Spend long enough in the presence of start-up founders and a little past their infectious enthusiasm for new ideas, you’ll find a frequently- bandied word: struggle. Struggle for affordable office space, functional infrastructure, fresh talent, clients, investments, payments... struggle, struggle, struggle. But, in true start-up spirit, there’s an innovative solution for this too. Enter the world of co-working spaces, where young entrepreneurs, freelancers and start-up teams rally together to share physical workspace, material resources, soft skills and, of course, their struggles.
Widely contagious in the West, and fairly prevalent in Delhi-NCR, Mumbai and Bangalore, co-working spaces are now quietly mushrooming across Chennai, in avatars both commercial and charitable. “Chennai isn’t perceived as a start-up hub for India, but nearly 600 start-ups open in the city every quarter, and that’s comparable to numbers in other metros. It goes unnoticed because most people work out of bedrooms, coffee shops and restaurants,” notes Vijay Anand, founder of The Startup Centre, Thiruvanmiyur, an incubator for tech start-ups, which also incorporates a co-working space. It’s precisely the challenges of Chennai’s entrepreneurship environment, though, that’s bringing start-ups together at such spaces.
The average co-working space offers users the basic amenities of a formal office, such as workstations, power backup and steady Internet, but blends it with the structural informality of a coffee shop, explains Ashwin Shankar, founder of The Works, a two-storeyed co-working centre in Nehru Nagar, OMR that he rents by the seat on daily and monthly contracts. From a table-tennis table converted into a work desk, to round tables, a conference room, formal cubicles, pantry, endless supplies of coffee and generous natural light, The Works tailor-makes its environment to suit the working styles of everyone from headphone-addicted graphic designers to eight-to-10 member start-ups in need of brainstorming space.
Besides catering well to the fluctuating team size of most young start-ups, co-working setups also tend to evolve by users’ needs. For instance, Seshu Karthick, founder of Dimensions, a mobile and website developing company, runs a space in Vadapalani exclusively for technology start-ups, where three-four teams share his 14 workstations in an environment of amicable silence. His space is also home to start-ups headquartered in cities across Tamil Nadu who desire a one-man presence in Chennai as well. Chennai’s co-working spaces thus cater largely to the shifting population of nationwide entrepreneurs who require just short-term, temporary work spots here.
Across the board, what co-working gives its practitioners is a sense of discipline and brotherhood. “It sounds silly to charge entrepreneurs, a community of people without easy access to money, for a workspace, but a little while into quitting their jobs and opening a start-up, most entrepreneurs realise that the nine-to-five has its benefits and co-working gives you back that rhythm. Also, when you’re incurring a daily cost, you tend to push yourself into generating an income from your start-up sooner,” says Vijay. For Vivek Durai, former lawyer and founder of Humble Paper, a ‘contract negotiation platform’, co-working opened him up to like-minded entrepreneurs with that familiar spirit of positivity and persistence. “Entrepreneurs are usually misfits. Put a bunch of them together and they’re bound to help each other forward,” he says.
And the wider the mix of people working together, the better, adds Vivek. While developing his technology start-up, Vivek says he was most encouraged by fellow entrepreneurs who were building a completely unrelated electric vehicle.
It is this culture of cross-pollinating ideas across spheres, and collaboration between start-ups that Ashwin says will eventually sustain co-working. The Works, hence, is now host to partnership deals for members, and events that bring together start-up founders to network as well as ideate about collective challenges. Similarly, Harris Abdulla, founder-partner of Fruit Shop on Greams Road, now runs Launchpad, a mixed-genre space for young filmmakers, artists, designers and corporate trainers to showcase and propagate their work.
Co-working also often hinges itself on hopes of mentorship from seasoned entrepreneurs. Gokul Nath Sridhar, 22, was still in college when he founded his content curation start-up Likewyse and now Tenreads, with one intern co-working at The Startup Centre. While his team has grown in numbers since and he’s migrated to his own solo space, Gokul says it was his early days of watching entrepreneurs fundraise, develop and market their products, as well as create a work-life boundary for themselves that now stands him in good stead. “I see new groups of three or four people every day convinced they’re going to change the world, which sounds irrational, right?” asks Vijay, “But co-working in Chennai will catch on in a big way soon, because when you surround yourself with irrational people, the world somehow makes more sense.”
