Thoughts: It's awfully lonely in this WeWork

This week I'm reflecting on whether co-working spaces have lost their lustre for us fintech folk, and whether a more professional community focus might bring them back.

Let me preface this by saying it’s not really about WeWork, but a wider conversation, and that this all might just be a “me” problem. With those disclaimers in mind, welcome to The Biome. 

I am beginning to wonder if co-working spaces have lost their lustre, and whether a more professional community focus might bring them back. 

When I was a baby editor, circa 2018, I interviewed WeWork for a feature about their expansion across Asia. I remember being really taken with the idea of co-working spaces where companies of all shapes and sizes could come to do their work but also collaborate, use communal areas to share ideas with each other, and kick back at the end of a day to celebrate or commiserate. 

And maybe a casual conversation over the (briefly, in those heady days, “always on”) beer taps might lead to the next Facebook. Since I was young and knew everything except what an interest rate was, that seemed a reasonable day’s work. 

Most of all, I was attracted to the idea that these spaces could support the little guy. I’ve always loved being around entrepreneurs – from early memories of visiting stalls with my dad run by his secondary school enterprise students – and in 2018 I was just as passionate about empowering people to have their own business, despite age or background, as I am today.

Being able to use a single desk or small room in a place where it was all “happening” to start your own business seemed incredibly exciting. I wondered if one day it would be me working on the Next Big Thing. 

Fast forward through the global pandemic to our post-Covid, post-ZIRP world, and WeWork as a company has gone through a huge amount – from wider economic issues to questions over the viability of its business model, to the sprinkling of naughtiness we’ve grown accustomed to among high-growth tech giants (which we’ve also since realised WeWork isn’t, quite). 

Co-working spaces are now a very different beast, and are often simply something a company uses when it doesn’t want to pay for a big office. This doesn’t just make sense for a two-person startup, but now increasingly for larger, more traditional businesses as well.

There’s a plethora of options around London, and many companies tell me they’ve opted to buy their employees a flexible subscription to one or two of these, along with a smattering of Private Members’ Clubs, instead of committing to any office space at all.  

But when you walk in the door of these trendy establishments, do you feel the same buzz experienced in London pre-Covid? And even at the peak of the pandemic when people were briefly let out of their cages and desperate for a bit of company, even in a half-empty building? 

In some ways, WeWork IS still how I imagined it. I often describe it as what your family members would visualise if you told them you were off to work “in tech”. There are pool tables and beanbags, and anyone wearing a tie is regarded with mild suspicion or friendly ridicule. A dog is always there. And the occasional cat that thinks it’s a dog. The priorities of these surpass those of the human clients at all times. 

A big difference now is that some weekdays, a lot of the lights are off, and there’s an eerie silence as even the most pampered chihuahua has opted to stay at home. 

Taking WeWork’s woes specifically out of the equation, what does this say about our needs and preferences as entrepreneurs and fintech professionals for somewhere to work, collaborate and call “home”? What’s changed? 

First of all, there’s now a wider variety of people using these spaces. They are no longer the preserve of “tech bros” or “creatives”. This is no bad thing, and technology companies founded in the 2010s or 2020s should now be looking to more established industries for advice on how to tackle problems - but I am not sure we have all learned how to benefit from this yet, how to talk to and gain insights from people whose job on the surface seems so different from our own. Perhaps we’re a little shy. 

Secondly, work is now work. The majority of the workforce has matured past the “work hard, play hard” and “we’re all family here” slogans of the 2010s. We seek a better work life balance, to come to our office to work and go home to our social life - less so than having it all blur into one in the same place and give up every evening for a company that has a two-week notice clause and isn’t afraid to use it. 

Thirdly, some aspects of community building are incredibly tough to scale especially with the overheads of real estate included. If you really want to be a “hub” or a “home of new ideas” you need a killer team of professionals who can understand on a deep level what each business does, or what each individual is interested in, and have the confidence and motivation to match people up. This sounds like an expensive person with a very tough to measure KPI.*

Another unscalable aspect is the size of the space. You want as many people as possible to join your co-working space - obviously - but the more people who join, the less personal it can feel, and the less space there is to chat. The members’ club I mentioned in a previous post has had difficulties with this, as people had to arrive first thing in the morning to bag any kind of space and defend it to the death throughout the day. 

Additionally, not all of us feel the need for a physical space to connect, and it really seems fiercely 50/50 whenever I have the conversation as to whether people want to meet in person at all, ever. Enthusiasm varies between needing a space to meet up and wanting to do this all over Zoom for convenience, and all this results in for the poor co-working provider is a constant demand for more phone booths – no, fewer phone booths, more meeting rooms – no, just more quiet space, or at least could the guy on level 3 take his calls somewhere else because even with those Airpods we’ve all heard him do the same pitch seventeen times today? And whose dog is barking by the way? 

As for fintech more specifically - it’s just gotten a bit more serious. Rightly so, in most cases. But where we used to have a lot more time to take a step back and think about innovation, or mention to the guy across the hall that we’re having X problem and find he dealt with the same issue last year and used Y software – most of us have spent the last year just keeping our heads above water. 

Maybe us fintech folk, while we’re naturally interested and collaborative people, just ain’t cut out for the WeWorks of the world any more - we’re so busy keeping the lights on, heads down, and worrying about runway that we can’t bear the thought of having to chat to our neighbour before we’ve had our triple espresso.

And after it, we’re far too anxious to chat anyway.

*these people do exist by the way, and I’ll be talking to them in a future issue. Spoiler alert: they probably aren’t being paid enough.