Full transcript: Charles Armstrong on London Real
0:00 Brian Rose: This week on Silicon Real, Charles Armstrong, founder and director of The Trampery.
0:05 Charles Armstrong: Every building we do is a laboratory. You want to design things that increase the likelihood that two people are going to bump into each other. It’s a very inexpensive way to actually help groups of people to achieve more. There were investment deals that got done. There were sponsorship deals that got done. Collaborations got seeded purely by unpredictable, serendipitous conversations.
0:29 Charles Armstrong: When you see an industry that’s ripe for disruption, you want to get stuck in. Be optimistic. Be excited about the future.
0:43 Brian Rose: On Monday, Silicon Real presents Charles Armstrong, the trampery.
0:50 Charles Armstrong: Go out and take risks.
0:53 Brian Rose: In London, technology is the Silicon Roundabout. Introducing a new talk show dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene. Silicon Reel, each week interviewing entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, financial technology, accelerators and incubators in an exciting three-person format. Learn about the people behind the innovation. Locally filmed, locally sourced, Silicon Reel.
1:28 It’s about the people. This is Silicon Reel, the weekly talk show dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene. My guest today is Charles Armstrong, who is the founder and director of the Trampary, which I’ve just toured one of your branches, the latest branch, the one on Old Street, which you probably walked by it 1,000 times, because it’s in the center of everything, right where Old Street and Great Eastern cross, right across from what used to be the foundry back in the day, which might become a boutique hotel one day.
1:59 We don’t know. The trampery is a shared workspace right here in Shortage. It’s hosting some of the UK’s leading startups. You’ve just recently had some pretty big visitors, including His Royal Highness, the Duke of York, twice, and the British Prime Minister, David Cameron. Charles, you studied music and political science at Cambridge, you’ve got a fascinating background in tech as well, but right now, welcome to Silicon Real.
2:23 Charles Armstrong: Thank you, it’s a pleasure to be here.
2:25 Brian Rose: You know, it was a pleasure being at your space. It’s fascinating, you know, I’m 43 years old and so I kind of grew up in the 70s And so I was walking around this co-working space and touching like the cork board. And I used to make a little fort when I was a kid. And I remember putting cork board up because it was kind of trendy at the time.
2:41 And every single room has like kind of a retro feel to it. And obviously someone put real thought into a design when a lot of times people think of co-working spaces as just that, a place to put a laptop. And I was wondering if you could tell us your vision behind this trampery and then them in general and why maybe a co-working space is more than just a desk and a power socket?
3:08 Charles Armstrong: Well, absolutely. And I think that just the sheer amount of time that we spend in a working environment and how important that is in our lives, I could never understand the typical office assumption that it was all right to have cheaply made furniture and bland decoration.
3:27 Surely you should apply the same kinds of consideration and attention that you do for the way that you decorate your home. If anything, it’s more important. If you want people to collaborate efficiently, if you want people to be inspired in what they do and to come up with new ideas, if you want to foster new kinds of relationship between people, then the kind of space that you create, the way it looks and the delight that you find going into a new room and the fact that it’s different than the room you just came out of.
4:01 It’s a very inexpensive way to actually help groups of people to achieve more. So from the very beginning with the Tramp Reef five years ago, we knew that what we did with the interiors was going to be a fundamental part of the model for everything that followed. And I have to say that starting life here in the center of Shoreditch, you couldn’t have had a better heritage, because this was one of the focal points for experimentation with design and architecture in London.
4:35 And through the 1980s and 1990s, there was a very characteristic kind of eclecticism that developed here. So if you went into a cafe or a hair salon or a little boutique, you’d probably find some improbable mixture of antique furniture, some bits of industrial cast offs, a piece of an old car or something. And there was really a desire, I think, to break with the conventions. And so that all got sucked into the way we did the first trampery. And then each building that we’ve done, and Old Street is the sixth, we tried something different.
5:18 We tried to respond to the structure of the building, to the local community, to the kind of members that we were expecting to have. And it’s been really good to stretch the model in different directions. When it came to Old Street itself, I suppose we wanted to try and go beyond anything that we’d done before. And because it’s essentially a brutalist structure, it’s these two giant slabs of concrete with a band of glazing all around the outside. Having thought about where our inspiration should come from, we pretty quickly realized that the 70s was the period to look at.
6:07 And we thought, well, what if we did a workspace that had the look and feel and quality of a 1970s luxury hotel. So we’ve got two kinds of cork in there with different characteristics. All the doors are made of walnut with bronze handles, the light switches are bronze. There’s a lot of rosewood and teak. We’ve got one whole wall behind the bar in the gold ceramics and lots of details in gold and walnut. And I think as soon as we’d found that, that starting point, it began to unfold very naturally in every different part of the design we looked at. We found the right way to take that inspiration and adapt it into something quite contemporary.
