The concept of coworking is not very familiar in the UK — until recently, smaller companies, startups, independents, freelancers, etc. would either rent out serviced office space or work from home and the local Starbucks. Our shared workspace model is a straightforward and flexible alternative. The all-inclusive rate makes life simple for everyone — there are no deposits, lengthy leases or contracts and there’s just a one-month minimum commitment. We’ve still got a lot of work to do though to let people know that we exist and some people remain put off by the still unfamiliar idea of ‘sharing’ work space or ‘coworking’. Our members seem to love it though (just take a look at our members’ area on the website — as one describes it, if you’re a small business, it’s a ‘no-brainer’).

Spike: Who has been using the space?
Gemma: Our members represent a really broad range of professional backgrounds including PR & marketing, event management, charity fundraising, video & music production, real estate, and recruitment. We also have several web-based companies, entrepreneurs and writers.

Spike: I see that clients can drop in and get started. Are there ever scheduling conflicts? How do you handle reservations?
Gemma: We rent our desk spaces on a monthly basis, which makes the booking system very straightforward — everyone has their own desk which they pay for upfront every month. When we have space, our members can rent out empty desks for colleagues or guests on a hot-desk or daily basis but otherwise we don’t do hot-desking. This also makes billing simple — we charge one rate for everyone with all the office services and facilities, meeting rooms and extras (coffee, tea, DVDs etc.) included which makes life super-easy for everyone.

Spike: How did you come up with the idea for the space?
Gemma: Peter, the guy who designed and set up Le Bureau, was renting a desk in a ‘pleasingly anachronistic’ shared office in North London a few years ago, when he realised that professional Londoners surround themselves with beautiful things; they go to beautiful restaurants, drive expensive, beautiful cars, furnish their houses with beautiful things — but when they go to work it’s a dump — ugly, soulless and unmotivational. He did lots of research on shared and coworking spaces around the world and set about creating a beautiful, motivational workspace for independent professionals and businesses.

Spike: You offer a lot of extras. I was particularly curious about the DVD Library — can clients watch DVDs there or is this just a take-away perk? How
did you come up with what to offer?
Gemma: While we’ve tried to make it as beautiful and comfortable as possible, so that people find it a pleasure to work long hours here, the idea is that people take the DVDs home with them.

Spike: Seems like you’re definitely a for-profit model. Some coworkers seem to eschew this idea and want to make their spaces about community first, with not much concern for profit. Any thoughts on this?
Gemma: As I said before, the whole ‘coworking’ ethos is not a big thing here in the UK and I’m not convinced that the majority of Londoners like the idea of lots of touchy-feely community stuff — especially if they feel it’s being imposed on them. I think some of our members would run a mile! Above all, our members are here to work hard and make their businesses work. We’ve considered putting on community-building events, lunch time seminars and the like, but we intuitively feel that our members prefer to build community in more subtle ways… and it does seem to happen naturally and work really well like that.

We’ve seen lots of collaboration going on which, in some cases is adding significant value to our members’ businesses. We’re also about to launch a Members Network to help this process along — a sort of intranet / online forum where each member will have a profile page and forums where they can share knowledge and ideas. Plus, we have a fridge stocked with beers so there are lots of impromptu drinks and little soirees that happen.

Spike: Anything else you’d like to tell me?
Gemma: We are aiming to assign a small number of desks to local young entrepreneurs who might otherwise not be able to afford an office or workspace. These young people will then benefit from all the facilities of a professional office and have the opportunity to work alongside our members, many of whom will have a ton of advice to impart about setting up and running successful businesses.

Seth Godin is a well-known marketing guru, public speaker, founder of Squidoo, author and, by his own account according to Technorati and AdAge, “writes the most popular marketing blog in the world.” Among his eleven published titles are Purple Cow, All Marketers Are Liars, and Meatball Sundae.

Godin’s got another book, Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us coming out in October and, in the interest of following his own marketing advice to “do something different” he’s come up with a rather ambitious plan. Anyone willing to pony up the dough to pre-purchase the book, sight unseen, gets free membership in a new online community he’s created called Triiibes, targeted at marketers, leaders and “those focused on building communities or creating products or spreading ideas.” With this offer he’s peddling a sense of exclusivity and elitism, though really, considering the book is less than fifteen bucks and membership goes public in October, the exclusive nature of Triiibes will be short-lived. [Update: I’m wrong — membership is closed, probably for good.]

