How we chose and furnished an office the Y Combinator way

They're at work, they're supposed to be suffering from eye strain. Desks facing walls is bad, because you can't shift your view to something distant to rest your eyes without turning around. And I wouldn't even dream of working anywhere that had the mentality "you should be working all the time so it doesn't matter who is looking over your shoulder". If I need to spend 5 minutes talking to the wife on IM, I am going to. If you have a problem with that, you're going to have a hard time hiring good people.

> "Meaning they decided to procrastinate instead of working on their product/service."

If they were truly procrastinating, you've got a point. But that's hardly implicit in having spent time and energy on a desk. You can't work productively 24x7. You need downtime.

And those desks, not to minimize the effort they did put into them, don't look like a huge time investment to me.

As to the ergonomics, sure: ideally you want adjustable desk height and some way to get monitors to a comfortable height. But how often have you found those qualities in the sub-$40 desks you'd have them buy?

Then why did they design their office to look like a starbucks?

I'm not sure if I'd be all that happy hacking away on a door desk. It's too rectangular and even with a good ergonomic chair I find my elbows aren't supported with my keyboard. I've worked on desks of similar size and shape and they just don't cut it.

I prefer a corner desk with a rounded, concave cutout. I can imagine with a bit of competitive pricing I could put one together for less than $100. I'd probably go with a birch or maple veneer plywood and stain it to the right color.

To be fair though, I'm a hobbyist woodworker and a lot of people don't have the inclination, patience, or skill to build a desk. There is also little point in DIY if what you can buy can be tax deducted as a business expense.

As the Cloudant Founder (YCS08) that opened the Seattle office, I really enjoy the diversity of this comment stream. I wrote this post because I thought it would provide some insight into our company, and because others may find it useful. We have been exceptionally busy building product, revenue and team. After fiddling with the prototype desk in my backyard, we ended up with something economical, fast, ergonomic and flexible. You may say we have a "scalable" desk design.

A bit more about the desks, to address some of the comments below. We can move the desks around easier than "L" shaped ikea frames and have tried multiple positions. I prefer to gaze at a brick wall for focus, others like to gaze out the window or into the room. The desks can be moved in the center of the room and "stacked" like a big lab bench for group hacking. They can also be assembled into mega "L" shaped desks if you need to, say, sort through 2 years of receipts. Getting the height right was a big challenge, and we didn't scrimp on chairs. We also have screws in the feet to adjust the height of the desks if needed. Laptop heat is a non-issue so far, and they don't require coasters.

Per the bigger picture, I'm glad to discuss/listen on the relative merits of team building, brand identity/pride, and balancing running a surprisingly large global data service if that's of interest. We did this for many reasons, but a major portion was to have some fun in the (exceptionally rare) off hours. I would say that building something mechanical and getting the chance to do manual labor is all too rare in my life, and something from which I derive deep satisfaction.

Also, I can't say this enough -- we got a huge assist from friends and family of Cloudant.