6:56 And I suppose most notably the facade.
6:59 Brian Rose: The building’s facade had not changed since it was built. So that’s 1961. It is what is originally a council building, like for low-income housing. It’s 12 stories tall. Am I roughly describing it right?
7:12 Charles Armstrong: That’s right. So it was actually built by a private developer in 61, but it was bought by the bar of Hackney. And so it’s got 15 stores of housing above it. And there’s still one person living there, Hilda, who moved in when it was built. She came to visit us on our opening day, amazing.
7:30 And then there’s the first floor workspace, which is Cantolevered out over Old Street. And that became Hackney’s housing office. So if you wanted to apply for accommodation, that’s where you’d go.
7:43 Brian Rose: Right. And the look was kind of that gray and like dull blue panels or something.
7:48 Charles Armstrong: Exactly. The blue asbestos panels. And it’s that same kind of, you know, council look that you see in London.
7:53 Brian Rose: I was telling you earlier when I was touring it, which is kind of tuning out sometimes and it’s just like, oh, that building. So when you started changing the outdoor paneling with that kind of golden brown, you know, look, I was like, what’s going on here?
8:04 Brian Rose: Because, you know, you could have been flashier, but you didn’t. So it was all about the subtlety, which I think is your design.
8:11 Charles Armstrong: So what we wanted to do something that stayed within the structure, because there’s an aluminum grid structure that wraps around the concrete plinth, and then all the panels and the windows fitted within that. We didn’t want to change that, but we wanted to find a cheeky way of radically changing the statement that the building made on the street.
8:30 Because exactly as you say, we learned to filter out a lot of Sixtus architecture. It becomes invisible, and we wanted our building to be visible. It needs to make a little statement. It was actually a brilliant design rework called Dan Ainsworth, who came up with this idea of printed and applied vinyl panels in black, white, brown, and gold. He actually found a piece of quilting from the 1970s and elaborated that into this facade treatment that now wraps around three sides of it.
9:10 I think it’s been hugely successful. I love, then the days after it went up, I love just standing on the street watching people’s reaction.
9:16 Brian Rose: Right, and your entrance says the trampery, it says drugstore along with the publicist name there, and you just, I didn’t even know what it was. And then I had remembered that you and what you did, and so then it kind of clicked with me. I wanna talk about workspaces really quick, because anyone listening to us now probably has a tech interest or has been to a tech workspace.
9:33 And we all kind of know the story. We know about the Mashi Monster slide. We know Google was revolutionary in the way they redesigned the workspace with the areas and the breakout areas and the snacks. And it was all a way of getting the most output, the most collaboration. And I’ve had a lot of people on the show that have their own workspaces and their own ideas.
9:52 Brian Rose: We had the Google campus creators. And I’m just, when you have to create a new space like this, I mean, do you really, really take yourself way back and think, what are we ultimately trying to accomplish here, because I know you have a private members club, you were telling me about that. What are the key elements of making a good workspace, and are they obvious?
10:16 Charles Armstrong: Well, so, I go back to my origins, if you like, as a sociologist, because most of this is about some combination of sociology and psychology.
10:25 And I think there’s been a big change in the role that a working environment plays, that if you go back to the 19th century, when the first mills and factories started to be developed, the primary consideration was how you fit humans around a mechanical production process. So there was a very mechanical logic to it that in a way the source of motive power and the way it was transmitted and the flow of the different materials determined the basic framework of architecture. And the big windows was for the extra light.
11:04 Exactly. And then in terms of what we now call information workers, the clerical kind of environments, you see these rows and rows of Clark’s desks, where again it was about taking a kind of bureaucratic notion and mapping that out into physical space. So it was all about this very rational idea of a flow of tasks that needed to be accomplished and also supervised and monitored in a particular way. And there’s a hierarchy structure. The big wigs got the office.
11:36 Brian Rose: Look at madmen. I’m thinking of madmen because I just came from your office. And they’ve got the secretaries with the desks in the open and then the county execs with their own offices.
11:48 Charles Armstrong: Exactly, and it’s full of status signifiers. There’s a lot of famous folklore from Microsoft’s campus in Redmond of what people would do, the kind of strings they would pull to get a corner office, because it gave you a certain elevated status.
12:03 I mean, you’re an aristocrat in the management structure. So all of these considerations for the kind of 19th century way of organizing workspace. Now, if you look at actually what the priorities are, particularly for startups, but actually for larger organizations now, you very quickly start coming up against a desire for efficient knowledge flow through an organization, for a kind of sense of wellbeing, for maximizing the connections between clients and partners with people in the business, And for encouraging creativity and entrepreneurial and problem solving behavior.
