For the first 6 weeks we were so sick of moving that we didn't even begin to thing about making the office look nice, it just needed to be functional. Propping whiteboards against walls or rolling them around on chairs was fine and as long as we had wifi we were in heaven. It was good to hang out in the space a bit before ordering stuff, to get a sense for where the natural hangout areas were.

This is what each new employee gets to start working. If you have nothing else and your office is a mess, having their stuff all set up so they can start working right away is a great way to show how important they are to you and the team. Don't make them download all the required stuff, take care of it for them and they'll thank you. We don't force anyone to use Macs, but the the 13" solid state MacBook Air has been the preferred laptop for our team of 7.

We have several people who bike, and bikes were often strew around in random places. The biggest problem was handlebars constantly scraping up the walls, so once we built out the phones and had a big new blank wall we decided it was time to put up bike racks. I had a Task Rabbit who is bike messenger and rack-hanging expert (he goes by "The Hangman") come in, and he warned me that he has seen a lot of people tear holes in their walls without an anchoring piece of wood.

Our "common area" is basically the only place to hang out other than your desk or a conference room, so it usually is where people eat lunch, gather for informal brainstorming, or to take a break and play Xbox. We wanted to find an inexpensive way for it comfortably seat all 15 of us, so we decided on a massive rug instead of multiple couches, to save both space and money.

The conference room is important because your potential hires, potential customers, and potential investors will all likely spend time with you in there. Think about annoyances from past conference rooms, like awkward moments trying to connect to the projector, and try to fix them. It's not about making the room expensive to impress people, it's about making it functional so you can focus on hospitality and the important meeting you're about to have. Set it up, and forget about it.

At first our open office space was perfect for us, and people would just wander into various corners to take phone calls. But as our teams grew and businesses had more customers it became clear there wasn't enough space to hold a professional call. When people hear tons of background noise they assume you're not a real company. We worked with our landlord to build out 3 phone rooms for a reasonable cost, using pre-existing building plans from another company in the same building.

We have a unique problem, which we didn't notice when we toured the space in August (the dead of winter for San Francisco). It get really really hot in the afternoon when the light streams through our huge windows. Getting great natural light turned out to be both a blessing and a curse. The temperature can go from a comfortable 68 to blistering 85 around noon. At first curtains sounded like a really stupid and expensive thing to worry about, but combined with the hideous blinds behind them the space looks nice and blocks out the sun effectively.