by dSebastien
0 subcomment
- Most people also miss a fourth place: https://www.dsebastien.net/you-need-a-fourth-place-a-place-t...
- 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
- I'd be interested to see an update to this study in the coming years. Starbucks has been pivoting towards take out and mobile orders and removing tables and chairs entirely from some of its stores lately.
by postexitus
2 subcomments
- Turkish Starbucks and its local equivalents are usually open until 2am. Don't have an idea on the impact on entrepreneurship though.
- I’m pretty sure I would move to a city anywhere in the world based primarily on the availability of high quality 24 hour third places.
by hiAndrewQuinn
5 subcomments
- 1. This is actually a really cool idea for a website. Is this powered by NotebookLM or some such?
2. Coffee shops are probably my favorite Third Place in general. Here in northern Europe, I've heard of some attempts at Costco-like coffee shops where you pay a yearly membership fee, somewhere between $50-100, for the ability to purchase coffee from there, but the coffee itself is quite cheap. You can usually bring some number of friends or colleagues as well. I'd really like to see this model take off, if they can solve some of the adversarial concerns with it (e.g. it probably shouldn't become a replacement for a full time office, but regular 2-3 hour work sessions seem ideal).
- I really can't imagine how it could probably ever work. So one goes into Starbucks and start bugging other random people sitting there (with whatever topic, not just pushing their "elevator pitch" onto them)? If that happened people will start avoiding them just like they avoid places frequented by bums or beggars. No one wants that. People won't go where it is possible.
- Or, the kind of people who are likely to create startups are drawn to cities that are big on coffee shop culture.
As usual the direction of causation is a bit difficult to tease out
by mystraline
2 subcomments
- At least in the US, SBUX was the primary 3rd place until they decided to remove themselves in lieu of drivethru and mobile orders... And removing chairs and tables.
To be fair, a proper 3rd place really can't be a company proper, since there's always the pressure of 'buy or leave'.
Even malls aren't sufficient, since many of them are incredibly hostile to under-18. I instead look at public libraries as the gold standard here.
It makes much more sense for cities to run the actual 3rd place, and businesses rent around the 3rd place. That way, coffee shops, restaurants, and the like can comingle as can the people.
Outside the USA, we see more of that in various areas. But folks here would likely howl socialism with a 3rd place run by the city. One can wish for better community, but alas.
- Twenty five years ago, when I did Econ 101 I had it explained to me the theoretical underpinning for the fact that coffee shop chains are impossible
Does Starbucks even exist?
by bravesoul2
1 subcomments
- In SF? Not anywhere I've been though. Cafes I see are full of friends catching up, families or caffeine addicts.
by phendrenad2
0 subcomment
- Third places still exist, and if you go find them, you'll notice something: Most of the best ones aren't places of commerce. Not coffee shops, but clubs, churches, nonprofits, public parks, universities, apartment courtyards, volunteer fire departments, etc. I think that our modern society, based around cutthroat capitalist optimization where any "third space" is a lost opportunity to extract money from "consumers", is so far from the possibility of true "third spaces" that we can't even reason about them properly, no, not even the people who ostensibly study them academically.
- > First, we compare census tracts that
received a Starbucks to census tracts that expected a Starbucks but did not ultimately get one due
to administrative issues such as city planning, zoning board rejection, architectural board
rejection, or community mobilization. These ‘rejected’ Starbucks are a natural control group
because Starbucks Corporation also sought to invest in those neighborhoods.
This is a terrible control group cuz it probably means that the cities that rejected starbucks have idiotic zoning and permit policies that impact entrepreneurship. Like SF, any restaurant that has over 7 locations requires special permitting and can be easily blocked.
by femiagbabiaka
1 subcomments
- Cafe hangout supremacy. The Yemeni coffee shops show the ideal model imo. Open late, lots of seating.
by bluehatbrit
1 subcomments
- On the website / app this is using - it looks like a nice approach to consuming these papers, but I really wish they'd also provide the link to the original source paper. In an age where you can't trust anything anymore, being able to jump to the source material is really important.
Edit: This comment was made when the post pointed to an audio form of the main article. I'll leave it here none the less as feedback to the audio sites maker.
- Original paper link: https://www.nber.org/papers/w32604
- I am sorry, I did not follow the guidelines so link was rightly removed. Here is the audioform link: https://thetreeoflife.cc/demo
- You people already turned every coffee shop into a wework and now you want a "third space".
- They’re usually called “third spaces” not third places. Otherwise you’d confuse them with bronze medal winners.
by bdbenton5255
5 subcomments
- Like a church? A synagogue? A mosque? That fits the definition exactly. It seems like a substitute for a house of worship for people who do not believe in God.
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