Here are some things I like about owning this space:
You don’t have to ask anyone’s permission to make modifications to it or to use it in unusual ways. For instance, if we want to cover every wall with whiteboards (as we’ve done in many rooms), we don’t have to ask anyone’s permission, we just order the boards, hire a few laborers, and have them cut them to size and nail them all along the walls. If I want to turn a 4-person team office into a 4-person bedroom, I just get a few people, carry the furniture into storage, carry some beds in, and we’re done. This means that in the span of just a few days whole buildings can be turned from one use case into another (e.g. from housing into a conference venue), as demand comes up. This is not true of rented office spaces (where you certainly cannot reliably sleep many people or do surgery to the walls) or chain hotels (I cannot ask a hotel to use a room as a team office for 3 montsh), and most residential spaces are far too small. As another datapoint about the limitations of rented spaces, the last office building I was using wouldn’t even allow us to have a fully-dark nap room due to regulations about lighting visibility in the event of a fire.
This space is much more aesthetically beautiful and harmonious with our intentions than most alternatives we could find in Berkeley. It is relatively central in Berkeley, yet has a large, private outdoor area that you can work from in the sun all day. The rooms are not inhuman exact squares with sterile lighting, they’re all unique shapes, often with nice old woods and we can install our own lighting. We’ve had the space to build a number of wooden outdoor huts to work from with electricity and soon-to-be-heated cushions. In my model of the world the aesthetics of a space really affect the sorts of affordances and feelings and problem-solving-approaches that people will consider. For example I think this sort of natural beauty helps people be more willing to go deep on an idea or hypothesis for a longer amount of time.
The space is made of 5 separate buildings, which gives a little village-like feel, and (we’re hoping) can allow some fairly different things to be happening on-site at the same time. In one building you could have a self-contained retreat (CFAR workshop, AI alignment workshop, etc), in another building a few x-risk focused teams could be getting work done in their offices as they have ever day for the last 2 months, another building could be having a weekly communal lunch open to 100+ people as well as hosting a few visitors in rooms upstairs who have flown in from out of town for a few weeks, etc. My hope is that the separate buildings can allow a lot of different things to be happening concurrently, and have natural boundaries between them.
Perhaps of interest, when we were considering alternative locations, the main other places that had the properties of my first two bullets were educational religious spaces. The School of Religion, the School of Theology, and a strange surprise-Buddhist-temple that Habryka and I unexpectedly found ourselves in one evening (as the woman was showing us around the school-like building, she fully walked past the temple doors, until I politely asked to look inside, and she unlocked them to show us a ~7k square foot room with a 40-foot high ceiling, filled with golden statues and colorful ribbons hanging from the ceiling and ancient texts inscribed on rotating pillars and 300 folding chairs and a big stage). These places had a lot of beauty. But one of them basically wasn’t on sale, and the other two were only partially on sale (we couldn’t have owned the whole property and would have to share with some religious groups, which is not a total dealbreaker but I strongly prefer having full ownership).
We also considered renting solely office spaces, which would have been much faster to get started with, and were on the verge of going through on a deal last year. But then at the last minute they explained the elevator needed replacing and would be out of use for the first 2 months of us living there (which is a pretty big obstruction for moving in all of our heavy furniture up ~3 floors). They wouldn’t negotiate at all on this and we walked away. I actually heard (epistemic status: I assign 75% to this being true, I have pinged the person who said this to me to double-check) that the elevator only actually got fixed around a month or two ago. To me not having to deal with this sort of thing is part of the advantage of having full-ownership I describe in the first bullet above.
(I googled and found their name and website, which has a history section about them here. The rest of this comment is a list of other links and recollections from our interaction with them that I found as I looked back into our chat logs and did a little googling, in case anyone is interested.)
Habryka linked it to me, I phoned the number to set up a viewing, we visited it that evening (10th March, 2022, the day after I turned 25). After Habryka and I visited that night I don’t believe we ever talked with them again.
We thought it was a coworking space (“Coworking With Wisdom”, 4 reviews on yelp, 39 google reviews) that was open to selling, but it turned out to primarily be a Buddhist space called Dharma College (whose website I’ve just found now for the first time).
The Executive Director, Wangmo Dixey, walked us around. My vague recollection is that her father had brought the family to America to spread their tradition of Tibetan Buddhism and he bought the place (Wikipedia says the building was bought in ’09), but for whatever reason she didn’t have as much demand for the space these days (it’s 35k square feet) so she was trying out renting it as a coworking space, and also was quite open to us renting the majority of the building while she had daily meditation classes upstairs (and ran other classes). We told her a bit about our community’s cognitive science / reductionist / AI background, I recall her suggesting it could be exciting to have shared public dialogues with invited Buddhists and rationalists about the mind and consciousness.
The space had a lot of windows and high ceilings and multiple kitchens and more, and I think we could get a lot of use out of it if we were there. If we did co-own I thought many people would quite like the affordance of an upstairs daily meditation session at lunchtime.
