Surprise Rat Poison Day
Do it. Accept the invite.
Seven years ago I was sitting in my boss’s living room on New Year’s Eve while we crawled the error logs of our new domain registrar product. Without looking away from his laptop screen, and without any context, he told me “we’re opening an office in Lisbon. You should do it. Want to?”
I responded with “sure” and we returned to our EPP investigation.
My company sent a landing party of six or seven team members from our offices in San Francisco, Austin, and London. We mostly came from different teams, but nearly all of us worked in some sort of R&D function – including the CTO at the time who joined. We assembled this particular group to help open up the new location and start recruiting. Most of us planned to move to Portugal on 12 or 18-month secondment agreements.
We all heard a few different rumored opening days but no one sent a formal email. So we sort of trickled into a coworking space over the course of a week. I wound up being the first to arrive by a day or two. I began to set up shop in what will always be my favorite office.
Two goobers, an older Dutch guy and his younger Portuguese colleague, ran the most half-assed coworking space this side of the Atlantic. I loved it so much. Every single day was a new cartoonish mishap that made me furious and delighted at the same time.
The coworking space occupied half of a floor in a building that housed some aristocratic family in a prior century and had since been subdivided. If a coworking staff member was present to buzz you up (which was not guaranteed) you walked into a hallway reception space. A rotation of two or three part-time models “staffed” the desk and exactly zero of them wanted to work there.
Once inside, if you turned right you would find a small kitchen with an Ikea table and one minifridge (European-sized mini). Behind the kitchen sat two rooms. One was a shared conference room with a giant mounted picture of sardines. The other was a small open office leased to four or five developers. Brazilian by their accents. They worked for some unknown company. The door to their space was a single pane of glass which gave them a fishbowl vibe. We never once talked to them. They never once acknowledged us. We just made soulless eye contact with each other sometimes. I laugh every time I think about that.
The charm extended to the decor. I think the dudes who ran the coworking space had never stepped foot into a WeWork, but had watched YouTube videos of WeWork tours, pausing at moments to note things like “oh, ok, these nerds love cucumbers in water. Write that down.” Their screenshot vision board translated to a jug of room-temperature water with a single slice of cucumber that they refilled maybe four times in our eight months there. Everything in the space felt like a slightly “off,” store brand version of a real WeWork.
Our particular unit must have been the dining room back in the day. We could fit desks and chairs for about 16 people. That is, we could fit about 16 people when the coworking team remembered they had leased it to us. In our first week they had forgotten that we were starting and rented our room to some kind of event for a couple of days. The handful of us who had already arrived worked from the sardine conference room.
Outside our space you could find a bathroom that featured a shower. Not in a separate stall, though. This shower head loomed directly above the toilet like the blade of a guillotine. I assume this allowed the coworking space to advertise the venue as great for bike commuters. And, to their credit, we did use that shower all the time. If your elbow swung too wide while zipping your fly you bumped the shower and returned to your desk dripping wet. It was common enough that everyone would look at you, say nothing, and get back to their work.
The office lacked air conditioning which was a problem because the Portuguese held elections that summer. In some neighborhoods the political parties still campaign by driving around in a car with a loudspeaker strapped to the roof shouting slogans and encouraging people to remember that the Communist Party is the true home of the heroes of the revolution that overthrew the fascist regime in 1974. We would leave the windows open to catch a breeze and the latest campaign updates. That August was the last time I knew more about Portuguese politics than my very informed, Portuguese-speaking wife.
Despite the chaos, or more likely because of it, our little landing team grew close. Communities like this develop their own culture. You spend all of your time around each other, in a foreign place without other friends, vaguely lost together. Intense rivalries developed around silly tabletop games. Everyone had seen nearly everyone else cry at some point.
The isolation, the rudimentary space, the objective to build, and the team size made us feel like a mission to Mars. We were six or seven astronauts from different backgrounds sharing a small office/habitat with supplies for one year, trying not to kill one another, as we set the groundwork in motion for something bigger.
We even experienced the same kind of communication round trip delays that future Martian settlers will encounter. One morning our global IT team accidentally disabled our enterprise email and chat tools. Three of us, all Texans, were in the habitat that morning - our signal to our home planet suddenly lost. We wondered aloud if we had been fired. No one was awake yet in the United States and we did not know the phone numbers of any colleagues in London. So we went and got a coffee while waiting for Earth to acknowledge our transmission.
We also struggled with local communication. We had one colleague in that initial team who spoke Portuguese. We will always be in her debt. And when she was not around, we found ourselves in danger.
Like on Surprise Rat Poison Day. The same three Texans who were there the morning that we lost comms were also working late one evening as summer started to turn into autumn. The sun had set and we were illuminated by our laptop screens; we often forgot to turn on the lights as it got dark.
Suddenly a gruff, round, mustachioed Portuguese man walked into our space. He wore the beginnings of a hazmat suit and looked as surprised to see us as we were to see him. He began to gesture and grumble at us in Portuguese, a language that none of us spoke at that time.
Eventually he kept repeating the Portuguese word for rat, rato, and making a throat slicing motion with his hand. Fortunately, that word is close enough to the English that our group of brilliant morons realized that he was there to exterminate the rats in the office (this is also how we learned there might be rats in the office). He then zipped up his suit and started spreading powder without waiting for us to leave. We scurried out of there as quickly as the actual ratos.
That first space was never going to last. It was just a beachhead. Since then, we have grown to more than 350 people and our progression of office spaces reflects that journey. Each became bigger, and a bit more full-featured, until a few months ago when we opened a spectacular new home along the Tejo River. We finished out an entire floor of a new building. We have a common area for hosting events with panoramic views of Ponte 25 de Abril. A library hides inside a designated quiet area. We have multiple, American-sized, refrigerators.
When people visit the first thing they do is ask if they can take photos. I understand why. I love the place. When I am in Lisbon you can find me there five days a week.
We recently threw a party to celebrate our new office. The Portuguese Minister of the Economy cut an actual ribbon. I gave a tour. And the handful of us who opened the doors of that first location in Chiado, who still work at Cloudflare in Lisbon, felt joy at seeing that our Martian colony had become sustainable. Even if we felt a tinge of longing for the smell of rat poison.
If you are ever asked to consider being part of a new office, do it. Or at least don’t say “no” outright. Trust me. All we are is a collection of relationships and stories. Opening a new location adds to both.