Still, I bought the book and signed up to check out the new community. It’s kind of interesting. It’s built on the Ning platform, so the features will be familiar to most community-oriented people. You can blog and participate in forums, and of course you can post pictures and videos. There’s a job board and news — in short, there’s most of what you’d expect on a community site. Unfortunately there doesn’t seem to be a way to search by subject area (or if there is, I haven’t found it) which makes it kind of hard to find conversations.

I don’t know what to make of it yet. I’m vaguely uncomfortable with the elite thing. It is kind of nice that it seems like members are using their real names, though I’m not sure if they can verify that. But since members seem interested in connecting for business purposes, like at LinkedIn, real names seem to be the way to go. I haven’t found any gaping need that Triiibes fills.

Another community?

A bigger issue for me, as I debate the merits of being part of this “tribe,” is personal. I don’t know if I want to invest in another online community. I’m curious to see where it goes, which means I’m doing more lurking than participating, which of course means I’m not getting nearly as much out of it if I were participating more actively. If people send me messages, I answer. But I’m asking myself, At what point does your bandwidth get too thin to take on another community? Twitter, which I use all the time, has proven to be a fantastic networking and marketing tool. It’s also a huge time suck. Do I have time for another social media commitment? Then again, when entrepreneurs tell me they don’t have time for Twitter, I often respond with “you can’t afford not to.”

Before I fully commit to Tribe (or not) I need to know: What makes this community unique? We already have plenty of communities for “everyone”. The only common denominator for Triibe’s that I can see is Seth’s blog. I read his blog faithfully. I think he’s a brilliant marketer, an engaging writer, and he seems like an all around good guy. Is this enough to make a community?

Which makes me dig a little deeper and ask: How much do you have in common with a group of people before you feel you really have a community? The word “friend” is becoming meaningless thanks to places like Facebook and MySpace. Clearly, being able to connect with so many people online has a lot of benefits. But at what point do you stop joining communities and focus on a select number of individuals or groups?

I interview a lot of folks about their coworking spaces and I always ask for a description of the business model. Is the focus on profit or not? What are rates like? This past week, I came across two very opposite-ends-of-the-spectrum models, financially speaking. Monolab|Incubator is in Palo Alto, California, and charges premium rates. Big In Japan is in Dallas, Texas, and offers free space to coworkers, who must go through an application process to earn a spot.

I interviewed Ismael Chang Ghalimi, Chairman of Monolab, and CEO of Intalio to find out more about his plans for spaces around the world, which I first read about in this IT|Redux article.

Then I talked to Alexander Muse, Big In Japan’s CEO.

Monolab offers an all-inclusive package for members that start at $1500 per month. The company hopes to open spaces around the world, perhaps even offering places for coworkers to sleep when they’re on the go.

Ismael explains how he came up with his plan: “We simply looked at the market for shared office spaces. On the less expensive side, we found very cool coworking facilities such as Bureaux in Sydney, Australia, or WorkSpace in Vancouver, BC, but they’re optimized for solo entrepreneurs or part-time visitors. On the more expensive side, we were quite familiar with Regus, and did not like the small private offices and the lack of networking opportunities with local members. We wanted to build something that would be appealing to global companies, large and small, with a strong sense of cosmopolitan aesthetics, very close to what Monocle (the magazine) is developing. We accidentally found the perfect place for a demo facility in Palo Alto a couple of months ago, and the whole project came together very fast after that.”

Currently, they have one location open, which features twenty workstations which they anticipate selling out by the end of the summer (they’re halfway to the goal). The expansion is targeted at eight other locations around the globe including San Francisco, New York, Vancouver, London, Sydney, Tokyo, Shanghai, and Singapore, with San Francisco expected to open before the end of the year, and Vancouver early in 2009.

Given the services provided, Ismael considers low cost. “We charge them enough to cover our mortgage and overhead. We do not have any full-time staff on site. We do not need to make much of a profit for the business services component of the venture, and can therefore keep our prices low.”