12:54 Now, these don’t look at all like the drivers for the 19th century workspace. And so the fact that we’re still building a lot of offices on those 19th century assumptions is a sign of an industry that is ripe for disruption. And just like any entrepreneur, when you see an industry that’s ripe for disruption, You want to get stuck in and start experimenting and seeing if you can work out what the new structures look like. My observation is that a lot of these new drivers, they’re about social dynamics, they’re not about straightforward productivity or mechanical things.
13:34 You suddenly start thinking about floor plans and materials and furnishing in a way that It is about achieving certain unpredictable, uncontrollable social outcomes including serendipity. If you want to design things that increase the likelihood that two people are going to bump into each other and have a chat. That was very much part of the starting philosophy for the trampery and in a way every building we do is a laboratory that then we we learn as much as we can and then that goes into the next set of experiments in the next building. So it’s definitely the iterative character to it and we keep changing the the solution based on what we’ve learned adding new elements and I think we’ve still got a lot of iterations to go.
14:26 Brian Rose: One of the things I noticed is 20 or 25% is this huge ballroom that I just came from that has this you know black and white you know design and some great things on the wall, but you said it can suit up to 200 people standing.
14:42 I mean, that’s a big part of your space that goes for a social type of experience. And is that by design? Because ultimately you want that serendipity to happen, whether it’s other companies, other events, people in your workspace. I mean, what percentage of business is social? I guess that’s the question.
14:58 Charles Armstrong: Well, so. What does social mean? In the very first trampery, if I just look at how the kitchen has evolved in the trampery. Our first office, we had a pretty conventional kitchen. It was tucked away in a little room at the back, and most of it was dedicated to dasking.
15:17 And I realized that actually the times when somebody was going to get a sandwich from the fridge or go to make a cup of coffee, those were the times when people weren’t locked into whatever they were doing on their computer. Those were the times when they might be interested to speak to somebody, and we weren’t really making much of that opportunity. So when we moved to Bevan Street in 2011, the biggest change in the floor plan, we pulled the kitchen right to the front of the building.
15:48 You walk through the front door, you’re in the kitchen. There’s this big breakfast bar that wraps around. So for one thing, it was designed to foster opportunities to talk to people for members when they were taking a break from their desks. But also it meant that guests coming in, they had a chance to talk to, maybe you were sitting there waiting 10 minutes for a meeting with another business, you might strike up a conversation with them. And there were investment deals that got done, there were sponsorship deals that got there.
16:22 Collaborations got seeded purely by unpredictable, serendipitous conversations that happened there. So we knew that was important and we elaborated that for the buildings. With Old Street, we thought, well, we can’t just keep making the kitchen bigger and bigger. clearly not a kitchen anymore and that’s where the idea of actually separating it and recognizing this is a members club this is a different facility that goes hand-in-hand with the desk space but it’s essentially the same philosophy this is where the the people with desks go when they’re taking a break from their work but it’s also something that we can open up to a wider membership so people from publicist people from publicist clients other interesting entrepreneurs in the community journalists we can give them membership so they can they’ve got they’ve got a little home base in the center of Shoreditch whether that’s in the afternoon when they might have a cup of coffee or whether that might be for an evening function that they come in with a couple of friends they can have a glass of wine they’re going to meet interesting people there and then the ballroom that you mentioned yes we devoted a big chunk of space to a very flexible very beautiful function room that already there have been all kinds of activities from hackathons to training events to conferences that have happened there.
17:41 But that’s another very important part of the geometry because every one of those events means there’s a whole new community of people who maybe just for a few hours, they’re coming in.
17:51 Brian Rose: Right. They’re coming over to your house for a party.
17:53 Charles Armstrong: Exactly. And you’re going to probably interact with them in some way.
17:57 Even if it’s for 10 minutes, you’re going to go say hi and check it out. That’s right. On the one hand, you don’t want those people that flow in and out to disrupt the people whose businesses are based there, who have to be the first consideration in the business. So as you saw, there’s access control and the flows don’t interfere. But on the other hand, you want to provide the opportunities for little eddies and currents and interactions to happen.
18:22 So the drawing room, the members club again, is the central focus for that. Guests who come in for an event, they’re welcome to stay in the drawing room, or if they come out just to take a phone call or something, that’s when they have the chance to bump into some of the residents, the resident businesses who might be having a cup of coffee there.
18:40 Brian Rose: Okay, I like it already. Hopefully I’ll be hanging out there more in the future. Talk to me about co-working space as a business model.
18:47 I had James Layfield in here from Central Working. They have that new space over in Whitechapel, I believe it is, and he’s had a few iterations here. I mentioned Campus London that Izzy Vidra had done before he’s gone on to Google Ventures. We know Rohan Silva has his new second home. Alex Hoy, I was over at Runway East the other day, a completely different feel from you, but a lot of fun there, you know, lower tech, rougher, but a lot of fun.
