I did it once, three years ago, for 10 whole days!
I was coming to Paris and knew it was going to be one of those out and about all day and half the night and with a side trip to another country kind of vacations. And it was January, which meant heavy luggage. What was I going to do, lug my laptop around with me? Leave it in a safe? Certainly not in the room!
And when, realistically, was I going to use it? Those café tables are hardly big enough for two beers. I knew from experience there was a computer in the lobby of my hotel where I could check my e-mail for X Euros per X number of minutes. So the laptop stayed home. It was not easy.
Now the days of deprivation of this magnitude are over, luckily for you! Prepare yourself for the Parisian dream geek vacation.
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The triplets are due any moment now, and that means so is your mother-in-law. Or your precious baby girl has just graduated from college and has no more of a clue than she did the day she started, so she wants to come home for “a while.” Or maybe you’re moving back in with mom and dad yourself…
You can kiss your home office good-bye (hopefully temporarily). So now what?
There may be co-working spaces near you, but they’re not quite as ubiquitous as Starbucks yet… You can dig (and dig and dig) through craigslist and hope it’s your lucky day and that your dream workspace will appear in the first 10 listings (because looking at any more than that is mind numbing and hazardous to your health) and that the people with the perfect space for rent that miraculously appears in listing number seven actually respond to you when you do contact them. (I have a very low tolerance for classifieds sites, can you tell?)
You can go to Regus, the slick, corporate rent-a-workspace/meeting room/virtual office people, and deal with “a representative” who will probably try to sell you a plan or a package or something. (That’s just the impression I get from looking at their site and knowing how American businesses operate… I could be wrong.)
Or… You can check out ShareYourOffice.com, a new project with a whole lot of potential. It’s a free service for people who need office space, or those who have extra space they’d like to fill with a warm, rent-paying body.
Wait! Before you say, “Not interested” and stop reading, think of this: it’s a French startup. Parisian. Which means most of the office spaces (at the moment) are in Paris. Ever dreamed of living and working in France?
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As I mentioned in my last post, I attended the first TechCrunch Meetup in Paris on Tuesday. I confess, I don’t enter the tech meatspace very often, generally preferring to observe from afar via the Web. But I couldn’t pass this up.
I didn’t find the millions of euros I was hoping for (I admit I didn’t try very hard). But I did find some real live French web workers/startup founders (including a delightful web-working couple with the delightfully French names of Sylvain and Jacinthe) and a startup with an app we web workers can use (more on that soon).
I also discovered La Cantine, which is where the event was held. It’s a great co-working space run by Silicon Sentier, a nonprofit networking organization for tech professionals.
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I get to go to the first TechCrunch Meetup in Paris today!
I’ll be wearing two hats there (hopefully neither of them a lampshade, but there will be an open bar, so we’ll see…). One is my entrepreneur hat; of course I’m hoping somebody who hasn’t lost all his or her wealth in the crash will dig my elevator pitch to the tune of several million Euros. But aren’t we all? I’m sure there will be lots of talk about the Wall Street fiasco and what it means for the tech industry and entrepreneurs looking for funding. Should be interesting.
The other hat is my web worker hat.
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