via Pinterest

What it’s like to work in a basement

Rob Kish
Rob Kish
Sep 5, 2018 · 5 min read

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: for about a year, we worked out of our founder’s basement. A tech company working out of the founder’s basement? No way. Queue the photo of Bezos with “amazon dot com” spray painted on his wall in ’99. For us, it felt like some sort of rite of passage, as if we had to experience the modest beginnings of a tech startup.

Well, we weren’t in the basement the whole time

In June of last year, we made one of the dumbest moves in the history of the company. We moved our office from the basement to the 2nd floor. In the heat of the summer, we were sweating it out on the top floor of a house without AC. Not a good decision. We didn’t even drink coffee because it was so hot (no small matter for us). On top of that, we weren’t making enough to get that fancy cold brew covfefe the kids like to drink nowadays.

At the end of September, we had enough of the heat and we made another terrible decision. We moved from the hot box all the way back down to the basement. This meant moving our desks and equipment down two flights of skinny, poorly laid out staircases. Once we managed to get everything down there, it was great. We were back below ground, which meant it stayed quite a bit cooler. We even had a door that went straight from our office to the backyard, and a window that let some light in.

Needless to say, the basement was back in style for us. Until about the middle of November. If you’ve ever been to West Michigan in the winter, you know the bitter cold and lake-effect snow that pummels the area. What we went through makes George Washington’s winter at Valley Forge seem tame.

via Encyclopedia Britannica

An unfinished basement, little insulation, and concrete floors. I bet GW and his troops never had to walk barefoot on cold, concrete floors at 7 in the morning in the dead of winter.

Two tables and whiteboard walls

At one point one of us thought it a good idea to paint the already white walls with cheap whiteboard paint. It wasn’t. The paint was so thin that it splattered everywhere while we rolled it on. Our basement looked like an all white Jackson Pollock piece.

Imagine this but with all white so you have to turn your head a little bit and close one eye to see the light reflect off the paint. via Sotheby’s

To top it off, it didn’t even work. The wall made even the finest Expo markers into Sharpies.

All we had in that basement was one large L-shaped desk, a square table, three chairs, and our hopes and dreams. At the time, it was all we needed, even though we knew (read: hoped) we’d soon outgrow our sub-ground, sub-optimal office space.

It’s not all glitz and glamor. Actually, there was no glitz or glamor

We hated everything about working in that basement. Turns out, there’s a reason Michigan is not nicknamed the Sunshine State. We get very little of it, especially in the winter. That ground level window I talked about earlier, it didn’t do much after the first lake-effect snowfall covered it up.

via NOAA

One light bulb lit the small 9 feet by 12 feet industrial grade freezer we worked in. On most days we got there early before the sun was up, we made breakfast, usually oatmeal or scrambled eggs, and started work while we ate, because startups.

We went from a hot, sticky sauna to a cold, dark, chap-your-lips-dry dungeon almost fast enough for our back sweat to freeze.

What drove us out of the basement though wasn’t the cold, it was our inability to separate our work life from our home life. When working out of the house, it was impossible to compartmentalize our personal and work lives. Thus, we graduated from the basement to a co-working space. We figured this space would increase productivity, have a regulated room temperature, and help keep us all at least partially sane.

Fine, there were a few things that we liked

We had a dog at the house. She’s great. Penny was always ready to play with one of her tattered tennis balls in case somebody needed a break from work. The only problem, she would not come downstairs…at all. We couldn’t even coax her down with a treat. Either she was that afraid of stairs, dogs are actually cold-blooded, or she’s a heck of a lot smarter than we are.

I have to admit, an underrated aspect of working in a meat locker is your glass of water always stays cold and your coffee never burns your mouth.

We still can’t afford that fancy cold brew stuff (who can?)

It felt right to run a startup out of a basement, but it feels so much better to work in an actual office. Okay, okay. It’s a co-working space. But still! We’re out of the dark, dingy icebox.

Our main takeaway from working in the office: it is pretty nice to have a working thermostat. But, never forget where you came from. After all, we’re all just kids from somewhere. If Wedge was a kid, it’d be from the Arctic (and the sun), better known as our founder’s basement (and his second-floor landing).

What’s Your Wedge?

There are a lot of people in this world. People with stories that resumes don’t begin to tell. We are a startup with the mission of highlighting and amplifying those stories. Follow us for updates on the most fascinating people we meet and things we learn in the process.

Rob Kish

Written by

Rob Kish

COO, Wedge | oxford comma apologist

What’s Your Wedge?

There are a lot of people in this world. People with stories that resumes don’t begin to tell. We are a startup with the mission of highlighting and amplifying those stories. Follow us for updates on the most fascinating people we meet and things we learn in the process.

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