Lexington, Ky - Out of college less than half a decade, Jim D'Amico said he can work "anywhere in front of my glowing rectangle."
"It could be a coffee shop, it could be my house, next to a couple programmers, anywhere." But while he can work anywhere, not all places are equal.
"Space to me has a lot of meaning, especially when thinking of ideas and trying to focus," he said during an interruption of his time working on the third floor of 163 East Main during the third weekly Freelance Friday. "While coffee shops are really great for atmosphere and the people, and to drink a couple cups of coffee, to actually come up with something productive and work with other productive people, you have to have a good space."
A good space is what Randall Stevens wanted to create when he three others bought the building across East Main from Lexington Police headquarters, each occupying a floor.
Originally housing his former company Mersive Technologies - a company specializing in large scale HD displays that moved recently to Denver after Stevens left daily operations - and currently providing offices for Archvision, which specializes in image-based renderings, the contemporary floor has open space.
Rather than trying to lease the space en masse, Stevens now houses offices for small high-tech businesses, and every Friday, spaces that have not been rented are up for grabs. "There are a lot of one or two man shops who are working out of their home or they're sitting in coffee shops, so the idea is to get out of your normal environment, it may stimulate new thinking or creativity by going somewhere else," he said.
"I kind of view it as a rising tide floats all boats. You can't put your finger on it, but I just believe if I can help other creative companies around here be successful, it comes back. I'm in those businesses, I believe we need to have lots of them, you need to have enough volume of companies in order to have employee churn among these companies," Stevens said. "If somebody's not working out or decides they want to do something different, they need to have another option and not have to move to get that option."
Stevens said the idea came to him during April's Creative Cities Summit. "I've been really interested in the missing pieces of the grassroots, entrepreneurial companies. So what I turned my attention to was creating an environment where people will be more likely to be successful, not necessarily trying to incubate them, butÖ co-locating into these facilities together. The idea is when you get small companies, two, three, four people companies, you don't get the benefit of scale. So when you put a lot of these companies together, you at least get people you can bounce stuff off ofÖ it's like a de facto advisory board for one another."
Stevens has also used the Freelance Friday concept as a time and place for people to present the projects they are working on or business concepts in an event called Kritikē, from the Latin for critique.
An architectural grad from UK, Stevens said one of the earliest qualities instilled in him and his fellow students was the ability to be critiqued by both professors and peers. "You learn the value of it, you learn not to take it personally, it's critique, not criticism. I've been amazed that so many people aren't ever exposed to that and have a hard time separating critique from criticism. It's not personal, it's trying to workout and get the best thing," he said.
D'Amico's concept, OnCampus, a mobile web-based company aimed at universities and their students was the first to go under Kritikē's microscope.
"The invite list to Kritikē is business professionals who truly get down to practical measures of a business concept and talk about that in a very open and direct way. As long as participants with the concept come in with an open mind and are willing to have that acid poured on the idea, there's not a better more constructive forum," D'Amico said.
Freelance Friday is scheduled for every Friday on the third floor of 163 East Main. More info on Freelance Friday and Kritikē can be found at http://www.base163.com.