Though he’s the chairman of Monolab, his wife runs the operation, as he’s often busy globetrotting keeping up with 50 employees and 400 customers in 45 countries. This, in fact, is what inspired him to start Monolab. He’s convinced coworking is the way work will be done in the future for any number of reasons, two big ones being that “working from home is a bad idea and sharing resources is a good idea.”

He’s also hoping to partner with other coworking facilities around the world. “Our concept is fairly high-end and all-inclusive, hence a bit too expensive for solo entrepreneurs who are bootstrapping their venture,” he says. “Whenever we come across such prospects, we’d like to forward them to a local co-working facility we trust. In return, these co-working facilities might want to work with us for accommodating the needs of larger teams, or customers requiring slightly more sophisticated equipment and services.”

Meanwhile, right up the road in Dallas, Alex Muse’s jump into coworking was born of two things. First, he met Tara Hunt and Chris Messina, dug what they were doing, and hosted the third BarCamp at Big In Japan. “I thought coworking was a way to have the BarCamp feeling all the time,” he says. “I kept trying to be a catalyst to get someone else in Dallas to do it but no one stepped up — it’s a lot of work.”

Then, a second factor prompted an opportunity for him to take on the project. His company is housed in a 1.4 million square foot building that, for a long time, was only 20% populated by humans. The rest of the space was a data center. Then the building was bought and 100% leased. That left Muse with a lease-it-or-lose-it option on a 5,000 square foot space adjacent to his office. Not needing it at the moment, but knowing his company might grow into it, Muse went for the lease. “I said I’ll rent it. Then I said, What should I do with it?”

He decided to open a coworking space, hoping to attract UI folks, designers and “anybody with a cool startup.” Initially he planned to charge a nominal rent fee but the building management wasn’t keen on subletting. “So I said I’ll just do it for free. It’s not completely altruistic — I need to keep this space. If I can create good energy around my projects, great.”

But he didn’t want just anybody to pop by. So he came up with a scholarship application program to keep from being rude. Now he’s got a few little companies using the space and they’ve got a bit of a democracy going on. When a new applicant applies for space, they all get a say in part because Muse says, “I don’t want to be that guy who says no. I want to be the good guy.”

What if he winds up needing the space? He won’t necessarily kick the coworkers out.  “It’s an experiment,” he says. “If it works out, we’ll keep going.”

Great news — Workforce Management reports that a growing number of companies are willing to foot the bill for telecommuters to work in coworking spaces. They offer the example of Chris Jurney, a senior programmer with Relic Entertainment, who left the company, and Vancouver, to move to Philadelphia.

Jurney found other work but it wasn’t long before Relic asked him back, offering him the chance to work long distance. He jumped on it, but found working at home too isolating. He hooked up with the good folks at Independents Hall, where he was much happier. Knowing that happy can mean more productive and that programmers of Jurney’s caliber aren’t a dime a dozen, Relic agreed to pay $275 a month for him to remain ensconced among other creative folks.

Now that’s working smarter. Here’s hoping this will grow into a bona fide trend with more employers coming to understand that when you offer your workers options like telecommuting, and then support them in working in supportive environs, it’s good for all involved.

I just love what Tim and Karrie League have done for Austin. Though it wasn’t that long ago that they opened their first Alamo Drafthouse, the place (and it’s subsequent sister locations) have had such an impact that already the Alamo is an institution, a must-do for locals as well as visitors to the city, as if it’s been around since the original Alamo.

The Leagues took a great idea — combining food and movies on a big screen — and made it better. Not only can moviegoers order a meal and drinks right from their seats, they can also count on a lot of very fun shenanigans. Besides showing first run flicks, the Alamo also offers obscure, amazing old movie clips during previews. And they also host a slew of theme nights: sing-a-longs for attendees who want to belt out tunes with the actors onscreen; “classic” schlock that hurtles us back to the good old days of bad hair and high-waisted jeans; and even movies with live music accompaniment and hilarious commentary provided by local musicians and comedians.

I also love their determination. I’ve interviewed them a couple of times over the years for different publications. They did not arrive here with piles of gold ready to go skipping down easy street. They couch-surfed for their first year and lived on just about nothing as they worked to turn their dream into a reality. Then, they grew the business, decided they didn’t like where it was going, and reined it in. So they are officially the Founders of the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, and specifically the owners of the Alamos in Austin (but not owners of the other locations).

