Last year, a friend of mine working on environmentally aware chocolate, Sweetriot, invited me to visit them at their offices. She says, “Come on over to the Starbucks on 1st and 54th where we have our offices.”
“Offices? Starbucks?” I thought, “this is peculiar!”
I got up there to find that their whole complement of 4 employees (1 CEO/founder, 3 interns) had been staking out a corner at this Starbucks for months now.

How funny to see them conducting marketing surveys with people in one corner, while others were checking email and planning at another table, and all of them had DHL envelopes propped up against their laptops because one of them had called DHL to pickup a package at this Starbucks. I’m sure the DHL guy probably did a doubletake when he showed up!
Office Away From Home
Also last year, I met up with some guys over at Blinkx and they recounted to me on how, in their travels around the U.S., that Starbucks has become their office away from home of choice. They just open up their laptops, grab a latte, set their mobile phones on the table and start working. All their calls are routed to their mobile phones so nobody even knows they aren’t in the building. Messenger is up and running as well as emails – their virtual office is complete and great coffee and eats are just a step away.
As I work on David Shen Ventures, LLC thing, I find that cafes have become my virtual office. I joke that I am in some coffee shops so much that I should post office hours on the door, ie. Dave Shen at Coupa Cafe between 1pm and 4pm – sign up for time here.
It’s actually pretty nice. There is WIFI, good ambiance, and a never ending stream of people. The best coffee shops don’t have a lot of ambient noise and just have a low level of music playing in the background. Most annoying is the shriek of the espresso machine milk frother as they heat up milk for the drinks.
But I find that being not in the same place, like an office, sparks a lot of creativity and I get a lot done by not being in the same place all the time.
It’s also a helluva lot cheaper than having a real office. Someday perhaps (sigh)….
Privacy is sometimes a bother. Trying to have a conference call or meeting about confidential stuff is tough, whether VC financing terms or new top secret product plans.
Passing the Social Test
Occasionally I bump into people I know especially in places such as Palo Alto. Socially, it’s been great – when working as a one-man show, you don’t have a big company campus to go to and interact with people. After seeing one person that I’m working for now, he remarked to me that I had passed the Guy Kawasaki’s Stanford Mall test:
How to determine whether or not you should work with a given VC – If you see your VC across the plaza in the Stanford Shopping Mall, you have three choices.
1. Go over and say hello.
2. Say hello if he or she notices you.
3. Avoid him or her at all costs.
Kawasaki recommends to only work with a VC that you would choose option 1 for.
It’s nice to know that this applies to cafes as well…! Well, I’m not really a VC either….
Postscript
Hanging out in cafes means you probably are drinking way too much coffee. I started getting into 4-5 cups a day. Way too much and ruins my pearly white smile. Next drink of choice: Pelligrino or equivalent with lemon or lime, or Green Tea sweetened, either cold or hot.
By the way, free WIFI sucks unless the cafe is providing it. I bought a Verizon Broadband card in case the cafe doesn’t have WIFI and that works great.
Up and coming – launch Meetro and maybe you’ll meet someone new…!

In talking to a bunch of companies and signing some up and turning some down (either by me or by them turning me down), I have determined the sweet spot for team size at which it seems to maximize my participation.
It ranges from one and maxing out around 10 or so.
Why is this so?
I find that in my areas of contribution (User experience, Product strategy, Online advertising, etc.) I can make the most impact if there is not someone there at the moment covering that area. While in my role as advisor I do not get on critical path by actually doing the work, I help give them direction on hiring, what they need to do, developing their strategy (in all those areas), and give them an expert to bounce things off of. One goal I try to set for myself in my advisor term is to find resources, internal or external, to replace whatever functions I am advising on so that by the end of the term, they have support in those areas.
I have found that if companies already have people covering that area, then my impact is much less. It also is difficult for company personnel to envision how to integrate my help as well. For example, if there is already a GUI person there, then does it justify giving me my advisor compensation to just be a evaluator of what that GUI person does? For things like GUI and product strategy, it is difficult to express your opinion AND make the team members internalize that thought enough to be able to take it further. And, if you are not an employee and not there 24/7 to drive a direction, it becomes really tough to make that direction stick when someone else is already working on it, and has their own opinion on how things should be done.
That is fine. I do not take this personally. I think that if a company already has support in that area, then that’s perfectly fine. I don’t want to get into a situation where I am constantly butting heads with already present resources.
By the time a company reaches approximately 10 people, typically many of the areas I would help on are already covered. Time to move on to the next company where I CAN make a large impact…

I consistently hear this now. Suddenly engineers, GUI folks, and online sales people are scarce.
In the last few months, many new startups emerged. I guess they snapped up all the good engineers because now it seems that everyone has moved somewhere and is planning to stay there for a while. This is why I am trying to make contacts in outsourcing overseas for engineering.
GUI people did the same thing and switched jobs, although most of the ones I’ve heard of went to larger companies. In my experience, GUI people tend to be more conservative. Not sure why. I haven’t seen many take the chance of joining an early stage startup. Many startups have told me stories of failed attempts at hiring a GUI resource on staff. They turned out to be not that good, not experienced enough, or just out of school. I had to go create my own list of GUI design shops and resources, and keep track of everyone who is consulting.
The real scarce resource is online sales folks. The really good ones are truly hard to find. I feel fortunate that I got to know a ton of them at the best training ground for that: Yahoo!. Many of them have moved on, but mostly to higher positions/pay elsewhere. Here’s the kicker: to lure them away sometimes requires a lot of tinkering with compensation. For early stage companies, that’s really tough because they don’t have a lot of cash. I am now trying to see if some of the few out there are willing to consult. Some of them are actually thinking about it thankfully. About every early stage company that is thinking of selling advertising has no experience in this area and certainly no contacts at all. It’s one of the most valuable things that I can do is connect them to a truly good online sales person.
Time to get creative in finding ways of solving this personnel dilemma….