Third places and neighborhood entrepreneurship (2024)
79 comments
·June 25, 2025postexitus
Turkish Starbucks and its local equivalents are usually open until 2am. Don't have an idea on the impact on entrepreneurship though.
PartiallyTyped
Dublin has a big problem with 3rd spaces; no cafe is open for anywhere close to that, and we are all basically shoved to pubs..
I used to sit at cafes pretty late with a laptop — buying multiple ( >= 2 ) cups of coffee, often salads and sandwiches — in the countries I lived in, but there’s none of that in Ireland. Most non-chain cafes are not open past 17; and chains go on until 20.
hiAndrewQuinn
1. This is actually a really cool idea for a website. Is this powered by NotebookLM or some such?
2. Coffee shops are probably my favorite Third Place in general. Here in northern Europe, I've heard of some attempts at Costco-like coffee shops where you pay a yearly membership fee, somewhere between $50-100, for the ability to purchase coffee from there, but the coffee itself is quite cheap. You can usually bring some number of friends or colleagues as well. I'd really like to see this model take off, if they can solve some of the adversarial concerns with it (e.g. it probably shouldn't become a replacement for a full time office, but regular 2-3 hour work sessions seem ideal).
moritonal
Politely, on point 1 I disagree entirely. At a glance I thought it was a parking domain and closed it because I figured their site had crashed. Likely because the "Listen Now" looks exactly like a Google Advert and the jump in gradient for the other element.
WasimBhai
I definitely agree but as a poor graduate student, this was the cheapest domain I could find.
0xWTF
Just clarifying for thread (pretty sure OP understands) it's not the domain name that's sketchy, it's the page style.
moritonal
Hey, yeah, the site name is great, I'll never judge that. And even as design goes it's not "bad", it's just not as great as the parent comment originally implied.
I originally mistook the site as an ad-website because of how it's designed, which lead to me leaving. The neat part, is that's pretty easy for you to fix, so best of luck.
hiAndrewQuinn
That sounds more like a design issue than an issue with the fundamental idea behind the website. 3 to 4 minute audio clips breezing over interesting new papers still seems near.
thucydides
Yes, I had the same experience. OP should refresh the design
WasimBhai
Thank you. I deeply value the feedback.
dmbche
You can look for 'anti-cafes", where crackers and coffee is free but you pay for the time you're there, it was somewhat popular a few years back
frollogaston
I love coffee shops but don't like coffee very much, and they usually don't prioritize tea. Wish tea were more popular in the US.
WasimBhai
Thank you. Previously it was NotebookLM but now I am doing the entire thing, music choice, dialogues editing.
hiAndrewQuinn
Oh, that's interesting. Did you find NotebookLM's dialogue wasn't getting you the tone you were after?
WasimBhai
Yes. And there is no music to make you feel the place.
postexitus
What do you use to sound the back and forth dialogue?
wagwang
> First, we compare census tracts that received a Starbucks to census tracts that expected a Starbucks but did not ultimately get one due to administrative issues such as city planning, zoning board rejection, architectural board rejection, or community mobilization. These ‘rejected’ Starbucks are a natural control group because Starbucks Corporation also sought to invest in those neighborhoods.
This is a terrible control group cuz it probably means that the cities that rejected starbucks have idiotic zoning and permit policies that impact entrepreneurship. Like SF, any restaurant that has over 7 locations requires special permitting and can be easily blocked.
hinkley
They’re usually called “third spaces” not third places. Otherwise you’d confuse them with bronze medal winners.
picardo
I'd be interested to see an update to this study in the coming years. Starbucks has been pivoting towards take out and mobile orders and removing tables and chairs entirely from some of its stores lately.
ghaff
I don't dispute that there may be a trend but a lot of Starbucks have long had pretty scanty seating--and certainly tables where you can reasonably meet and talk. And it can be fairly difficult to find a table at more traditional cafes/coffeeshops. So there's reasonable debate over whether a lot of coffeeshops are really third places.
walterbell
> debate over whether a lot of coffeeshops are really third places
What are some examples of real third places in major US cities?
sneak
The third places in the United States are almost exclusively churches and bars. It’s sort of gross.