I wanted to do this interview not just to find out the secrets of their business success, but to find out about how they managed to fit into Austin so well. Like us, they took an existing model and turned it into something uniquely their own. Karrie answered my questions via email.

Spike Gillespie: When you and Tim came to Austin, was it because you knew your idea for the Alamo would work here?
Karrie League: We hoped so. We were coming off of a failed theater in Bakersfield, CA, and were unable to implement the idea of the food and drink service to turn things around there because we couldn’t get a liquor license. When we decided to try again elsewhere, we chose Austin as
the best location we could think of.

Spike: You really lived on air and water that first year, couch-surfing. Tell me about it.
Karrie: Our personal expenses totaled $5000 that year. We imposed on Tim’s cousin for about 6 months, and on Tim’s college roommate for another 6 months and we ate ramen and bologna sandwiches the whole time. We even got our bread at the Mrs. Baird’s thrift shop to save money. We liked to go to Central Market for samples, and when we had a splurge day, we would buy fruit. One time we met a group of college friends for dinner, and split a single taco from the a la carte menu. We could see everyone look at each other, trying unsuccessfully to hide how appalled they were.

Spike: During the lean days, did you make a deal with each other — like “If this doesn’t work, we cut bait?” Or did you just tell yourselves, “This is going to work,” and that was the end of it?
Karrie: We borrowed most of the money for the construction from my parents. They took out a mortgage on their house to give it to us, and we knew that if it didn’t work we would have to go and get real jobs to pay them back. Beyond that knowledge at the back of our minds, we didn’t let ourselves think that it wasn’t going to work.

Spike: How long have you been around now? Seems like forever, by which I mean if I were to ask someone to tick off ten unique Austin things to-do, you guys would make the list without a doubt. Have you always had a very clear vision of how to make/keep the business “very Austin”?
Karrie: We’ve been around since May of 1997, so 11 years now. I don’t think it was so much that we were trying to keep the business “very Austin” as much as that what we wanted to do matched the Austin vibe. I think that’s why we chose Austin in the first place.

Spike: Y’all branched out then pulled back in with the business. This makes me want to ask a “lessons learned” question. I mean, it doesn’t have to be that particular lesson, but what are one or two big things you’ve learned over the years?
Karrie: From the first failed business, we learned that sometimes failure is the best thing that can happen to you. If we had succeeded, we wouldn’t be in Austin now, and I know for a fact that the success wouldn’t be anywhere near as sweet as it is here.

From the aborted expansion, we learned that we should move at a pace that is comfortable to us and not allow outside pressure to influence our decisions. There was a lot of pressure from a lot of different sources telling us “grow or die.” We believed it, and we shouldn’t have.

Spike: Regrets?
Karrie: Not really. That episode was (and still is a little) painful, but it pushed us into a different direction that we’re happy with. That’s not to say that we wouldn’t be happy if we hadn’t made that misstep, and we wouldn’t be plagued with the problems that continue to follow it, but that’s theoretical, and in reality we’re happy where we are.

Spike: Greatest triumphs?
Karrie: There have been so many!  Every time we pull off a new event we give each other high-fives and it continues to amaze us, given how much we fly by the seat of our pants, that the events come out well. That’s all due to Tim, who works best under an extreme amount of pressure.

Spike: You’re a success now, tell me about that a little bit — when did you know you were really on solid business ground?
Karrie: It happened amazingly fast. The first month we were biting our nails, but once it caught on in the second month, we knew we were safe. That’s not to say that there aren’t always slumps and fears from time to time, but we’ve tried to change to meet these.

Dusty Reagan founded Austin’s Jelly community in 2007. Last month, he and three partners opened Conjuctured, a coworking space in Austin that so far has seen members coming from across many disciplines including: developers, writers, social media consultants, and designers. LaunchPad Coworking is a big fan of Dusty and all the work he’s done to shine a light on coworking in general, and specifically here in Austin. He was a great resource at the recent Innovation Camp. Conjunctured is hosting and all-day Jelly meet-up on August 19th. I caught up with him to ask about the new endeavor.

Spike Gillespie: Your involvement with coworking began with Jelly, right? How did you hear about Jelly, what prompted you to get involved with it, and how did
that work out for you?
Dusty Reagan: I found out about Coworking through an article on Freelance Switch about Independents Hall, a coworking space in Philadelphia. I had been freelancing for about seven months and when I read that coworking article I realized I wanted coworking in Austin immediately.

