Choosing an office location for your start-up

Paul Graham makes a great point about where to house your new start-up in this piece from 2010:

It's a smart move to put a startup in a place with restaurants and people walking around instead of in an office park, because then the people who work there want to stay there, instead of fleeing as soon as conventional working hours end. They go out for dinner together, talk about ideas, and then come back and implement them.

via Where to See Silicon Valley

Doesn't that just make you go, "D'oh! Why didn't I think of that?"

Yes and no, I guess.

If you're an ad agency or other media type in Singapore, you already do this. The whole Club Street area, for instance, if full of agency types who don't go home after work. (Whether that is an unquestionably good thing is another question entirely.)

But if you're a tech start-up located at Science Park or Block 71 or a big JTC office park somewhere, hmm, I don't know.

This clearly also has implications for policy-makers.

• "Should we spend money on a new technology park for entrepreneurs?"
• "Should we promote small offices in existing commercial areas?"
• "Do start-ups belong in universities or offices of their own?"
• "How important is non-office support infrastructure (restaurants, parks, gyms...) compared to the offices themselves?"
• "How much effort should we put into managing all this development? Should we leave it to develop organically?"
• ...and so on

This advice also depends on which country we're talking about.

In Singapore, it's certainly easier for colleagues to hang out after work at a nearby bar. In most Indian cities, going to after-work drinks itself feels like work.

There's also the small matter of cultural preferences. Whether people hang out with each other after work and where they do so depends not only on the availability of nearby restaurants or even commute times, but also on whether it's a cultural norm. The Japanese are well known to go drinking after work with co-workers even several times a week (hence, capsule hotels). In contrast, Indians, particularly ones with families, don't really have a big drinking culture but may visit colleagues at home or organise social gatherings with co-workers and their families outside the office.