Announcement: The Big Pivot
or what to do when the plan doesn’t work out as you expected…
When we opened The Big Building in 2015, we already knew that the building would eventually be demolished to make way for the development of the new bus and train station. In many ways, it was this very temporariness which enabled us to build the community under one roof. Three and a half years seemed like a long time, and of course we sneakily hoped that the bus station project would be delayed — giving us longer in the same location.
In 2017 it became clear that we would not receive any such extension, and that we would need to find a new building for the community. We set out to do exactly that, which turned out to be harder than you might imagine.
We had the same criteria as when we began; the right location, size and suitability of the building and of course the cost needed to be friendly for those companies who are in their starting up phase.
The biggest challenge turned out to be the economy. Currently we’re fortunate enough to be experiencing good times. A very different scenario to when we started with the concept in 2014 .The real estate market is currently, to put it mildly, booming. We looked at many large buildings, but, cutting the long story short, we did not find anything which suited even close to all of the criteria. We could find great buildings in poor locations (very far from the city), or good locations with unsuitable buildings (would need millions of euros to be brought up to standard). And of course, some buildings that might have been suitable but would have cost far more than is affordable by a young company.
And so, on February 28th 2018, we announced to the 70+ companies and their 630+ people that The Big Building would be unable to provide them w real estate solution beyond May 2018. Whilst most people were not necessarily shocked, the disappointment was, and still is, clearly visible.
For many companies that would be the end, but we saw it as the perfect opportunity to change our strategy.
In the world of (Lean) startup, there is a phenomenon called “The Pivot”, the ability to change strategy without changing the vision. Eric Ries, the author of The Lean Startup coined the term by accident, and you can best hear about what it means from the man himself:
Our vision, as described in the statutes of our foundation, is essentially to facilitate support for entrepreneurship. Building a community in a physical building was our first strategy on how to achieve that vision. For now, that is no longer a viable strategy, but our vision hasn’t changed. Therefore we needed to find a new strategy, to make our very own pivot.
When we started, one of our assumptions was that in creating a community of diverse people, knowledge would be shared amongst them. This assumption was validated. We’ve seen people helping each other across companies. Whether someone needed advice on branding, marketing, design, technology or just about any other topic you could imagine, there was knowledge available. Sometimes that happened at the lunch table or Friday drinks, other times in more traditional workshop type settings.
We believe that every single person knows something that somebody else needs to know.
This led us to start exploring how we could facilitate the community to share this knowledge when they are no longer housed in the same space. On the 28th of February we also delivered the news that our new strategy is to build The Big Building Academy.
Over the next few months we’ll be hosting an assortment of different learning sessions, given by both people inside and outside the community as well as asking the community to give input both on what they would like to share as well as learn. We’ve already heard some things which have positively surprised us, now we just have to prove that we can deliver the value that we see is possible.
The Academy will also be available to people who are not currently in the community, so if you’d like to teach or learn something, please let us know by emailing: academy@thebigbuilding.com