I started reading everything I could find on coworking and through that process I learned about Jelly. Jelly was a way for me to start coworking and building a community immediately. It requires no funding, no lease, no amenities, just the desire to meet other independents. Jelly in Austin has been extremely successful. We meet every Friday at Cafe Caffeine and have anywhere from 10-30 people per week. Occasionally we even have people hosting Jelly in other parts of Austin. I’ve met tons of interesting people and made some great friends as a result of starting the event in Austin.

Spike: Tell me about Conjunctured — how did it come to happen? Is it a business you own (i.e. Is your name on the lease?)
Dusty: Conjunctured’s model, what we’ve coined as a co-company, was conceived by Cesar Torres, David Walker, John Metcalf, Matt Revelle, and me during an early Austin Jelly. We were pondering the idea of an agency model that shares the culture of an open source development team, and is built on top of a coworking space. Six months later Conjunctured was born. Conjunctured, LLC is co-owned by Cesar, David, John, and me. Our names are on the lease. :)

Spike: What’s your model?
Dusty: Our model is based on monthly memberships and daily walk-ins. We try to provide coworking at the lowest cost possible while making our profits from agency work and special events held in the coworking space. Our coworking rates range from $425 for full-time access to $25 for the day.

We aim to use our brand to attract agency projects that our members can benefit from. The idea is that as a project comes in the door, we can dynamically create a team of independents who opt in to the gig. When the project is over our team disperses until the next project. This will provide a means of income and a small amount of security for our members in order to help them continue working on their passion projects. Further, we hope that this arrangement will provide our agency clients with work developed from some of the most creative and passionate people in their field.

Spike: Tell me about your space — how did you find it, how big is it, how did you furnish it?
Dusty: Conjunctured is located in a historic house built in 1918 on 1309 E. 7th St. We found the space with the help of Jesse Lunsford, a commercial tenant agent recommend to us by Julie Gomoll of Launchpad Coworking. The house is just over 1,500 square feet, with a kitchenette, large front porch, small front yard, parking lot for 6-8 cars in the back, and five rooms dedicated to different aspects of work.

We were able to get in the space and furnish it through the help of our friends, family and early adopters. They were willing to put up a few months membership to help us get going. They also helped us by donating furniture, with labor, and making small investments in our endeavor. There’s no way we could have done it without our members, family, and friends. Thanks everyone!

Spike: When did you open and so far how’s it going — are you filling up?
Dusty: We opened our doors on July 1st for a “soft launch.” During our soft launch we worked on gathering furniture and making improvements to the space such as painting. We also had several early adopter members and visitors. August 4th was our 1st official day. We still have plenty of room, so please come by and see us!

Spike: Launchpad Coworking will be opening soon, which means there will be two official coworking spaces in Austin. What do you think about that? How is Conjunctured different from LPC? Is there room for overlap/cooperation?
Dusty: We’re huge fans of Launchpad Coworking here at Conjunctured. Julie and Launchpad were incredibly supportive of our efforts to start Conjunctured. There are many great opportunities for cooperation and cross promotions. Plus we’re eagerly looking forward to seeing Launchpad’s beautiful plans become a reality.

Conjunctured’s market and profit model are quite a bit different from Launchpad’s. We’re looking to attract entrepreneurs, inventors, creatives, and independents in an effort to catalyze innovation and small business. We consider ourselves as an incubator for independents creating a start-up or growing into small business.

Spike: Besides running the space, what do you do for work? Do you think that eventually running the space will interfere/replace the other work you do?
Dusty: I’m a freelance web developer. Running Conjunctured has been extremely time intensive, even with four partners we’re stretched pretty thin. We consider and treat Conjunctured as a typical business start-up and as such we expect the hard work and risks involved. I consider running Conjunctured as my full time job these days. My lovely wife has been incredibly supportive!

Photos by Michael Brown, Michael Cummings and Dusty Reagan

A couple of weeks ago I was interviewed by Douglas Kennedy for Fox National News. Finally, I have a clip. Not only does LaunchPad Coworking get some nice air time, Indy Hall, Citizen Space, and Blankspaces are also mentioned :)