I tried to find online photographs of the Temple inside, but there are none. This combined with her initial intent to not unlock the doors for us, makes me think they’ve intentionally made it a secret space and kept photographs off the internet. I think both Habryka and I were somewhat awed by the temple room and I remember positively reinforcing myself for overcoming the slight social awkwardness in asking to go back and open those doors. I recall using the word ‘glorious’ when describing the room as we walked out of it.
The Dharma College site has more about their traditions. Its history can be found here (including a photograph of Dixey and her father at a ceremony at the White House in 2021), and Dixey’s bio can be found here, where I’ve just learned that she has an honorary degree from Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya University in Thailand.
Interesting background. They sound like they are struggling and, like many organizations (not to mention, individuals), wound up buying more house than they could handle—I imagine that COVID was probably a bad thing for large urban temples like that, and it’s not like the Bay Area was undersupplied with various flavors of Buddhism AFAICT. If a Buddhist temple is trying to run a coworking space on the side, they must have a lot of excess room indeed. Might be worth keeping in touch for overflow or backup purposes? They sound well-equipped for conferences or other functions.
I do agree it’s likely they’d be very open to a deal. In general office space in the Bay has taken a nosedive in terms of prices since many tech companies have stayed remote post-pandemic, and a lot of places will take any deal you offer them (I know places that previously would only consider 12-24 month leases will now jump at a month-to-month).
But we have (rough estimate) ~24k sq ft indoor space and ~20k sq ft outdoor space, the vast majority of which is not utilized and not got a set use planned, plus we’re renting a 9bdr house v nearby for overflow housing, so for now we’re certainly not looking for additional space!
These all sound like major benefits to owning the venue yourself!
To be clear, I don’t doubt at all that using the Inn for events is much better than non-purpose-built space. However, the Inn also has costs that renting existing spaces wouldn’t: I assume that purchasing and renovating it costs more than renting hotel spaces as-needed for events (though please correct me if I’m wrong!), and my impression is that it’s taken the Lightcone team a lot of time and effort over the past year+ to purchase and renovate, which naturally has opportunity costs.
I’m asking because my uninformed guess is that those financial and time costs outweigh the (very real) benefits of hosting events like you have been. I’m interested to hear if I’m just wrong about the costs, or if you have additional plans to make even more effective use of the space in the future, or if there’s additional context I’m missing.
ETA: Oli answered these questions below, so no need to respond to them unless you have something additional you’d like me to know.
Here are some things I like about owning this space:
You don’t have to ask anyone’s permission to make modifications to it or to use it in unusual ways. For instance, if we want to cover every wall with whiteboards (as we’ve done in many rooms), we don’t have to ask anyone’s permission, we just order the boards, hire a few laborers, and have them cut them to size and nail them all along the walls. If I want to turn a 4-person team office into a 4-person bedroom, I just get a few people, carry the furniture into storage, carry some beds in, and we’re done. This means that in the span of just a few days whole buildings can be turned from one use case into another (e.g. from housing into a conference venue), as demand comes up. This is not true of rented office spaces (where you certainly cannot reliably sleep many people or do surgery to the walls) or chain hotels (I cannot ask a hotel to use a room as a team office for 3 montsh), and most residential spaces are far too small. As another datapoint about the limitations of rented spaces, the last office building I was using wouldn’t even allow us to have a fully-dark nap room due to regulations about lighting visibility in the event of a fire.
This space is much more aesthetically beautiful and harmonious with our intentions than most alternatives we could find in Berkeley. It is relatively central in Berkeley, yet has a large, private outdoor area that you can work from in the sun all day. The rooms are not inhuman exact squares with sterile lighting, they’re all unique shapes, often with nice old woods and we can install our own lighting. We’ve had the space to build a number of wooden outdoor huts to work from with electricity and soon-to-be-heated cushions. In my model of the world the aesthetics of a space really affect the sorts of affordances and feelings and problem-solving-approaches that people will consider. For example I think this sort of natural beauty helps people be more willing to go deep on an idea or hypothesis for a longer amount of time.
The space is made of 5 separate buildings, which gives a little village-like feel, and (we’re hoping) can allow some fairly different things to be happening on-site at the same time. In one building you could have a self-contained retreat (CFAR workshop, AI alignment workshop, etc), in another building a few x-risk focused teams could be getting work done in their offices as they have ever day for the last 2 months, another building could be having a weekly communal lunch open to 100+ people as well as hosting a few visitors in rooms upstairs who have flown in from out of town for a few weeks, etc. My hope is that the separate buildings can allow a lot of different things to be happening concurrently, and have natural boundaries between them.
Perhaps of interest, when we were considering alternative locations, the main other places that had the properties of my first two bullets were educational religious spaces. The School of Religion, the School of Theology, and a strange surprise-Buddhist-temple that Habryka and I unexpectedly found ourselves in one evening (as the woman was showing us around the school-like building, she fully walked past the temple doors, until I politely asked to look inside, and she unlocked them to show us a ~7k square foot room with a 40-foot high ceiling, filled with golden statues and colorful ribbons hanging from the ceiling and ancient texts inscribed on rotating pillars and 300 folding chairs and a big stage). These places had a lot of beauty. But one of them basically wasn’t on sale, and the other two were only partially on sale (we couldn’t have owned the whole property and would have to share with some religious groups, which is not a total dealbreaker but I strongly prefer having full ownership).
