Thanks to my Austin HerDomain contacts for putting me in touch with this YouTube paean to the niceties shops like Firecat Studio care about.
There are more from the same guy on YouTube. He knows his stuff!
The Firecat First Friday session for May happens on Friday, May 2. The coworking session is open to all in open house format all day, to do whatever you would normally work on, just in a fresh environment. So free yourself from your cubicle, office, home office or coffee shop and get a dose of new ideas and new faces while getting some work done.
At 11:30, we start the brown-bag session. with a topic agreed on and published in advance. This is a loose, show-and-tell type format. Bring something you want to share or just come to watch and listen to others who are passionate and knowledgable about the topic.
It's hard being an entrepreneur and a parent. I'm very interested in how parents (especially women, and especially those with young children) solve the childcare dilemma while staying independent. I think our culture does a fairly lousy job of supporting new parents.
When my son was born, I planned for him to stay quietly at my feet in a Moses basket while I conducted business at home. That didn't work out.
So I left my stable, profitable agency business for a corporate gig when my son was a few months old and went to work full-time for my largest client. That move turned out well for all of us; it provided me a support structure when I needed one, and I went back to my entrepreneurial ways when my son entered school.
Menlo Park-based coworking spot Cubes & Crayons attempts to span that gap for parents. The space combines coworking and a sort of drop-in daycare model.
When I was in Austin, we toyed with creating a co-op daycare in our office space. It looked expensive and time-consuming, and we worried we would sink our fledgling businesses; it's hard enough to start up one business, never mind two. We worried about the proximity of the kids to us, and us to them -- that the distraction factor would be too much.
But marrying the coworking model with a drop-in daycare model -- that sounds very promising. I hope it takes off big.
Coworking isn't a one-size-fits-all thing; there is room for coworking spaces to meet different needs, reflect different philosophies. The LaunchPad Coworking space in Austin (scheduled to open in July) will allow children in their cafe area, but not the workspace, for example. Many spaces focus on specific types of freelancers, such as web developers and designers. Coworking spaces can reflect the special interests of any group.
Offering a solution to the childcare dilemma could definitely help a coworking space fly. San Antonio is very family-centric, and it strikes me as a place that could support this type of model easily. What do you think?
At the Firecat First Friday discussion today we went all the way there in our discussions. This is exactly the ground that I hoped to cover, the big-picture, central issue, how we should live our lives ground.
Alan Weinkrantz mentioned his passion for setting up clients with an "ecosystem" for PR - that syncs in very nicely with our philosophy. We like setting clients up with a sustainable ecosystem for content, or services, or relationships with clients | employees| stakeholders. We talked about having clients come to us and saying things like "We need a blog," or "We need a Flash site," and walking them through their underlying motivations and ideas and goals.
Meeting others in San Antonio's "creative class"
Getting support for an entrepreneurial approach, whether you work for yourself, a small or large organization.
So put May 2 into your calendars now.