What Happens When Your Company Moves From the Couch to a Real Office
A couple years ago, Mackenzie Barth and I started a student publication at Northwestern. Then we had the crazy idea that we could turn it into a company. We had no clue what we were getting into.
We Googled how to incorporate a company. I taught myself to code. Kenzie talked with hundreds of students to see how Spoon could work at their schools too. About 6 months into the startup grind, as we were beginning to lose steam, we got into the Techstars accelerator program here in the city, and we learned exactly how much we didn’t know. We focused, learned quickly from mistakes we had made, raised a seed round of funding, found some crazy passionate people who wanted to join the team, and kept trying to build Spoon into what we knew it could be.
There’s something endearing about being two girls working in your PJs on your couch, and something corporate about having a real office. With each step we take, we risk losing some of the idealism and charm that we started with. Not really, not on our end, but somehow it seems that way externally. After all, what people may not know from the outside is that the couch in our office is the same exact couch that we worked on in our apartment. We just moved it into the office so we wouldn’t have to buy another couch.
As Spoon University grows and begins to look more and more like a real company, we want it to be obvious that we are true to our roots. At the end of the day, we have one goal: to build a community of like-minded people all around the world, and help them make things together.
Spoon is a community, not a media company with reporters. We want to help every chapter member learn from each other and create amazing work. We want to connect people on an intimate, local level, and at an international one.
We will, forever, maintain an open conversation with all of our members and readers to make sure that we’re always held accountable to that. If anyone in our community ever feels that we’re losing sight of that priority, we want to know about it. And we promise to do all we can to fix it.
In this publication, we’ll document all that we’re doing as a company. We’ll talk through our lessons, discuss our decisions, and announce our changes. We hope that by doing this we can allow for more transparency, encourage more feedback, and share the lessons that we learn as two young girls doing a crazy thing we don’t know how to do.
This is our promise to prioritize our community, to maintain our integrity, and to never stop exploring.
