I came across coworking on a magazine article. Call it coincidence or what you will, it set me off thinking and like a few other ventures I am grinding out, decided to start this one too. As for me, I am Venkat (when-cat) and I co-founded and now run an outsourcing services (oh, what else) start-up with a small-ish functional office in India and operations/ virtual offices in Norway, Sweden, the UK, and Colombia. If you found us interesting this far, look us up on www.outsmart360.com. Working on a few others too.
Funding is hard to come by in India, and like the rest of the world - money talks. And real estate has gone through the roof. After working through two apartments (in two different cities with three other nationalities for colleagues!), a highly expensive, yet very functional business centre (like a regus), I finally managed to set up an office. This is a 30 seater, but I only have 10 people on board now, so I figured why not let other people who want to start-up or are free-lancing step on board and have access to real infrastructure for as less as maybe 50$ a month? Yeah, thats how low I would love to go, lets see if my accountant allows it ;) Sounds killer though.
I decided to name this "movement" around here OpenCommune - and I would love other people around here in India to join me as well as part of a community effort to create similar workspaces in their start-up offices (www.opencommune.com the website/blog is going to be up soon - its up!). So since I have the space and the infrastructure, I should just start going about getting it a bit conducive for people to use (but heck, we already have wireless, beanbags/chairs, functional tables, a lounge with coffee and green tea + snacks, a mega sized white board, a nice little loo like the one you find around the local pub - but doesn't stink as much gets cleaned everyday, satellite radio, air conditioning, and 24/7 security and access...and yeah - lots of grafitti on the walls done by the creative cooks who work with me). And yeah, we are in a cluster CBD too.
I am really kicked about starting this initiative out here in Bangalore/India! If there's anyone from India or Bangalore reading this, you are welcome to contact me at venkat dot ramana at gmail dot com for any thoughts you might about coworking locally or if you would like to cowork yourself.
If any of you are visiting, you are welcome to drop in for the day (free drop ins ;)! Watch this space for more updates!