Founders want compute and the bench in one building

On October 10, John Furr of Base Layer Robotics posted a photo and one line on X: "It's going to be so freaking nice to have compute and lab/workshop in the same space."

My read: that is a founder looking forward to the end of a commute between his own rooms. It is also a useful note for anyone who runs a research park.

The problem: one company, three addresses

A deep-tech company rarely needs one kind of room. A robotics team needs a bench to build on, a place to test, and machines to run its software. A device team needs a lab, a desk, and a room to meet an investor. When those sit at three addresses, the company spends part of every week in the car.

Founders notice that cost before anyone else does. Specifically, they notice it the day they stop paying it. That is what Furr's post reads like.

What the builders are building

Two other posts from the same week point in the same direction.

On October 7, Jonas of The Collective announced a New York headquarters in Chelsea: a 6,000-square-foot loft with private offices, a maker-space, a content room, a kitchen, and a lounge. His reasoning was plain: "There are very few good coworking spaces in NYC." He also reported that the group's fourth cohort filled in three weeks, with more than 450 applications (post).

The same day, Farhaj Mayan introduced Forma Campus in Bristol, England, with one sentence: "We built a sanctuary for founders" (post). The post does not list what is inside. It does say who the building is for.

None of these is a South Dakota project, and the posts are short. But the direction is consistent. The people building space for founders are putting the making, the computing, and the working under one roof, and the maker-space now sits on the floor plan next to the private offices.

What this means for a research park

My understanding is that most research parks already know deep-tech tenants want lab space. The harder question is the mix. A founder reading a park listing is trying to answer four questions:

• Is there a bench or shop I can use on day one?
• Is there enough power and network for the compute my product needs?
• Is there a private room for the conversations that cannot leave the building?
• How far is any of that from my desk?

The listing that wins answers all four on one page: one address, one lease, one walk down the hall.

That is not a construction problem first. It is a communication problem. Many parks already have more of this mix than their materials show. A shop on another floor, a shared conference room, or a tenant with spare bench time rarely makes it into the listing. As a result, the founder never learns it exists.

Where Thel sits

Thel Consulting handles marketing, tenant recruitment, and developer recruitment for the USD Discovery District, where Building 1 is a named project. We also wrote the 2023, 2024, and 2025 Mapping the Growth Potential market studies for the district. That work keeps us close to this question: what a deep-tech company needs, what a park can actually offer, and how to say both plainly.

What's next

Furr's post was one photo and one sentence. It was enough to say what he wanted. The next step for a park is to make sure its own listing says as much.

For more on this work, see our 2024 AURP conference presentation, Discovering the future of research parks: flexible master planning + strategic marketing, the 2025 South Dakota bioscience market study, and the 2024 market study update for the USD Discovery District.

Sources

• John Furr, Base Layer Robotics, post on X, October 10, 2026: x.com/johnfurr538500/status/2108951765953466554
• Jonas, The Collective, post on X, October 7, 2026: x.com/jonaasw1/status/2107884361588895893
• Farhaj Mayan, Forma Campus, post on X, October 7, 2026: x.com/farhaj/status/2107884918743388219