entrepreneurship

Locus Member: Gerardo Robledillo

Community Manager entrepreneurship, Locus Workspace, members, profile, sharing economy , ,

Name: Gerardo Robledillo
Hometown: Madrid, Spain
Occupation: Web Developer, Website Owner of International Schools Database and Expatistan.com

Gerardo is the owner and founder of International Schools Database, a website that helps relocating families find the right English-language schools for  their children, and Expatistan.com, a crowdsourced price comparison website that provides current information about the cost of living to both companies and the employees that they relocate.

“Expatistan is a cost of living calculator that allows you to compare the cost of living between cities around the world. The comparisons allow you to get a better understanding of the cost of living of any city before you move there” (Expatistan.com). 

This database is compiled from information received from it’s users. The more data is entered, the more accurate and reliable the information is. Gerardo’s website is a unique and useful tool that arguably outperforms the best cost-of-living indexes otherwise available.

Gerardo Robledillo

Why did you choose to make your own website?

“At one point, I was moving a lot in a very short period of time, and I was working for other companies. They would offer me a salary, but I wouldn’t know if that was enough to sustain me in that city. There was nothing that was reliable for me to find online, so I built it myself.”

What is your favorite part about working for yourself?

“Freedom. I have much more freedom. Freedom of working when and where you want.”

What brought you to Prague?

“I started working in Madrid right after university, but I was looking to go abroad. I have always traveled, but I have never lived abroad for a long time. I wanted something different and interesting, but not too different. Central and Eastern Europe was distant enough, yet close enough to home. The first offer I accepted was in Prague, and I loved the city so I remained here. I was briefly in Frankfurt, then I moved to Barcelona, and then I came back.”

How did you get into coworking?

“After two months of working at home it didn’t work as well [as I wanted]. I tried the library and cafes but it didn’t work that well either. I started sharing an office with a friend for a while, but it didn’t work. Then I found the concept of coworking, and it was the perfect balance: really nice office, interesting people, social benefits of an office without working at a big company, and freedom.”

How did you find Locus Workspace?

“I was looking for different coworking spaces and I tried locus because it was very close to my place. Will gave me the tour and I tried it, and it was perfect, so I stopped looking.”

What is your favorite part of the city?

“Vinohrady.”

What is one interesting fact about you?

“I love planes and flying.”

Interested in finding out how much it would cost to live somewhere else? Check out Gerardo’s website here.

If you would like to be featured on a Locus Workspace Member Monday in the future, contact Dani Crepeau at dcrepeau@bryant.edu.

“Embarrassing confessions of a coworking space”; or “The evolution of a ‘clean your dishes’ message”

Will Bennis coworking, Locus Workspace, management , ,

Dirty dishes have a negative effect on the coworking space for all members. The vast majority of members clean their own dishes and are annoyed by those few who don’t. It’s usually just glasses and mugs and spoons: easy things to clean. Given most coworking spaces’ strong commitment to the value of community it might seem that getting members to consistently pitch in and clean their dishes would be one of the easier challenges in running a coworking space.

Not so. Dirty dishes persist. And it’s not just the case for Locus Workspace: it seems to be an acknowledged problem for coworking spaces generally, including those well-known for their strong sense of community. Nonetheless, perhaps for the reasons just noted, it is not without some sense of… embarrassment? fear? impropriety?… that coworking spaces admit the problem. And now it’s Locus’s turn to air it’s dirty laundry dishes. Or at least to talk about some of the things we’ve done to try to end our tragedy of the commons (unfortunately without the greatest record of success).

We started from day one with the “Locus Rules“. Every person who joins Locus has to read the rules and click a box indicating that they read them. The rules are short, and cleaning up after yourself, including doing your dishes, is one of the few things members commit to (just in case they thought they were renting a serviced office rather than joining a coworking space). That worked for the most part when we were a very small coworking space, probably because members are more inclined to clean up after themselves than not, regardless of the rules.

But over time as the space grew, more and more dishes seemed to pile up in and around the sink. We joked about different things that might put a stop to it. We could just put a picture of a person looking at us above the sink. That seems to work! Better yet, make the onlooker in the image of Jesus (can you tell that one of my other hats is as a moral psychologist?).

How about surveillance cameras! But Locus (or to be fair, just I) had already been the butt of some members’ parody of the “Locus Rules,” turning it from a “Community Workspace” into a “Communist Workspace”.