19:11 Brian Rose: What is the business model of a co-working space? It seems to me like a hard business model, although your space is really unique and I see a definite need for it. So what’s it like doing this? You’ve done this a few times, right?
19:26 Charles Armstrong: Yeah, well, obviously there are a number of different ways that you can construct it as a business.
19:32 And I think one of the very exciting things in London is quite what a wide variety of solutions there are now, probably as wide a variety as you find anywhere in the world. This is one of the R&D centers for workspace, not just workspace design, but for the business models of Thunderlight. And you have some models which are based on alignment with essentially a corporate backer or an investment fund, and where there’s some equity element that is factored into the overall business envelope.
20:15 Brian Rose: Right. Kind of that’s more the accelerator incubator type piece.
20:20 Charles Armstrong: But the boundaries are becoming increasingly fuzzy. Then you’ve got operators like the Trampery, where it’s a more straightforward hotel model, where you’ve got facilities that members just pay a certain rate for using those facilities. But maybe within that, the distinction is between operations that are essentially about a large, diffuse membership of people are spending short periods of time in there, that are more a kind of hot dusking model versus models which are based on permanent full-time occupation, which has really been the centre of gravity for the trampery.
21:04 Brian Rose: And it’s a tough business in a city like London where property prices are rising everywhere. And getting available property is, must mean you’re impossible. I don’t know how you got this space, but…
21:21 Charles Armstrong: Well, so every, like it means the core part of our competence is being able to source suitable properties to be able to negotiate terms with property owners and with partners that enable us to make what we want to do economic in situations where on the face of it might not be economic, and then to be able to manage refurbishments and also operate in ways that achieve a very great impact whilst keeping costs to an absolute minimum.
21:59 Charles Armstrong: It’s a business where you have to be phenomenally disciplined. So all of the skills that we now have in terms of surveying and being able to assess properties in terms of lease negotiation, in terms of design, costing, and the way that we manage contracts. There’s a lot of different levels to it and every single one is essential to making this work. But it’s a tough business. It’s a tough business.
22:23 Brian Rose: And since you’re not enjoying any potential equity upside with any kind of a piece in any of these companies, you don’t have that potential to look forward to that a lot of companies in the startup space have,
22:35 Charles Armstrong: Right, but that’s a it’s a very as you’ll know very uncertain potential upside but also and also like I would say that there’s a very specific reason why we don’t do that because Our model the trampers model is is based around multiple growth stages We want some businesses that are just starting out, but we want businesses that are already established their teams are going into a growth stage Like we were delighted to to provide space for city mapper earlier this year, they were going through a period of phenomenal growth.
23:06 But just the expertise that they have means that in a mixed community, alongside much smaller businesses, there’s more opportunity to learn. Essentially, we need the most neutral model possible in order to be attractive to that wide range of businesses.
23:22 Brian Rose: City Map is a great company, index backed, and a couple other big backers there. Yeah, it’s impressive. Everybody raves about that app.
23:31 So you really think about what these different companies are bringing to your overall ecosystem when you’re bringing them. And one of the things that really attracted me to having you on is your relationship with Publicis and they have this drug store piece. Obviously Publicis is a huge global company when it comes to advertising. And I was just wondering if you could explain your partnership with them. I know you said that they had a big closing day with a Cadillac account or something recently, which is a big move, because they are a very traditional company.
23:59 Brian Rose: There’s nothing traditional about your space and being in Old Street, right?
24:06 Charles Armstrong: Absolutely. But it’s existed for 100 years. It’s been a giant in the advertising industry for most of that time. But I think what’s interesting about Publixis is how focused on innovation it has been at a very senior level.
24:26 So both Artyus Sardun, the chief executive of Priblicis worldwide, and Maurice Lévi, the chief executive of Group Priblicis, have been involved in the decision to form the relationship with the trampery and to create the drugstore proposition. They’ve both been to visit here. And I suppose also Dylan Williams, who they engaged, who’s a stalwart of the tech city, the Shoreditch technology community, engaging him as a chief strategy officer and chief innovation officer.
25:04 You could tell that was a business that didn’t just want to carry on business as usual. That was a clear signal that they intended to do some very, very bold things with the business. Artu Sardin, a couple of years previously, had introduced a kind of focal point for the whole global network around lead the change. And again, it was clear that wasn’t just words that they actually wanted to do it. And so very quickly, after I’d started speaking to Artu and Dylan, It was clear that they were ready to rethink their core strengths in the kind of strategic relationship that they’ve got with industry leading companies around the world about what new kinds of value they could provide alongside the established advertising and communications related services. And just as Publixis itself was seeking to innovate, they had conversations with client after client that was struggling to keep up with new insurgents in a market.
