Every client invoice is a small investment in our product
We've had investors since day one. They just never asked for equity. How 300 € and client invoices paid for every product we've built.
Leer más →A company isn't a place
If you took away our office tomorrow, what would be left of the company? I've been asking myself that, and the answer is less sentimental than I expected.
Nobody pays us for our office.
They pay us for things that work. The office is just where some of that work happens to sit.
That thought has been bothering me for a few weeks. Because if the people who pay us don't need the place, who is it for?
The office as a costume
We started Foxnice in 2014 with 300 € and no one else's money. No contacts. No one to ask for a loan. Having our own space felt like proof. Proof that we weren't just two guys with laptops anymore.
I think that's what an office is for a lot of small companies. A costume. You put it on so the world, and you, believe you're a real business.
The funny part is that the work never really lived there.
The websites we maintain live on servers. PagoCRM lives in the cloud. Support happens in inboxes. Since last year I've been running a good part of the company from Thailand, and the servers didn't notice which time zone I was in.
If anything, the inboxes noticed. As far as I know, clients didn't.
An office is where you sit. A company is what keeps working when you get up.
So what is a company?
I've tried to answer that without slogans. This is what I've got so far.
A company is a set of promises that someone keeps. The site stays up. The fees get collected. The email gets an answer. Where the person keeping them is sitting is a detail.
It's also judgement. Decisions about what to say yes to and, more often, what to say no to. That doesn't live in a room. It lives in two heads that have known each other for more than twenty years. Yeray's is usually the one asking the question mine skipped.
And it's trust. Clients who pay every month without needing to see where we sit. That's not loyalty to a building. It's loyalty to the fact that things work.
Put like that, the office looks less like the heart of the company and more like a very expensive coat rack.
The uncomfortable question
I'm not writing this to announce anything. I'm writing it because I've noticed I'm defending the office with feelings, not reasons.
That's usually a sign.
Every euro we spend on things clients never see is a euro that doesn't go to our products. Patient money only works if you're honest about what's structure and what's decoration. And I'm starting to suspect which of the two a rented room is.
That doesn't mean offices are useless. For some teams they're exactly right. Shared space, shared energy, a door you close at six. I get it.
But I think a small company should be able to answer one question without flinching: if this place disappeared tomorrow, what would break?
If the answer is "nothing important", the office isn't holding the company up. The company is holding the office up.
I haven't decided anything yet.
I've just stopped pretending the coat rack is the company.
P.S. To be fair to offices, they're excellent at storing boxes nobody ever opens.