We also considered renting solely office spaces, which would have been much faster to get started with, and were on the verge of going through on a deal last year. But then at the last minute they explained the elevator needed replacing and would be out of use for the first 2 months of us living there (which is a pretty big obstruction for moving in all of our heavy furniture up ~3 floors). They wouldn’t negotiate at all on this and we walked away. I actually heard (epistemic status: I assign 75% to this being true, I have pinged the person who said this to me to double-check) that the elevator only actually got fixed around a month or two ago. To me not having to deal with this sort of thing is part of the advantage of having full-ownership I describe in the first bullet above.
(I’d enjoy hearing more about the background/history of that temple.)
(I googled and found their name and website, which has a history section about them here. The rest of this comment is a list of other links and recollections from our interaction with them that I found as I looked back into our chat logs and did a little googling, in case anyone is interested.)
This was the LoopNet listing we responded to, where it advertises itself as a coworking space one block from the Downtown Berkeley BART station.
Habryka linked it to me, I phoned the number to set up a viewing, we visited it that evening (10th March, 2022, the day after I turned 25). After Habryka and I visited that night I don’t believe we ever talked with them again.
We thought it was a coworking space (“Coworking With Wisdom”, 4 reviews on yelp, 39 google reviews) that was open to selling, but it turned out to primarily be a Buddhist space called Dharma College (whose website I’ve just found now for the first time).
The Executive Director, Wangmo Dixey, walked us around. My vague recollection is that her father had brought the family to America to spread their tradition of Tibetan Buddhism and he bought the place (Wikipedia says the building was bought in ’09), but for whatever reason she didn’t have as much demand for the space these days (it’s 35k square feet) so she was trying out renting it as a coworking space, and also was quite open to us renting the majority of the building while she had daily meditation classes upstairs (and ran other classes). We told her a bit about our community’s cognitive science / reductionist / AI background, I recall her suggesting it could be exciting to have shared public dialogues with invited Buddhists and rationalists about the mind and consciousness.
The space had a lot of windows and high ceilings and multiple kitchens and more, and I think we could get a lot of use out of it if we were there. If we did co-own I thought many people would quite like the affordance of an upstairs daily meditation session at lunchtime.
I tried to find online photographs of the Temple inside, but there are none. This combined with her initial intent to not unlock the doors for us, makes me think they’ve intentionally made it a secret space and kept photographs off the internet. I think both Habryka and I were somewhat awed by the temple room and I remember positively reinforcing myself for overcoming the slight social awkwardness in asking to go back and open those doors. I recall using the word ‘glorious’ when describing the room as we walked out of it.
The Coworking with Wisdom website however links to a very faithful virtual tour of the rest of the building.
The Dharma College site has more about their traditions. Its history can be found here (including a photograph of Dixey and her father at a ceremony at the White House in 2021), and Dixey’s bio can be found here, where I’ve just learned that she has an honorary degree from Mahachulalongkornrajavidyalaya University in Thailand.
Interesting background. They sound like they are struggling and, like many organizations (not to mention, individuals), wound up buying more house than they could handle—I imagine that COVID was probably a bad thing for large urban temples like that, and it’s not like the Bay Area was undersupplied with various flavors of Buddhism AFAICT. If a Buddhist temple is trying to run a coworking space on the side, they must have a lot of excess room indeed. Might be worth keeping in touch for overflow or backup purposes? They sound well-equipped for conferences or other functions.
Coworking with Wisdom was around pre-pandemic, although that could mean they overbought years ago instead of recently.
I do agree it’s likely they’d be very open to a deal. In general office space in the Bay has taken a nosedive in terms of prices since many tech companies have stayed remote post-pandemic, and a lot of places will take any deal you offer them (I know places that previously would only consider 12-24 month leases will now jump at a month-to-month).
But we have (rough estimate) ~24k sq ft indoor space and ~20k sq ft outdoor space, the vast majority of which is not utilized and not got a set use planned, plus we’re renting a 9bdr house v nearby for overflow housing, so for now we’re certainly not looking for additional space!
These all sound like major benefits to owning the venue yourself!
To be clear, I don’t doubt at all that using the Inn for events is much better than non-purpose-built space. However, the Inn also has costs that renting existing spaces wouldn’t: I assume that purchasing and renovating it costs more than renting hotel spaces as-needed for events (though please correct me if I’m wrong!), and my impression is that it’s taken the Lightcone team a lot of time and effort over the past year+ to purchase and renovate, which naturally has opportunity costs.
I’m asking because my uninformed guess is that those financial and time costs outweigh the (very real) benefits of hosting events like you have been. I’m interested to hear if I’m just wrong about the costs, or if you have additional plans to make even more effective use of the space in the future, or if there’s additional context I’m missing.
ETA: Oli answered these questions below, so no need to respond to them unless you have something additional you’d like me to know.