26:18 And really that’s where the concept for the drugstore collaboration came from. Because we’d equally seen from five years of experience with the trampers members that a lot of the The challenges that startups face when they go into a rapid growth phase are about having access to wider networks, having access to resources to promote new products and services, to scale rapidly, but also to understand how you evolve an organization to maintain accountability when you might be doubling your headcount in size over a six-month period. And there was this potential marriage between senior executives in very large corporations and entrepreneurs with fast-growth businesses that crucially required an intermediary to provide a kind of safe hand-holding zone to connect those and to bring those separate worlds together.
27:23 Charles Armstrong: And so nobody’s done this at scale. Yeah, there have been all kinds of experiments, as you know, bringing together corporates and startups.
27:31 Brian Rose: Yeah, and I’m very skeptical. Again, there’s been, you know, every other week there’s another accelerator, there’s another incubator, there’s another huge corporate coming in. I can’t tell if they really care, if they just want the ideas, you know, the innovator’s dilemma says they’ll never get it.
27:47 Brian Rose: So I’m always curious when I hear about things like this, especially something like advertising, they are really very traditional industry. You know, and I haven’t heard of many of them dipping their toe on this side of the pond. WPP has something going on but I I never hear big things about them really innovating when it comes to the tech space. Is that a fair assessment?
28:12 Charles Armstrong: I think that of the status quo that’s absolutely a fair assessment. I think that what you’ve seen is a lot of the large agencies set up small incubators almost as show pieces just because they need to do something to show that they’re not dinosaurs, and it’s usually a fairly peripheral part of what they’re actually doing.
28:33 Brian Rose: Yeah, it doesn’t affect their core business ultimately, right?
28:36 Charles Armstrong: Exactly. And I think already what’s different with drugstore and with the relationship with the trampery is the level of senior strategic attention it’s had and how carefully thought through it’s been and how much ambition there is for that to become a platform that sits over publicist existing global network and is able to deliver a completely new set of services alongside the roster of advertising services.
28:59 Brian Rose: I’m curious I’d love to check back with you in three or six months and find out you know that the nuts and bolts of how that works because it’s it’s hard to keep something like that together it’s hard to keep the you know the guys from the West End to come out to the East End and you know you’ve got a you’ve got a task ahead of you but I like the fact that there is that intermediary because is that they just jumped in bed with a small or up and coming ad tech company.
29:25 I think that would be harder to do, you know, without that meteor. You’ve been doing tramparies for a while. This is your sixth, right? And I was just wondering how the other co-working spaces have evolved. Have they gone bigger?
29:34 Have they gone smaller? And then also just get your thoughts on this tech sector. I mean, you know, it’s in 2009, your trampoline did some crowdfunding back in the day, equity crowdfunding. So you’ve been around here for a while and you have an interesting perspective. So if you could hit me with both of those tramparies and then your background with trampoline?
29:51 Charles Armstrong: Well, so when we opened the first trampoline in 2009, it’s hard to believe now there wasn’t a single shared workspace in Shoreditch. Can you believe that? In five years, we’ve gone from none to about 30. OK, all right, all right, all right. And so that meant that I didn’t have much competition to compare what we were doing against, which is a frustration as an entrepreneur.
30:20 It’s always good to position yourself against something. And then Tech Hub opened six months later, and they had a radically different approach, which I was delighted by, because you’re already seeing differentiation in the market. They had a much more stripped down interior. I don’t know if you remember their old space just by the top of City Road.
30:40 Brian Rose: Right, is it what the white collar factory now is?
30:43 Charles Armstrong: Exactly, that’s gone to make great for the dollar.
30:45 Brian Rose: I used some businesses that used to be, and they actually never got a tour, but I knew Huddle was over there, in that area, and it was bare bones, right? Basically, they didn’t know when the building was gonna be tore down, they kept being told it was gonna be six months, six months, and it was bare bones.
31:00 Charles Armstrong: That’s right. And then another one, and another one, another one popped up.
31:04 And everyone was doing it a little bit differently. But I think from the beginning, I knew that this wasn’t actually a niche offering in the property market, that actually it was, for all the reasons that I touched on earlier, it was a sea change in the way that businesses use space. And what we were with the tip of an iceberg that was going to change all offices. And so there was never a sense that there was some limited market. It’s going to be all businesses.
31:40 So it’s been a luxury, in a way, being here and not feeling that there’s some limited demand and a zero-sum game between all of the different operators. And I think that’s made it a lot easier for all of us to take curiosity in what each other are doing and be interested and supportive of each other. It’s a very friendly scene, which I think is important, bearing in mind the fact we’re meant to be supporting the community.
32:09 Brian Rose: People sneak in and check out your
32:11 Charles Armstrong: Yeah, yeah, there’s a lot of…
32:13 Brian Rose: Is James Layfield doing some in-scene, some recon?
