Why Birmingham needs more Tech Co-working Hubs

Having spent a lot of time in London recently, one of the things that has struck me is the number of co-working spaces and hubs that exist and that got me wondering, does this have an impact on their startup community.

It is definitely the case that co-working spaces have been awesome for the startup community, both the network effect of putting together communities of highly skilled entrepreneurs, able to advise, share and collaborate on problems has led to some great success stories. It enables investors to easily communicate to groups of startups, gives opportunities for entrepreneurs to feel comfortable and safe in a community of like-minded people, places for training,meetups and very often mentors in the same space.

Having more than one community space for tech entrepreneurs generates a number of interesting effects, both collaborative and competitive for both investors and entrepreneurs. Finding the space that effectively meets your needs is a lot easier when there is more than one.

A truism is that work expands to fill the space available and I believe this to be true of coworking spaces, having more spaces leads to more startups, more chances of success which leads to greater reinvestment in the community itself.

More than one space means that different approaches can exist, both from an investment strategy and how startups are supported leading to a greater number of startups within the community overall.

Looking at Birmingham, while there are a lot of co-working spaces, from BOM, Impact hub, BizzInn,  there seems to be only e4f that seems to fit the definition of a tech working space rather than a general space and I think that while it does a fantastic job of both providing support and opportunities for tech startups that perhaps we also need some more spaces to achieve that which we see in London.

Manchester has at least 4 spaces, Leeds has a couple, is it not time for Birmingham to do better.

Having more spaces would give us more startups, meaning that Birmingham could capitalise on the recent publicity on its status as a top 10 city to work in by giving specific space to those that have the greatest opportunity to create high growth companies.

I look forward to the enterprising people that take the challenge up and help create the next tech co-working space.

An Evening of Tech Beers at Silicon Canal

I attended my first meeting of Silicon Canal Tech Beers last night and thought it would be worth writing a post to capture my thoughts of the evening and what I learnt.

Firstly its impossible to remember everybody's name, but thankfully meetup.com helps with that.

Google Glass is really cool, but you look like Robocop wearing it. Thanks to the guys from Love the Look to bringing it along for everyone to play with.

After some discussion of the best restaurants in Birmingham, Adams scores highly, we quickly moved to a more favourable topic, beers and economics, Pure Bar, Brewdog and the Wellington seemed popular!

On Economics:

I  learnt that vodka does taste different at different price points, watching the blind A/B test conducted by Stuart and Giles was entertaining. Next time I shall not put it on my tab( learning point)

On Behavioural Economics:

Being told something is more expensive makes it more enjoyable. 

At least 4 of the group wear pebble, and are into some form of fitness logging.

There are some awesome tech start-ups in Birmingham, and we need to shout about them more. 

Birmingham needs a decent profile blog page of how founders have done recruitment to share best practice, think I would be keen to do something around this.

All founders struggle with recruitment, some of the usual stuff around lack of talent but mainly around being able to commit the right amount of time to doing it properly.

A few companies are doing similar things and could share best practice around things like sales and hiring especially around using newer tools.

There is a scarcity of talent on Birmingham, and we lose it to London too much.

The Drop forge is a nice pub and serves great coffee.

Tech people are friendly even the ones that give Klingon welcome waves. 

All in a very pleasant night with some great, interesting people, looking forward to the next one.

I attended in my role as inhouse recruiter for a Birmingham tech Startup through my new company which can be found at http://www.babbagelovelace.com/in-house-recruitment-services.html