Wistia’s practically bootstrapped. Its offices are in Central Square. They can’t be much to look at it.
Hardly a startup, the video marketing tech company has been around since 2006, growing to 40 employees on just $1.4 million in angel investment. It hasn’t raised any venture capital at all. I guess it’s what venture capitalists call a lifestyle business.
Some lifestyle. The office is awesome. Take a look at the photos.
“Spiral staircase, full kitchen, full bar, golden retriever. We broke a lot of rules,” said Kenneth Williams, associate director at MIT Investment Management Co., which is Wistia’s landlord and built out the space, incorporating many of its tenant’s suggestions.
MIT wants to build more space like this in Kendall Square for more companies like Wistia.
MIT owns about 5.3 million square feet of commercial real estate in and around Kendall and Central Square, according to its latest Town Gown report. The institute’s mission to accommodate entrepreneurial spin-outs has led it into unorthodox investments like Cambridge Innovation Center and LabCentral, both of which call it landlord.
Those facilities have proven adept at accommodating new startups; MIT also leases entire buildings to pharma giants like Pfizer and Novartis. In the middle, there’s not much available, officials say.
“In between we’re struggling,” said MITIMCO Managing Director Steven Marsh. “… How do we accommodate the people who are growing out of startup spaces?”
Joe Ringenberg, Wistia’s design lead, had answers for the Institute.
When it looked at moving into 17 Tudor St. in 2013, Wistia wanted to duplicate something about its first location, a narrow, loft-like building in Davis Square.
“We…worked in every single kind of configuration. We all worked around one table. We all worked in different parts of the office in isolation. We would rearrange our desks randomly,” Ringenberg said. “When we grew out of our old space where we really started feeling the pain was that we were never able to do that kind of constant movement. … We simply didn’t have that kind of flexibility any more.”
The result is a 13,500-square-foot office that’s mostly wide open. Downstairs is one large meeting room and several smaller ones. A kitchen has a large hood over the range, a long, high table and big windows. The first thing you see when you come in the front door is a ping pong table, foosball and–oh, yes–steady rings suspended from a beam in the ceiling (like in the Olympics).
Despite the frivolity, much of the office has a practical streak. When the couches in its main meeting and screening room got too crowded, they ordered pull-out bleachers, the kind you find in high-school auditoriums. Much of the other seating is $112 wooden schoolroom chairs the company ordered from Hertz Furniture.
“They’re designed around what they’re going to be used for, and that really appeals to us,” Ringenberg said.
For MIT, attracting tenants at this stage of growth is a new frontier, and the institute wants to do that for multiple disciplines, similar to the group of major research buildings–the Broad Institute, the Koch Institute, the Stata Center–that cluster around Kendall Square.
“All the simple problems in the world have been solved,” Marsh said. For MIT to participate in solving the next set of problems, it seeks to build real estate that will accommodate a multidisciplinary meeting of the minds.
“It is Wistia’s living room on a city scale,” Marsh said. “That’s what we’re trying to achieve.”