32:16 Charles Armstrong: But we’ll do that with each other, let’s face it, we’ll see what’s coming over the horizon. And I think what I can say is that consistently, over those five years, standards have got higher and higher and higher. And it’s one of the reasons that with Old Street, I really wanted to lift the bar again. Because I think when we opened in 2009, we really set a standard for a kind of somewhat more luxurious working environment for early stage businesses.
32:46 Then when in 2011, when we opened Bevenden Street, we raised it a lot higher again. We’ve got a wall in there that’s all made of reclaimed ships decking, we’ve got another wall that’s a 10 meter long photograph. We did a lot of really beautiful things in that building. And then, as other people’s spaces opened, the standards got higher and higher. And this has to be a positive thing in a market.
33:12 We’re all looking to improve the quality of what we can provide to our members. And I think that London is about the best environment in the world.
33:25 Brian Rose: Why is it better than New York?
33:28 Charles Armstrong: I think there’s more diversity here, but also I think that the aesthetic is more developed here. You mentioned earlier the industrial trope, which during the 90s established itself as a kind of template, and it’s been stamped out over and over again.
33:50 Brian Rose: That still seems to be the lingua franca of workspace, trendy workspace design. which is the exposed concrete, the exposed HVAC, the very, the industrial brushed steel. Am I kind of summarizing?
34:07 Charles Armstrong: Yeah. Okay.
34:08 Brian Rose: And that’s New York. New York hasn’t evolved. You’re saying?
34:11 Charles Armstrong: Well, no, it has evolved. There is diversity.
34:13 Charles Armstrong: I don’t want to say anything negative about New York, but just from the space I visited, I haven’t seen the same level of ambition and experimentation and adventurousness in how far you can push this.
34:26 Brian Rose: Right. And I lived in New York for many years. And London has these very diverse neighborhoods, architectural styles, which you’re taking advantage of. I mean, very distinct neighborhoods.
34:38 I mean, this, compared to a mile away, compared to two and three miles away, you have completely different industries, completely different stories of what happened. And so you’re playing off that. And I guess we feel it more than we think. And in New York, you do have the grid system. And sometimes it’s hard to tell if you’re on 23rd Street or 43rd Street, or on 8th Avenue or 10th Avenue or 3rd Avenue.
34:57 So sometimes I guess you can’t really incorporate the history of that city into the field, the building. And maybe that’s lacking, from listening to you, maybe. But obviously, New York has many, many fantastic spaces and entrepreneurial communities. And it has a lot of similarities with London, I think the two most similar. What have you seen tech in London evolve?
35:18 Brian Rose: I mean, from five years ago to now, what are the big things, if you had to pick out two or three powerful changes that you’ve seen, And what are they?
35:30 Charles Armstrong: Well, so I’d say the single biggest change is what happened here in Shoreditch. That I started coming to this part of town in the mid-90s. Then I came here to set up Trampoline Systems, my software business, in 2003.
35:48 Brian Rose: What was it like in the mid-90s?
35:51 If you could just take us back to 95 or 96, like walking around, what would you see?
35:58 Charles Armstrong: So if you just look around now and then mentally erase all of the new buildings, and then look at all the tatty stuff that’s here and just make it about 10 times more tatty than that, then Put some vacancies in there, 20%, 30% vacancy. It was already by the mid-90s was this very, very distinct focal point for innovation. And it wasn’t anything to do with technology at that point.
36:32 But it had just achieved this gravitational pull during the 1980s and the first half of the 90s that created this energy around the visual arts, around fashion, around product design. Those were really the three communities that seem to be most fertile here. And there was a lot of experimentation with space and with the built environment. So for instance, as soon as there were enough artists who had kind of taken cheap warehouse spaces here, they wanted somewhere to go and drink, obviously.
37:10 They didn’t want to go to the regular old boozer. They wanted somewhere that was a bit more for them, but more in keeping with their values and aesthetics. And I do think that a lot of what unfolded later with workspaces like The Trampery. It was really started by some of those people in the 90s. Actually, going back even further, in 1984, an amazing man called Richard Boot opened the strong rooms.
37:38 It was the first recording studios in Shoreditch. It’s still going strong just off Curtin Road.
37:43 Brian Rose: Yeah, I know. I didn’t know it was a recording studio before. I just thought it was a park.
37:48 Charles Armstrong: You know it was a park. But the whole, that’s very significant. Because from the beginning, his whole conception for how that recording studio was going to work was it was about a community. So much a forerunner of what we’ve tried to do with the trampery. So the way that he decorated, it’s crazily decorated and painted by some quite famous people, and the way he furnished it, and the social spaces that he included, and then he opened a bar as part of the strong rooms.