As a teetotaling atheist, I moved to Berlin for the universities and night clubs, as there are tons of social events associated with both.
padraic7a
Public Libraries.
walterbell
If neighborhood entrepreneurs would benefit from seating, cities can require a minimum number of chairs per square foot, starting with a non-zero number to address US Starbucks locations that have removed all chairs.
sorcerer-mar
Or they can just get rid of Euclidean zoning and allow people to create small commercial enterprises in their actual neighborhoods so actual neighbors can easily spend time there.
picardo
Mixed use zoning is quite common in major American cities. It's much more complicated to implement than Euclidean zoning, though, so I assume it faces some adoption challenges in smaller cities.
prmph
Or, the kind of people who are likely to create startups are drawn to cities that are big on coffee shop culture.
As usual the direction of causation is a bit difficult to tease out
j_w
The brief summary on the actual paper (https://www.nber.org/papers/w32604):
"...tracts that received a Starbucks saw an increase in the number of startups of 9.1% to 18% (or 2.9 to 5.7 firms) per year, over the subsequent 7 years. A partnership between Starbucks and Magic Johnson focused on underprivileged neighborhoods produced larger effects."
Seems like third places have strong effects here.
wanderingbit
This isn’t enough information about the study to tease out cause and effect. There may be a third confounding variable that positively impacts both entrepreneurship growth and Starbucks growth.
For instance, what if Starbucks only decides to move into neighborhoods that have reached a certain level of economic growth (ie number of households, number of business, etc…)? Neighborhood economic growth would likely attract entrepreneurs as well, and we wouldn’t be able to conclude that Starbucks had anything to do with entrepreneurship growth.
Said a different way, would adding Starbucks in the middle of the Atacama desert grow Peruvian entrepreneurs? I mean come on it’d be the only third space around!
I can’t read the full paper because I don’t have a subscription, but the fact that they don’t call this out in the abstract makes me doubt it’s a meaningful conclusion.
thinkingtoilet
I wonder if it's more free wifi and an air conditioned/heated room than anything else.
potato3732842
What throws a big wrench into determining causation is that Starbucks tries to avoid opening where there isn't already a sufficient customer base.
Even if you do manage to tease out causation tech and other "sophisticated" industry startups are also just the tip of the entrepreneurship iceberg.
The bulk of the area under the curve of a city's wealth is the long tail of blue collar people who wouldn't voluntarily associate with the kind of people who go to Starbucks starting and making moves to grow businesses that HN snobs don't even notice.
dghlsakjg
Blue collar people drink starbucks, HN isn't a monolith of elite snobs. Please don't use unfounded or un-provable negative stereotypes to try to make a point.
If you read the article, you see that the effect was pronounced in lower income areas where a natural experiment was effectively run with Magic Johnson's intervention. Which kind of goes directly against what you are saying.
PaulHoule
My snobbish take that always gets downvoted was that you couldn't get a good cup of coffee in NYC during the 1990s. [1] There seemed to be two or three Starbucks on most blocks, probably because they thought they could fool stock market analysts into thinking it was that way coast to coast (like Duane Reade?) Independent espresso bars, which you could find in any mid-sized city in a flyover state by then, were driven out and you were left with bodegas and Jewish delis that served terrible gas station coffee at best.
Not long after, this Ithaca company
opened up a shop in Brooklyn and won an award for best coffee in the city, half because they have great coffee, half because they had no competition. It is better now, but the standard for gas station coffee is vastly higher thanks to things like
https://concordiacoffee.com/products-tag/convenience-stores/
[1] An astonishing hotbed of conformity. Sitting out in front of the headquarters of Fox News I was told that my wife and I were the freakiest looking people they'd seen in NYC and we only had matching costumes of t-shirts, jeans, ALICE packs and boonie caps with plastic flowers.
nemomarx
I think you have to assume the ability to meet other people like that helps in founding start ups though?
null
bravesoul2
In SF? Not anywhere I've been though. Cafes I see are full of friends catching up, families or caffeine addicts.
sneak
I’m pretty sure I would move to a city anywhere in the world based primarily on the availability of high quality 24 hour third places.
y-curious
With an American-centric view, how do you deal with homeless people using them as shelter? Like, Korea/Japan have those cheap gaming booths, but that would never work in America because of the aforementioned issue. The want would be an exclusive third place that has the people you'd want to meet with.
sneak
Third place doesn’t mean free. Churches and bars (the existing American third places) seem to have mechanisms for addressing this presently.
ghaff
I question how many people would want to hang in 24-hour third spaces beyond spaces that are open to some reasonably late evening hour.
dghlsakjg
Not many. But the existence of them in a place points towards a certain culture.
