The instructions for Friday night were mostly about the desks.
Leave them clean. Put anything private in the small conference room. The guest list was almost full, and the office needed to stop looking like an office for a few hours.
OneButton Studios was hosting another live session in its Brooklyn space. Doors opened at eight for drinks. Jane Herships and her band Spider were set to play at nine. I forwarded the invitation to a friend and went over that night.
This was one of the things I liked about New York. A room could do one job all day and become something else after people closed their laptops. There was no giant stage or giant production. It was a band in a working space, with the crowd close enough to see every cable and hear the room itself.
The week around it was full of normal Reonomy work. Hiring calls, product conversations, technical reviews, and an org chart that needed to be uploaded to the company wiki. I had also just booked a week of cycling in South Carolina. Friday night did not resolve any of that. It was simply somewhere else to be for a few hours.
The photograph matters because the email can only describe the plan. It shows the room after the desks were cleared and the event actually began. The band is playing. People are standing around the office. The plain setup is the whole point.
I have spent a lot of my career around startups, and many of the good memories are not formal company milestones. They are rooms like this one. Somebody had an idea for the space, sent a short list of instructions, invited people over, and made the office feel completely different by nine o'clock.
Monday could turn it back into a workplace. Friday night belonged to the music.