Maybe surveillance cameras aren’t the key to building a strong community?
Instead we went for increasing the number of days the cleaning person comes and just reminding members periodically to clean their dishes and not be jerks. The problem persisted, but until recently seemed to stay pretty stable without getting too out of hand.

But over the months and even years the dish problem has occasionally reared its ugly head. Inspired more recently by a blog post from another coworking space owner who seems to have done wonders at building a strong sense of community (hats of to Angel K., founder of Cohere in Fort Collins, Colorado), we tried blatant plagiarism.

An image from Angel’s blog post, “the most effective message to date”:

 

“If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,” right? Anyway, here was our version:

There are a lot of reasons I’m not crazy about this note. First, I’m not a big fan of plagiarism (neither is the community manager who put it up at my suggestion), despite the fact that in this context it doesn’t seem like a big deal, the original version was posted as a recommendation about what works to other coworking spaces managers, and adding a citation in this context would presumably undermine the message.
Second, it’s not the kind of language Czechs would use lightly, and Vlaďka is Czech (I remember signing a letter to a Czech back in the day when people wrote letters, “Love, Will” and being told–uncomfortably–that she didn’t know I felt that way about her). I guess Czechs have since become more familiar with English peculiarities, but the experience has stuck with me.
Third, it just doesn’t communicate how many of us feel about the dirty dishes in and around the sink. “Don’t be a jerk,” or, “We’re not your maids!” better sums it up. But I generally feel extremely lucky to have the group of members we have at Locus, so an angry sounding note that only applies to a small fraction of the members doesn’t strike the right tone either. But the “Cohere” message still felt to me like it didn’t have an authentic Locus tone.
So I was somewhat happy to see another community manager make light of the first message:
In case you can’t read it, here’s what it says:

“Washing a dish is not torture /

Unless it ends up in the mortu- /
ary.”
Still, while I like keeping things on the humorous side, the more words we use, the less likely people are to read them, and the more fun we poke, the less likely people are to take the whole thing seriously. Unsure what to do, however, I succumbed to a classic case of decision paralysis and did nothing at all.
Still, the dish problem has not improved.
Happily, I’m lucky to have another incredible community manager who has a knack for saying things directly and without pulling punches, without it being offensive. So here’s the newest version of the “do your dishes” wall of fame:

 

In case you can’t read it, here’s what it says:
“GUYS,
WE DO HAVE
DISH WASHER!!!
IF YOU DO NOT LIKE
WASHING UP YOU DO
NOT HAVE TO.
BUT! DO NOT LEAVE!
CUPS & GLASSES IN SINK.
IT TAKES 3 SEC TO
PUT IT IN DISHWASHER
& KARMA IS FOR FREE.
NO LOVE, LENKA”
Now there’s a message I can get behind. And behind that “No Love” don’t you just feel the love?!
Now what do we do about the kitchen without a dishwasher?

Meet Locus Member Bryn Perkins

Community Manager entrepreneurship, Locus Workspace, members, profile ,
Locus Workspace is pleased to welcome long-time expat Bryn Perkins as a coworker. Bryn has been living in the Czech Republic for 15 ½ years, where he has had a variety of interesting jobs. He has experience running an Internet business, managing a Prague-based hostel group, working as a management consultant, and leading an energy-saving consulting firm; he presently works in Business Intelligence for the mobile payments company Boku. Two of the most impressive contributions to the Prague cultural scene, however, were the co-founding and management of the bookstore and café Shakespeare a synové (Shakespeare and Sons) and The Prague Daily Monitor.
Shakespeare a synové started off on Krymská street in Vršovice in 2002, but now has two locations, one in Mala strana and one in Berlin. After opening, the Krymská bookstore nurtured the English writing community by hosting readings and other events in its eclectic and bohemian space, which continues to be appreciated as Café v Lese. Bryn sold his share to his partners at the end of 2003.
Bryn was also a co-founder of The Prague Daily Monitor, which he managed with editor Theo Schwinke until 2009, when it was acquired by Prague TV. It continues to be an important information source for English speakers in the Czech Republic. See: www.praguemonitor.com.

Bryn believes that truly great businesses are those that are both financially successful and positively affect all their stakeholders (including owners, employees, suppliers, customers, and the community at large). He is excited by “open-book management,” in which employees are taught how “the numbers” drive their company’s business, are updated on these numbers regularly, and share in the success they help create. Though a relatively small number of businesses are run this way, there are some impressive examples of successful businesses that have taken this approach.

