Silicon City by Cary McClelland

Author:Cary McClelland
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
ISBN: 9780393608809
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2018-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

SAUL GRIFFITH

He was born and raised in Australia. His mother is an artist, his father was a textile engineer, and the family home was part studio, part workshop, part family hearth. They kept a large pad of cotton paper next to the telephone. Over the course of two weeks, Saul’s mother’s drawings of cupids and Rubenesque nudes would fill up his sister’s landscapes, full of Saul’s machines and buildings, surrounded by his father’s math puzzles—layers upon layers. These notebooks captured the family in time and an alchemy that Saul would try to re-create as a husband, father, and engineer. He founded and runs a company called Otherlab, which designs moonshot technologies to protect the environment.

My wife, Arwen, and I bought this building, intending to have the research side of our business and lab always be in this neighborhood that we liked. It was cheap. And this has been an industrial neighborhood for a hundred years, manufacturing.

So we’re like, Okay. We can have machines that manufacture and do industry here. People didn’t complain, because we did the thing that was always done here.

But now the people who work from home in the live-work lofts next door complain that they can’t hear the sounds of themselves typing their 140 characters because of our machines in our industrial neighborhood. So fuck them.

If you invest, and you buy the building, and you’re all in, and you’re thinking about more than five to ten years—then you build gardens and you grow.

We put in all the plants on the sidewalk. We painted the murals on the walls. We upkeep the building as though we’re invested in it for the long term. These aren’t things that start-ups, or landlords with start-ups as tenants, give a fuck about.

I know every business owner by name in a two-block radius. So I know the people who own the art gallery across the road, the not-for-profit. I know the people at the wine bar and the guys who own the cocktail bar, and the chef who runs the two restaurants. We all talk to each other. We talk to each other about crime. We talk to each other about issues with the homeless people. That’s how you build neighborhoods, with investment.

The problem with most start-ups is that they are set on a short trajectory—they are venture-funded and a number of the companies in the portfolio need to get exits within seven to ten years. “Exits” means they need an IPO or they need to get acquired, and you need enough of those exits to make your fund profitable. So they grow, and they move to somewhere else. They aren’t really investing in the community around them because their tenancy in any building or space is one to two years.

It’s the nature of modern work. It’s inherent in the process of creating these new things that people have short tenures. These aren’t companies just turning the sausage-grinding crank. The median person works for three to four years on any one thing, then moves on.

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