38:17 Originally, not really thinking that people from outside were going to be interested, It was for the people who were there, the bands that were recording stuff, the musicians, to help them meet each other. And this was very, very early part of the fabric of Shoreditch, and you had a lot of people trying to do things that would help to build communities. And unknowingly, they were laying the foundations for then the blooming of the technology innovation scene that happened from about 2005 onwards.
38:45 Brian Rose: It’s a good perspective. This should be a documentary about Shoreditch, and you should be narrating it, I think. Tell me a bit about you. You studied social science and you studied music, I believe, at Cambridge. I know you were like photography in your spare time.
38:58 You said you should be found in a basement in Dalston listening to music. What are you doing here in the tech space? Do you ever ask yourself, what am I doing here?
39:08 Charles Armstrong: It’s one of those bizarre accidents. I never expected to wind up that way.
39:13 But I think that the sociology is probably the center of it. that simultaneously I’m fascinated by clusters and the way that they grow and develop. And that’s what drew me to Shoreditch because even from the mid-90s when there was no technology here, I could see that the kind of approach to collaboration and creativity that was just very improvisational and very free flowing was starting to look like a cluster but nothing like any of the classical clusters, like Cambridge, where you have a big institution at the heart of it, or like Silicon Valley, indeed, where you have a big educational institution and kind of quite a lot of formal structure.
40:06 So it was a sociologist in me that got fascinated in what looked like a new phenomenon and wanted to understand it, wanted to get involved in that. And then as I started to understand bits of it, I couldn’t resist the impulse to start tinkering and try to add bits to it and provide a facility that would help it to grow. So I think that’s a big part of it. And then on the other side, with my software business, Trampoline Systems, that’s equally about sociology because it’s all about doing big data analysis on patterns of business relationships and of growth trends and sexual analyses.
40:45 So they’ve become like the yin and yang of my work life. One with very tangible face-to-face physical environments. The other was slightly more disembodied data analysis and visualization and reporting. But they both stem from the same interest that I have in what makes businesses and business communities tick, what helps them to grow.
41:08 Brian Rose: It seems like nowadays that the tech person you’re gonna bump into now at the campus or at the roundabout is gonna be either some ultra business entrepreneur guy with a certain way of thinking, or maybe a tech guy, a coder guy, that kind of thing.
41:25 I don’t know if that’s right or left brain, but they’re not necessarily the brain that you have been trained with. And I was wondering if you sometimes catch yourself pulling an entrepreneur over or pulling over a tech guy and saying, these are some other very important aspects of a workspace or of this interactive environment or something, whether it’s sometimes it’s harder them to get, because they’re not that left or right brain?
41:53 Charles Armstrong: Well, you know what? A trend that I’ve definitely noticed over the last five years is people from engineering backgrounds, very pure engineering backgrounds, starting to get very interested in social patterns.
42:06 And I don’t think there’s any disjoint between the kind of theoretical views that making a community work, to a certain extent, is an engineering problem. So for instance, you look at the Occupy movement. That attracted a lot of coders and a lot of people with an engineering background, and those were some of the people who were most active in trying to design decision making processes and things that govern social consequences. So I think there’s actually a very interesting confluence between the hard engineering and the social sciences ways of looking at problems, because a lot of the time now we’re dealing with complex phenomena that involve reciprocal interactions amongst a large group of people.
43:01 Brian Rose: Yeah, and I’m an engineer by training and we’d love to model things And all engineering is based on modeling some system and then trying to make an imperfect, unpredictable system into something predictable. So yeah, it makes sense that the ultimate multivariable system is the social situation. Charles, we always ask people that come here a few questions at the end. I want to ask you, if you could make a phone call to the 20-year-old Charles and give that young man a bit of advice, would you tell him to do a certain thing or to focus on a certain piece now that you know what you know?
43:32 Charles Armstrong: Gosh, the first thing I’d say is don’t worry with the violin. You really shouldn’t try to play that instrument. Don’t waste your time yet.
43:41 Brian Rose: It always impresses me that anyone can play a violin.
43:44 Charles Armstrong: I think I was born for keyboard instruments, really.
43:47 The violin was just a disaster, yes, terrible. Secondly, if I could give a piece of advice to 20-year-old Charles, it would probably be spend less time thinking, start doing practical experiments quicker. Because in the end, I think that’s how we all learn the fastest. I think in my early 20s, I spent quite a lot of time observing, thinking, writing. And then by my mid-20s, I figured out you just have to get out and try stuff.
44:23 And if I’d done that a few years earlier, maybe I’d be a bit further down the track.
44:27 Brian Rose: And that’s a lesson we can learn from this community, because this community is all about trying things, right? Get the MVP out there. Release early. Release early, that’s what I said.
44:36 Brian Rose: Second part of that question is, best advice you’ve ever received, business or personal?
