Our avatars move... offices, that is!
Another milestone for Oddcast occurred this week when the company moved, for the second time.
The first time was in 1999 when the company moved out of our Founder’s basement into real offices on 8th Avenue. This time, we moved up to a deluxe apartment in the sky – or rather, two blocks away to 37th Street, between Broadway and 7th Avenue.
The need for the new office derived from the same need of the first move – more space - which just goes to show that there are more and more avatar-hungry people out there generating a lot of business for us.
A lot of thought was put in to how we could prepare Oddcast for continued growth. Obviously, for every new employee you hire, he or she is going to need a phone, a computer and a place to sit. These points could be considered the easy part of the job of setting up a new office. But even in a small company you can't escape the need to preserve the culture that has developed when you are only 20 people. When you are suddenly 60 people, you don't want people wondering, "Where did the cool go?"
Luckily, a big part of what Oddcasters think of as their culture is based on a high level of professionalism and technical proficiency. We have always been proud that when clients finally did see our office, they were shocked to realize that we could do so much with so few people. We felt further pride that we could do this on a shoestring budget using five year old computers. Of course, now we have much more modern computers and many more people. How does that reconcile with the "old Oddcast"? Only time will tell, but given the goals of the company, we expect that soon enough we will have people wondering once again how we could do it with so few people.
PS – We were welcomed by our new neighbors across the street that put up a welcome sign on their windows. So despite being the only non-garment producing company in the building, we are starting to feel right at home. We don't know who they are, but we'd love to get them a talking avatar for their website.
