TechHub London

Last Wednesday I visited TechHub London, a sort of social IT/web startup/entrepreneur incubator. The place is quite spartan, but its purpose is not being cool, but being useful to its users. It has a main shared area where members just drop their notebooks and work, network and share ideas. Another area is reserved to some selected startups.

The shared area idea is not new, however the TechHub implementation has some interesting aspects:

• sharing and networking is encouraged (much more than in normal incubators)
• every Friday afternoon there’s a sort of pitch slam that is also streamed live
• coffee is free (yay!)
• there’s a symmetric 100 Mbit/s Internet connection (double yay!)
• you get exposure to investors.

There are some downsides too:

• you can’t talk too loudly or for too long, or you’d bother other people
• there are no whiteboards there are whiteboards in meeting rooms, but obviously you cannot bring them away with you!
• you must work with your laptop (and I’d hate it – I want a terrific machine with lots of screen real estate).

I would not consider TechHub (or The Hub here in Milan) a startup incubator, as the term implies something that makes you grow as a business. It’s more like an idea incubator, where you should spend time exchanging ideas and views with peers, hopefully growing as an entrepreneur, developer, geek. Perhaps that’s the entire point.
When you must focus on business other than mere ideas, I believe a proper startup incubator is probably better. Actually, a mix of the two would be best.