This is both awesome and depressing.

Awesome he’s doing this.

Depressing it’s come to starting businesses in a god damn stairwell.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Simon Squibb, who retired at 40 after selling Fluid, his marketing agency, to PricewaterhouseCoopers, hopes the stairwell in Twickenham, south-west London, will provide a showcase for owners of small businesses.

Squibb, 49, is hoping to get permission from the local council to turn it into a pop-up shop, office or “live-work space” that entrepreneurs can use – potentially for up to a month at a time – free of charge.

“If I can, I’d like to say to someone: ‘Have it for a month, live there rent-free and launch your business – and then, if it takes off, you can afford to get a proper shop or an online store.’ That would be amazing.”

Squibb, who runs HelpBnk, a community of 75,000 entrepreneurs who help each other for free, said he was not interested in developing the stairwell in order to sell it: “I don’t want to contribute to increasing the prices of rent and housing for people.

He got his first idea for a business while sleeping rough in a stairwell in Cambridge after his father died and he was made homeless at 15.

If he was not granted planning permission to convert the staircase into a space for pop-up shops, he said he would use it as a place for entrepreneurs to network or try to get his investment.

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