Caleb Parker chats with Brett Million from NewFlex to discuss the importance of partnerships, management agreements and behind the scenes chat on how Bold was acquired.

John Preece from Hub Australia summarizes Dror Poleg‘s recent article called ‘Airbnb and the Abstraction of Location’.

Both the summary and the article are good reads that highlight how Airbnb changed how people booked trips by focussing on types of experiences first (before dates/locations/price) and Spotify changed how music was discovered through types or activities (as oppose to genres).

Makes us think how would, or could, workers pick workspaces other than proximity, price and amenities. From what I’m seeing with the aggregators and booking platforms in development, a lot of amazing teams are already experimenting with new ways of workspace discovery.

Flip Howard shares that WorkSuites are bucking the trend of entering less-risky partnerships with landlords, by signing two traditional leases for their expansion into Atlanta.

On the point of why leases over management agreements, Candace Carlisle shared:

"I do leases when I’m 100% certain they are going to work, I do management agreements when I’m not 100% certain a location is going to work. But if I’m not 100% certain a location is going to work, there might be a bigger problem," Howard said. "With these two slam-dunk locations" in Atlanta, "I only see a negative with a management agreement."

John Arenas shares that the first UK Serendipity Labs location is launching in Salford (near/in Manchester) in October 2022, and will be operated by NewFlex.

The actual article is paywalled, unfortunately, but the main takeaway is in the post. More and more US brands are expanding into the UK, and if you look carefully you’ll see that UK proptech companies are expanding into the US. Interesting.

Claire Coder shares that Aunt Flow have raised an $8.5M Series A led by JLL Spark.

Although the interview sits behind a paywall, I wanted to highlight their success in making these products accessible, available and obvious in large workspaces. Reminds me of the campaign from back in 2019 to bring tampons and liners into every coworking space.