Episode #24: The new 37signals office (listen)

Matt Linderman: Hello and welcome to the 37signals Podcast. This is Matt Linderman. Today we're going to be talking with Jason and David about the new 37signals office space. If you want to go to 37signals.com/podcast you can see some links that will show you the actual space so you have a visual of it too. I started off by asking Jason, now that the Chicago team has been working in that space for a few months, how he likes it.

Jason Fried: I like it a lot. I think it's one of those things where you come with an idea and you look at blueprints and you hire an architect and you work through it and you see it being built and you're like, "Man, if we made the wrong decision, we've got to kind of live with this." So you have a vision for what something should be and then, often times, in the physical world especially when you actually see the real thing, it's like, "Ew, that's not quite what I thought it would be." But this place, I think, on balance turned out exceptionally well, all things considered.

We never really had our own space before. We were making a lot of guesses about what we thought we needed. Right now, we're sitting in this room which is pretty much like a 99 percent soundproof room called The Podcast Room and we're doing a podcast with you right now and it's nice to have a room like this. We haven't used it a whole lot, but it's nice to have it.

It's nice to have these team rooms that we have where people can go and work together on projects. Those have been really, really successful. It's nice to have a conference room that's away from everything else so we can have a little bit more of a private conference area to talk to people.

It's nice to have a lot of space between each desk so people actually have room to breathe and they're not cluttered. It's great to have a really nice kitchen and a theater and all these things actually seem to have panned out quite well. In fact, more people are coming into the office than they used to before. So, I think that's another sign that things are working out really well here.

David Heinemeier Hansson: I think one of the interesting things here too is that we didn't need the office. If we had not had the office for another two years, 37signals would have gone on just like it would have before. But, it feels good to spend on some luxury when you've earned it. It feels like we spent a good, what, four years at the old office where we were totally crammed and we had too few desks and we were on top of each other and so forth. But yet, we worked through it. We grew the company. We built the business and all this stuff and now we're at a point where things are going well. When things are going well, at that point, it feels so much sweeter to me to say, "Alright. We've earned it."

That's really where I feel the difference too, versus just starting out: "Let's start a new company. We don't have anything going on yet. We're still building the product, but let's have all the most awesome things we could ever imagine right now."

I don't think that that's really - it doesn't feel right somehow. I can't put my finger on it exactly, but it just feels wrong. If you don't yet have something of value that you're indulging in all this luxury, it just feels like borrowed money, borrowed time, kind of thing. That we don't have that feeling at all here is really satisfying.

Matt: What was it like being on the client side of a client/architect relationship and trying to communicate to someone else what you wanted done?

Jason: It's always a good activity to be a client, I think, or to be a customer because it just reminds you that sometimes you're like, "God, why can't this customer make that decision?" or whatever. When you realize that when you're on the other side of it it's actually quite hard, because a lot of these decisions are permanent and they're expensive and you want to think about them and you're nervous about them and all that stuff. But, the architects and the general contractor and the craftsmen and everyone who worked on the project was top notch and they made it, ultimately, very easy. I was here probably about 50 percent of the construction time just to kind of keep an eye on things. I didn't really need to, but I wanted to be and you do spot things that aren't really going the way you thought they might and then you can change things in real time if you're there. It's a lot cheaper to do it then than it is to do it later. So, that was sort of fun to be part of that.

I'm really happy about the whole experience. I don't regret anything that we've done here and it was quite fun to be part of it.

Matt: What do you think the architect would say about us as a client?

Jason: I think, ultimately, we were probably a pretty good client, but I think we can be pretty picky. One of the things I butted heads with them about here and there was just simply utility, like what's worth spending time on, what's worth paying attention to? Sometimes an architect can get a little bit carried away about an architectural idea, that's cool, but isn't functional. That could come down to a desk - like our desks, originally, didn't have drawers. There was going to be a little rolling pedestal underneath everyone's desk that people could roll into place and stuff and I'm just like... It looked cool, but once you sort of roll it into place once, it's never going to be moved again. And a drawer, why not just make it a drawer, everyone knows how to use a drawer.

So, we kind of had a battle about that, but ultimately the drawer won and I'm happy that we have drawers on our desks now. So, it was like the purity of the desk was a drawer-less desk was more pure and more architecturally interesting. I don't want to say anything bad about that experience because I know where that comes from.

In our designs sometimes, we're like, "this is the right way to design something, it looks great this way," but it may not be the most functional way.