You see them not necessarily in places like wall street, but more in places with strong intellectual culture like universities and artsy neighborhoods.
I can use the existence of a country club as a useful signal about a place without being a member, or having any interest in it.
walterbell
> points towards a certain culture
Also points towards local labor law and market.
sneak
Go to some clubs in Berlin sometime :)
the_real_cher
Hell yeah same.
Where though?
West coast and Gulf Coast where Ive lived have very few.
dghlsakjg
Look near universities and in the weird/artsy neighborhoods.
null
anovikov
I really can't imagine how it could probably ever work. So one goes into Starbucks and start bugging other random people sitting there (with whatever topic, not just pushing their "elevator pitch" onto them)? If that happened people will start avoiding them just like they avoid places frequented by bums or beggars. No one wants that. People won't go where it is possible.
dghlsakjg
The entrepreneurial people I know are incredibly social. They don't mind having, or striking up a conversation they weren't anticipating, or learning about strangers. It frequently isn't about business, but leads to networking regardless.
It isn't like they are bugging people, its more like they overhear a conversation or see something of interest and find a way to jump in, in a way that isn't intrusive. "I can't help having overheard, but are you planning to open a Taco truck on 5th?" That kind of thing.
hinkley
I have manned a booth at a trade show twice in my younger days. When you’re a little fish at a trade show, you get people chatting with you not because they’re interested in your product, but to gather more data about where the industry is and where it is going. We actually tried not to engage them too much because it distracts from other people who might actually be interested.
hiAndrewQuinn
Typical mind fallacy. When I go visit places like this I do so with the explicit intention of meeting other people, otherwise I'd just stay at home.
Plus, isn't the claim literally that there is correlational evidence here? That lightly suggests your model of how the world works in this area is off.
TimorousBestie
Cultural observations are not instances of typical mind fallacy, you’re reading OP too literally.
hiAndrewQuinn
It's not a cultural observation. No society founded upon good commerce could possibly get by without the mechanism OP is describing being encouraged in at least some public or semi-public spaces. You need to actually intract with people to trade with them.
ekholm_e
I used to work as a barista, and we had several entrepreneurs/small business owners who worked at the shop regularly. Most were friendly with one another. I'm not sure if any actually did business together, but they definitely chatted here and there.
worldsayshi
I think a more likely scenario is that you schedule meetups with people that have similar interests.
ghaff
Yeah. If I'm going to meetup with someone outside of a conference room or whatever (probably associated with some other event), it will probably be a coffeeshop. But I'm not going to be inclined to strike up a bunch of random conversations at one.
i remember koramangala, 5th block specifically, mid 2023. that blue tokai outlet next to roastery was ground zero. half of early stage bangalore was working from there. two pm to six pm you'd overhear: investor calls, pitch deck review, even product teardown with some YC alum. no seats inside so i parked at the outside bench near the window. wifi barely reached there. next to me this guy's debugging something on a steamdeck looking devkit. i half glance over and ask if it's AWS creds, he goes 'nah, it's some edge TPU , google keeps timing out cold starts'. we start chatting.
turns out he's building vision for offline-first retail. he's got no frontend, just a python backend. i scribble something on a napkin about fast-booting wasm modules from disk cache. 3 weeks later he pings me on telegram saying they got boot time down from 14s to 2.8s using a variant of that.
never met him again. never even learned his startup's name. but that entire bottleneck cleared because two people overheard a swear word near a bad socket.
we maynot recreate that on a discord channel. there's no incentive to overshare when you're not spatially co-located. bangalore 2023 worked because entropy was high and friction was low