[Tara Hunt and Chris Messina] started putting together meetups at Ritual Roasters in the Mission in San Francisco because we thought it would be even better to get a space full-time for independents....
We put the call out for people to come together and were super excited because lots of people showed up. Within a few months, we co-rented a live/work space in Portrero Hill with a group of others (we called it Teh Hat Factory — not a typo).
A few months later, Chris and I both left our startups and decided to start our own company, which led us to looking for and renting a bigger, more professional space in SOMA. We called this Citizen Space. It opened in October 2006.
Citizen Space is no longer open, but its indie feel can still be found in some other coworking sites, such as Pro Desk Space in Fullerton, California. This space caters to individual entrepreneurs, and its pricing supports people who need a desk for one day, or for one day a month, or more frequently.
And closer to home, it appears that there's a coworking space near downtown Ontario.
But Hunt and Messina didn't invent the office sublet - Regus (now IWG) was around long before 2006, and informal office sublet relationships have existed since the first office was established.
However, I wonder if we're seeing a new trend of coworking.
In march 2017, the New York City–based editors and writers of The Atlantic moved to a WeWork office in Brooklyn. I remember our first morning vividly: It was like entering the Millennial id. Craft beer and cucumber water poured from kitchen taps. Laptoppers in jeans and toques clacked along to MGMT in the wood-paneled common area. A WeWork “community manager” showed us to a glass-walled office so small that my colleagues and I could clasp hands while seated. We sat. Had we arrived in the future of work?
The Atlantic told us this arrangement would be temporary while our real office was renovated. As of this writing, we’re still here. If WeWork had its way, we’d stay forever, along with much of the 21st-century workforce.
This is fundamentally different from Factory Joe Startup renting a desk. And you can see it in WeWork's pricing. While Pro Desk Space's pricing page starts by asking how many days you want to work, WeWork has a different question: how many employees need seats?
Not all companies are supporting the concept of remote coworkers away from headquarters, but the WeWorks of the world are positioning themselves to cater to companies that are spread in multiple locations. If the companies outsource the whole "remote worker" thingie to a WeWork, then they don't have to worry about leasing facilities themselves, or supporting an employee's home office. And in the same way that companies expand and contract cloud storage, they can expand and contract square footage.
I'm not sure if I'd thrive in such a situation, but perhaps I'd learn how to do it. At present, my boss is over 2,000 miles away from me, so I'm already starting to adjust to this kind of life. (One of my coworkers has worked from home for over a decade now.) Why not work from a place in which I can just plug in (and put on the headphones)?