Two of Bryn’s “business heroes” are Ari Weinzweig and Jack Stack. Ari Weinzweig co-founded Zingerman’s Deli in Ann Arbor, Michigan in 1982 and now is CEO and co-founder of the highly successful Zingerman’s gourmet food company, with revenues over $50 million. Jack Stack, a highly creative businessman, is the founder and CEO of SRC Holdings. He is known as “The Father of Open-Book Management,” an approach he has used to great success. His company has helped to start scores of successful businesses founded by employees who learned about business while working at his open-book companies.

Regional Accelerators and Incubators

Will Bennis Czechia, entrepreneurship, investment, Prague, sharing economy , , , , ,
Below is a list of some of the business accelerators and incubators in the Czech Republic and in nearby countries (or else ones that actively target Czech startups). This is a work in progress, so please help me keep the list current and accurate by sending me feedback or leaving comments!
The terms accelerator and incubator are sometimes used interchangeably and sometimes used differently from how I would use them, so take these classifications with a bit of skepticism. This overlap in usage and similarity in experience has me grouping the two together for this blog post.
For me here are the basic similarities and differences:

Similarities

Both accelerators and incubators provide shared work space and mentorship to startup businesses for a limited period of time (usually 3-6 months) to help startup businesses success. Both also tend to do this on a competitive basis, providing the space and support for free to the selected winners who are deemed to have the most potential.

Differences

Incubators

Incubators tend to be non-profit entities set up by regional governments, academic institutions, or other non-profit organizations with a mission to help support the startup environment. They generally have some kind of institutional support that allows them to provide the free work space and the mentorship. As such, incubators are not as firmly tied to either the limited time period or the competitive nature of acceptance. Some of them have relatively open acceptance based on university affiliation or some other general requirements, and many will not put strict limits on how long a startup can stay. Although they do not as a rule provide capital to the startups, some do, though usually without strings attached or any ownership stake in the company being incubated. Though acceptance may be in batches on a calendar schedule, it is often on a rolling basis as well.

Accelerators

Accelerators, on the other hand, tend to be for-profit entities. They provide free work space and mentorship AND INVESTMENT in exchange for a percentage of ownership in the company. For accelerators, the competitive nature of entry and the limited time period are essential features of the program. They are gambling on getting that next great startup that will compensate for the loss on most companies they accelerate. The investments tend to be small (5-25,000 USD) as does the percentage of ownereship (5-10%). Acceptance for accelerators tends to be on a set schedule, where all of the companies being accelerated will start and finish together, as would a class of students in the same cohort. Often accelerators will have stages with benchmarks, where additional help and funding will be possible as long as these benchmarks are met.
But again, this is my usage based on what I take to be the norms. I may not have it exactly right, and certainly many of the players in these industries mix the concepts as they see fit.
The list is organized geographically relative to Prague, since that’s where Locus Workspace and our members are located.

Prague

Czech Republic outside Prague

  • Help me add to this list!

CEE Region outside the Czech Republic

  • Urban Quest (added 2018.03.29), Warsaw, Poland. PropTech accelerator (Property / real-estate / space technology), sponsored by Skanska, Microsoft, and business__link.
  • hub:raum Krakow, Poland (also locations in Berlin & Tel Aviv). Has both an accelerator and an incubator program.
  • RubixLab Bratislava, Slovakia
  • CEE LiftOff Budapest, Hungary (website not working properly, may be ending)
  • PwC CEE Startup Collider Warsaw, Poland. FinTech focus. Seeking participants from all over the Central & Eastern Europe countries.

Crowdfunding Portals on the Czech Market

Will Bennis Czechia, entrepreneurship, investment, sharing economy , , , ,

Below are a few crowdfunding portals on the Czech market. I’d like to keep the list current and have some details about each, so let me know if you know of any others or have any comments about the ones in the list. Specifically it would be nice to know their pros and cons and whether they have any particular industry focus.

  • Hithit (Czech, Slovak, English; as of 3 Oct 2015 seems to be the largest and best known)
  • startovač (Czech only)
  • kreativcisobě.cz (Czech only)
  • nakopni mě (Czech only)
  • Everfund (Czech-language only; as of 3 Oct 2015, new on the market)
  • Fundlift (still not launched as of 3 Oct 2015; claims to be first EQUITY crowdfunding platform on the Czech market)

No longer operating:

  • Fondomat.cz (no longer operating; may have been the first on the Czech market)