Third places and neighborhood entrepreneurship (2024)

i remember koramangala, 5th block specifically, mid 2023. that blue tokai outlet next to roastery was ground zero. half of early stage bangalore was working from there. two pm to six pm you'd overhear: investor calls, pitch deck review, even product teardown with some YC alum. no seats inside so i parked at the outside bench near the window. wifi barely reached there. next to me this guy's debugging something on a steamdeck looking devkit. i half glance over and ask if it's AWS creds, he goes 'nah, it's some edge TPU , google keeps timing out cold starts'. we start chatting.

turns out he's building vision for offline-first retail. he's got no frontend, just a python backend. i scribble something on a napkin about fast-booting wasm modules from disk cache. 3 weeks later he pings me on telegram saying they got boot time down from 14s to 2.8s using a variant of that.

never met him again. never even learned his startup's name. but that entire bottleneck cleared because two people overheard a swear word near a bad socket.

we maynot recreate that on a discord channel. there's no incentive to overshare when you're not spatially co-located. bangalore 2023 worked because entropy was high and friction was low

> because two people overheard a swear word near a bad socket.

There's also an undesirable side to coworking cafe low-OPSEC.

Funny anecdote about that...

I was meeting up with a startups friend, at one of the cafes that's popular for techbros.

Before we met up, friend mentioned this guy from the startups scene, who sometimes lurks at that cafe, to steal ideas.

So friend and I are talking at the cafe about an application domain we both know. And how we're surprised no one is doing X for it, because then you could do A, B, C, etc.

I look over, and some guy has moved from his table, to sit on the floor, close to us, and just has a cat-that-got-the-canary beaming look on his face. Yes, it was the noted lurker-stealer guy.

Shortly after, an organization he's affiliated with announced a big initiative/group to do X for that application domain. Maybe just a funny coincidence.

Is the problem solved then? Is he making bank?

Ideas are useless without execution

Agreed about the importance of execution.

The anecdote is a funny way to raise awareness about OPSEC.

There's reasons that most companies don't air all their internal discussions and work publicly.

In a cafe, it can be easy to forget that.

And there really are people who actively exploit that.