So, it's just a matter of give and take, back and forth, and battling over the things that you really believe in. All things considered, I think that both sides would feel pretty comfortable saying that it was a good experience for everybody involved.

Matt: The space also uses a lot of unique materials; like there's cork and felt on the walls, there's unique kinds of wood, like lacewood being used, there's stainless steel and magnetic chalk boards. So, I asked Jason about this choice of materials, why did we choose them?

Jason: One of the things I told them early on was that, if we're going to have a modern space, this is in a concrete loft sort of space, all white ceilings, originally white walls - well, actually, the walls are still white - and a white floor, and it was just a modern space. A lot of times, modern spaces can get kind of cold, with just a lot of white and glass and blonde woods and stuff. And so, I wanted to make sure there was a lot of different textures and richer colors so it just felt a little bit warmer. And also the materials should feel a little bit warmer. So, there's a lot of felt in the space, which is warm and fuzzy for real, which was nice.

And also we had a lot to do with sound. So, the whole thing is we want to keep the office as quiet as possible in the open areas. So, a lot of the materials we chose, and a lot of the ways the materials are fabricated had to do with acoustic properties - deflecting sound, or absorbing sound, or something like that.

And we just wanted to be surrounded by high quality stuff, because I believe that the things that you work around, the environment that you're in, have a lot to do with the work that you do. And if you can be influenced by things that you know somebody spent a lot of time on, and is something that was carefully considered, and it's just the right material for the job, hopefully that will rub off on you when you build something and you design something, that you think about the same types of things. So, the office, in many ways, is supposed to be an inspiration for us to build better stuff.

As far as the materials go, though, there's chalkboard material everywhere, so a lot of the walls are metallic chalkboard. I don't like whiteboards, so we went with the chalkboards. We have a lot of acoustical tiles on some of the walls to absorb sound. Some carpet in the work areas, wood floors in the common areas, like the hallway and the kitchen. Felt, glass, wood, nice rich woods that are real woods, no plastic woods, you know, nice woods.

David: Cork.

Jason: Oh, cork. Yeah, cork. We used a lot of cork in the team rooms, so you can tack stuff up on the walls, but also it's acoustical. And it's stacked, so it comes out at different - like a rock quarry - sort of comes out at different levels, at different spots, which helps to reflect sound, and keep sound in the right areas. The glass we chose is real thick glass, it's half-inch glass, which is expensive and acoustical, but it was the right thing to do. We just kind of picked the things that made sense to us, and I think, overall, we're pretty happy. I mean, I generally don't like carpet, but I think it was the right choice for most of the work areas, because it's better for sound, and it warms up the space.

Matt: 37signals has a ten year lease on the space, with an option to get out after seven years. I talked to David about how you project for how much room you need for an office, say, years down the road. Clearly you don't want to be fenced in with not enough room after just three years, but, at the same time, you don't want to get a cavernous space that's going to be mostly empty. Here's what David had to say about that.

David: I don't think there is a good, easy way of balancing it. What we can just do is we can look out a couple of years and think, "What do we feel like? Do we feel like this is going to be a 100 person company in three years?" If it was, then this space would not have been a good fit. We would have out-grown this space too fast. But, when we look at the kind of company that we want to run, it's not 100 people. So, what is it? Is it more like 50, or 40, or...? Whatever that number is, it's probably a manageable number.

We're already hiring... at least half of the people we're hiring are not in Chicago. So, even the few times a year when we bring everybody in, I mean, maybe it would get a little more crammed if we were 30. It will work for 30?

Jason: Mm-hmm. Sure.

David: It could totally work for forty.

Jason: For sure.

David: So, that seems like enough of a headroom. We can't predict, "How many people are we going to be in 2016?"

Jason: Right.

David: It would be futile to try to map that, "Oh, the growth is two to three people per year, blah-blah-blah." No. This is what it is. To get this kind of space, you have to sign it for 10 years. We don't know exactly how many people we're going to be at the end. This feels just about right. You can waste endless amounts of time trying to get the capacity planning perfect, but it seems like that would just be a waste.

Matt: And that will wrap it up for this episode of the 37signals Podcast. Again, you can go to 37signals.com/podcast to see related links to this episode. We've got links to see pictures of the office, there's also a guided walkthrough of the space from the architect, that's neat to watch. You can also find transcripts and previous episodes there, too. Thank you very much for listening.

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