One of the great advantages of working for a startup is that you can basically work from anywhere, as long as you have a laptop and access to wifi. Chances are the company is working out of a fancy tech hub somewhere in central London, with perks such as beer nights and access to an office ball pit. I have yet to find an actual adult who likes writhing around in plastic balls to aid stress, but apparently these places do exist.

When I joined SPARKL, the team was in its last few months at Cisco’s IDEALondon on the fringes of Shoreditch. IDEAL was a great place to be as someone just starting out in tech; everyone’s grooving along, working hard but enjoying the college-like experience.

After graduating from the IDEAL programme, we moved to a small office in the backend of Canary Wharf, which was ideally packed with banks to talk to but the commute was a complete faff. We also missed the general buzziness of the startup environment.

Just a couple of weeks ago the team moved into St Katharine’s Docks into an open plan office to share with Fusion Experience, another tech company. We are especially delighted by the café downstairs and the even nicer views of the Tower of London and the City just behind it.

I mean, installing an office slide would be my idea of perfection but this is London. You have to compromise on something, I suppose.

Even so, the move got me thinking about the essentials of a happy, working startup office. You need a collaborative space where people can hash out ideas without fear of disturbing anyone else; and yet you also need a quiet spot where you can stick your headphones on and get on with coding.

In other words, the startup mentality might be gradually changing from the constant chant of “code beer code beer” to something else a little more, dare I say it, people-friendly. Someone from Slack put this in a really lovely way in a recent Product Hunt Live chat:

It’s interesting to see this kind of realistic attitude coming from a company that is valued at billions of dollars. But I still want an office slide!

Image courtesy of 20th Century Fox