Sektor5 is closing, the place where Fresh van Root was born and I made friends, found clients and had lots of Makava.
Sektor5?
If you have never heard about Sektor5, I will quickly get you up to speed: It was not the first co-working space in Vienna, but the first one which was born during the early days of the startup scene in Vienna and fully embracing the startup lifestyle. It was also one of the first spaces to offer super flexible membership tickets (from ten day passes to fix desk and more).
Over the last couple of years, Sektor5 grew into the space that was most well known for being the home for the startup community. Many successful companies started out at Sektor5, like MySugr, Indoo.rs, Pagestrip, Extrasauber, to name a few. It was also a home for lots of meetups and events, the biggest one being the Austrian Startups Stammtisch.
The reasons for the closure of the space (after 7 years) are outside of focus of this post, the Sektor5 team has posted on Medium about that, and countless people were shocked after reading about the news. Check Twitter to see how former and current Sektorians praise the work Floor and Yves have done.
Co-Workers, Friends and Clients
I’ll take this chance to look back and see how the co-working thing worked for me. Spoiler: It worked well.
I met
- Robert, CEO of Linearis, a company focused on helping departments solving issues in the area of business intelligence. Started with a consulting project, now a friend and client.
- My vegan lunch buddies Martin and Matias from exit.live. I learned a lot about vegan food (and where to order it), I will miss the talks over lunch which are refreshingly not focused on any business topics (most of the time).
- Manfred (WerkzeugH), my back 2 back sit neighbor, for our exchanges about all things geekness, out of office leisure thingies etc.
- Richard, the art director with years of experience, which he used to help me polish a pitch deck recently, and now working with him on a project for the first time
- Martin, (CTO at Grow WisR) developer and WordPress geek. Will miss the talks about life and going for Indian food.
to name a few.
Sektor5 connected us, was the home base we met and now everybody is moving on. Thanks to Slack we can easily stay in contact.
What I got done at Sektor5
This is just a mix of things from Fresh van Root life connected to Sektor5:
- Fresh van Root was born at Sektor5. I remember sitting here and creating the first onepager (which is still up, but the portfolio grew..).
- This blog here was launched while working from Sektor5, initially as a podcast blog featuring Austrian startups
- I did not count but roughly half of the ~100 blog posts up here were written at Sektor5.
- Several clients were invited for meetings and workshops to Sektor5
- I joined the Sektor5 team in 2015 to organize StartupWeekend, pitched my own project at betapitch once.
- ~100 conf calls and thousands of emails sent
- I interviewed Floor about Sektor5 and 5starts for last year’s new year special
- For a Microsoft content project a photoshoot was done here
- I disconnected and re-connected the WiFi about 150 times over the years (“Why are you using Windows, Rolf?”)
Misc stuff
- The drinks offered at Sektor5 stood out. I was sticking to Makava, Club Mate and “blue coffee” most of the time
- It took me a while to figure out how making a coffee at Sektor5 actually worked (this one tiny detail 🍴)
- I never learned how to install the printer driver myself, tried several times.
- At the beginning there were no dogs, now there are 3 on crowded days.
- My gear changed a lot: Working with a Lenovo Thinkpad X220, then a Surface Pro and now a Surface Book.
- Smartphones during my time at Sektor: Windows Phone, iPhone 5c, OnePlus One, OnePlus X
- During the “rocco times” I had a pasta overdose
What’s next? Fresh van Root will continue to work out of a co-working space, but which one is still undecided. What’s for sure: After looking at several spaces it is clear that Sektor5 was not only home to a special community but also was a well designed space to get stuff done.
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