Cultivating a state of mind where new ideas are born

The Knight: As you know, I am afraid of emptiness, desolation and stillness. I cannot bear the silence and isolation.

Death: Emptiness is a mirror turned to your own face. 

— Ingmar Bergman’s workbook, April 5, 1955

In the early 2010s, a popular idea was to provide coworking spaces and shared living to people who were building startups. That way the founders would have a thriving social scene of peers to percolate ideas with as they figured out how to build and scale a venture. This was attempted thousands of times by different startup incubators. There are no famous success stories.

In 2015, Sam Altman, who was at the time the president of Y Combinator, a startup accelerator that has helped scale startups collectively worth $600 billion, tweeted in reaction that “not [providing coworking spaces] is part of what makes YC work.” Later, in a 2019 interview with Tyler Cowen, Altman was asked to explain why.

Συνέχεια εδώ