44:43 Charles Armstrong: I know, it’s always the hardest question. So I was extremely lucky for a couple of years to be mentored by an amazing gentleman called Michael Young, Lord Young of Darlington. I was the last person that he mentored before his death in 2002. And he gave me a lot of incredible advice, some of which I only really appreciated years later.
45:08 But one of the first pieces of advice he gave me was that I could learn that from every single person I met, there was something life changing that I could learn from them. And I think particularly having been through the Cambridge experience, I wasn’t looking at the world that way. I had a kind of clear hierarchy of the kinds of people I could learn things from and that was such a valuable piece of advice and has proven to be so true and has changed the way that I interact with people in all kinds of different situations.
45:46 So I definitely would pin that one up pretty close to the top of the stack.
45:50 Brian Rose: That’s a fascinating observation. It’s also one that’s hard to practice sometimes because sometimes you’ll meet someone and you’re thinking the last thing I wanna do is learn something from him. But I guess you can, right? I guess you really can.
46:02 Learn what to do, what not to do. But that’s interesting that you said that you came from that perspective, you know, from being at Cambridge. Last part of that question is, you know, to the 20-year-old that’s listening to us somewhere in the world, you know, that wants to kind of be involved in all of this energy around here, whether it’s, you know, you can call it tech, but I guess it’s really innovation and really change. You know, what advice do you give to them?
46:21 What’s the best thing they can do themselves to become part of the ecosystem?
46:29 Charles Armstrong: Well, so I think right now, when the world is full of so many kinds of fear and all kinds of things that looked very certain through the 20th century now look very uncertain, that’s imposing all kinds of burdens on young people looking to the future, because it’s harder and harder to see what that future is going to be. And so what I’ll say to anyone out there who’s just pondering what life should hold is be optimistic.
47:11 Be excited about the future. Go out and take risks. Go out and try things that you’re fundamentally interested in. And let that guide what you do. You’ll discover what you’re good at.
47:26 You’ll discover what you’re bad at and you’ll learn quickly and you’ll have some bumps and bruises along the way. But I think more than any period in history, this is an era when we all need to be entrepreneurs, when we all need to start out with that mentality that we’re going to vigorously go into the unknown because the reality is the future for all of us is now pretty much unknown. And the more we can develop that literacy around risk and observation and quick learning, and the more that we can be optimistic and see the possibilities of positive futures, then the better things are gonna turn out for us individually, but also for society as a whole.
48:12 Brian Rose: It’s good advice. I have a recent mentor I’ve met and he has a phrase which is just do it and it’s funny how much you can learn by not theorizing, like you were said, by not always reading a book about it, by not always Googling it, but sometimes just by doing it, which is how you’ve learned through the trampery iterations over the years. So that’s good advice, very good advice indeed. How can people get in touch with you if they wanna become members of the trampery old street or move in there or get involved with publicist?
48:39 What’s the best way?
48:40 Charles Armstrong: Well, you can go to our website, which is thetrampery.com, find lots of information there and get in touch with us. But equally, just come knock on the door, We’re always happy to see people, we’re still in the face of, we love showing people around because it’s still like, it’s exciting for us every time. So come visit.
48:59 Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s got that new car smell when you walk in and yeah, you got to come just to see the wallpaper.
49:05 It’s off the charts. I took a few pictures, I’m gonna send them out later, but the pictures don’t do it justice because it really feels like I’m being transformed back. And like you said, it’s a great conversation piece. You want to show people around when they come in. It gives people that extra kind of fun feeling, good feeling and I can see how it’ll just make collaboration, you know, and work it better. So, fantastic. I’m so glad we hooked up. It’s just so nice to see more positive energy in this space and the collaboration aspect, you know. I’m glad that people aren’t fighting over territory here and, you know, you can be inspired by what someone else does and so I like to see that. And the fact that you said it’s not about tech workspaces anymore, it’s every workspace is benefiting from that and so that’s gonna be exciting to see. So, So fantastic, if you’re listening to us on iTunes you can see Charles’s multi-colored trousers on our channel on YouTube and also we’re putting out trailers now every Friday.
49:58 So right before people go out for drinks on Friday around three or four o’clock you can get 40 seconds of the previous guest and then you can watch us live obviously on Friday afternoons. So come check that out, we’re on Twitter at Silicon Real and we’d love guest suggestions and let us know who you want to see in the future. We always say it’s about the people which is what I think the theme is in this tech scene And I’ve sat down with so many fantastic people that are making this all you know happen And it’s a lot of fun to be here
50:19 Charles Armstrong: Thank you so much, and I love the space and I hope to come back soon
50:22 Brian Rose: Thank you so much been a pleasure talking to you today all right take care this week on silicon real we have Saranga Chandra Talake Partner at Balderton Capital.
