Pangea.app, the startup behind a platform to connect companies with college students for freelance work, has a new headquarters: a house in Providence where co-founders Adam Alpert and John Tambunting, along with lead designer Tae Sam Lee Zamora, all live together.
"We all hear stories of how startups in the early 2000s burst out of a garage in Silicon Valley," Alpert told Rhode Island Inno. "There's no reason you can't do that now in a house in Providence."
Alpert and Tambunting, who head up Pangea as CEO and CTO, respectively, have lived in the house together since 2017. Zamora moved in this summer. While Pangea maintains an office at RIHub on Dyer Street, the pandemic has essentially turned the house into the startup's home base as the team embraces lockdown together. Prior to Gov. Gina Raimondo's "pause," business development specialist Kacie Galligan was commuting from her mother's home in North Providence to the house as well.
Alpert spent much of the summer quarantining in New York with his family, but once he returned to the Ocean State in the fall, the team decided to embrace hack house life. They made a group trip to IKEA, painted the walls in two shades of blue, put up color-changing LED lights, installed new curtains and bought a massive whiteboard from Amazon. Then, they removed all the furniture from the dining room and replaced it with four adjustable-height desks and chairs. A portion of the house is now dedicated solely to Pangea activity, with the actual "living" happening elsewhere.
"[It's] kind of like our own hackathon," Alpert said.
So far, things seem to be working out. Alpert says that living together has significantly increased Pangea's productivity levels. The startup has helped students on its platform collectively make more than $200,000 in 2020, and the team is already preparing for 2021, planning to release a new web application in mid-January and announce new student-focused programs.
"The pandemic has provided us a good excuse to kind of shut the rest of the world out and shut ourselves into the house and get our heads down working," Alpert said. "We have no reason to be leaving. We have nothing that we have to leave for. We order delivery in. We have an excuse to not go out on the weekends. We have an excuse to stay home and work."
Alpert expects Pangea will maintain its space in RIHub until early next summer. By then, he hopes that Pangea will have secured new funding, his team will be vaccinated against Covid-19, and it will be time for the startup to outgrow the five-person coworking spot anyway. (The startup just raised another $352,500 in equity, per a new securities filing.) The future of offices in general remains to be seen, but Pangea will likely have a space apart from both RIHub and the hack house.
But for the time being, living together has its benefits. Alpert says it has filled a crucial gap left by remote work: social interaction among coworkers. Alpert isn't only wearing his CEO hat when he talks to his team, he says; he swaps it out daily for his "friend" hat and his "housemate" hat as well.
"Every day at lunch, we take time away from the office and take time away from the table," Alpert said. "That's one of the things we've lost in the pandemic. That water-cooler moment. That lunch-table moment. Every single interaction you have with your teammates feels transactional. I think there's exciting developments happening in the world of remote work that will feel more serendipitous, but it's hard to replicate."
