Adrian Johnson, founder of Elyos AI and member of Y Combinator’s 2023 cohort, shared YC’s official new joiner manual guidance that explicitly discourages startups from using coworking spaces. The accelerator’s manual states YC doesn’t believe in coworking because it already provides community, citing concerns that open coworking spaces are loud and distracting, can overshadow a startup’s internal culture, and often house companies "going through the motions without truly being serious." YC argues the best startups have weird ideas and need private space with closed doors to operate differently from average startups.

The manual specifically mentions WeWork, advising founders who use it to secure enclosed offices rather than hot desks.

Worth noting that YC has backed Commery, Innov8, Deskimo, FlexDesk, AND Tandem, who are all in/around the coworking space, plus 2,700+ B2B startups who sell into or to coworking spaces.

Clark Jacobs shares a data drop from 12 months of booking trends across the FlexDesk platform.

Unsurprisingly, 70% of bookings are on middle-three days, with Friday seeing half as many bookings as Tuesday. But what’s interesting is that WeWork received 3 out of every 4 bookings on the site, where Regus (at 10x the location count) sees 13% of bookings. Everyone else shares 11% – my question to you is.. is this an opportunity for "other" brands to pick up more bookings here, or would time/effort be invested elsewhere?

Clark Jacobs shares that FlexDesk have released their Utilization Intelligence solution. In short this lets corporations plug in their existing attendance tracking systems and get more engaging results.

Watch this space as more and more flex space platforms are diving deep into surfacing insights from across disconnected data silos – especially around space utilization.

Clark Jacobs shares that FlexDesks has zigged when other zagged, allowing corporations to manage their traditional portfolios within their platform, measured alongside and against utilization data and eliminating manual data collection processes.