Establishing a startup culture with coffee mugs

 Definitely not a hot dog

During a recent call with our CMO Rick Kuwahara, we discussed the tricky topic of establishing a startup culture in a co-working space. How do you build company culture at a co-working space? I think that's a valid question in 2017.

As a tech startup, we adhere to a strong, positive corporate culture to match our team members' hard work. And as the founder and CEO of Paubox, I understand that the right workplace culture is important for our business performance. When it comes to an ideal office environment, the benefits to being a member at a proper co-working space like Covo are clear:

• Month-to-month lease.
• We don't have to worry about utilities, internet, cleaning, or working toilets.
• It's easy to add staff and stay in the same place.
• They have a cafe and bar on premise. Useful! (Now if only they can add a ping pong table…)

Yet when you're sharing a space with at least 50 other startups (varying from early stage startups to small businesses) on a daily basis, it's not kosher to bash a gong after each sale (we miss our gong) or hang corporate propaganda slogans on the wall like, "How do you kill that which has no life?" (I miss that sign) After some brainstorming, we concluded a clever way to continue cementing our startup culture: we decided to impart corporate slogans via coffee mugs. Everyone can use them and we can stock extra inventory so that others at Covo would see it =)

Two Chairs

Sure enough, I recently spotted some folks at our co-working space using our coffee mugs. I struck up a conversation and as it turns out, they're a digital health startup called Two Chairs and were keenly interested in our HIPAA Compliant Email solution. The great people at Two Chairs are new members at Covo and we're grateful they've now become a Paubox customer.

Restocking the 500 Startups Kitchen