I spent the better part of today at Mozilla’s offices in Toronto – the workspace that my friend Nicholas Carlson at Valleywag labeled as ‘the worst in tech’.
Mozilla’s Toronto office is far from the worst tech workspace I’ve ever seen – in fact I’d rank it among the best small office spaces in tech I’ve visited.
Here are a few reasons why:
1) They’re located on top of a Beer Store (in Ontario you can’t go buy beer just anywhere, you have to go to The Beer Store). Here’s a pic of their physical building at 720 Spadina in Toronto (left) with shots of their building and door name plate below. And a shot of the view from the front of their office looking south (with the CN Tower in the background).
2) Instead of a ‘task board’ listing all of the different things that Mozilla staffers need to do, the Mozilla Toronto whiteboard is a listing of all the places near the office that they want to go to lunch (with a checkmark besides the places they visited)
3) The office itself is a nice open concept setup (no cubicles here).
4) Air Conditioning works really well. It was near 40 degrees Celsius (with the Humidex) in Toronto today, but you wouldn’t know it from the Mozilla Toronto offices which were as cool as a cucumber.
5) The people. It’s people that make a workspace. Check out the little vid I shot today giving a little tour of the Mozilla Toronto office...clearly not the worst in tech….(and thanks again to Mike Beltzner and the rest of the Mozilla team in Toronto for opening their doors to me today)