Week 46, 2025

CEO of Baseworx, Graham Clarke, shares how if you’d be able to swap your logo with any other brand, you’re probably in big big trouble. "Coworking isn’t a game of copy and paste. Your space should say something… Why do you exist? Who are you here for? What experience do you want people to feel when they walk through the door?"

But it does bring up a fun thought experiment… if you could swap your logo with ANY other coworking brand, who would that be? Slide into the DMs on our brand new Insta and let us know.

Jeremy Bamberg, co-founder at Factory shares a think piece on ghost kitchens and their impact on city streets and CRE.

Ghost Kitchens (ie ‘restaurants’ or kitchens built primarily for delivery app customers) are a growing trend across cities of all sizes. We just spoke to Jessie Glew about how they’re introducing shared kitchens into a WOTSO space.

Jane Sartin from the Flexible Space Association are making the case that a new property tax increase could cause a crash of businesses and put jobs at risk.

In a letter, co-signed by 60 operators (who host more than 27k businesses), sent to UK chancellor Rachel Reeve they express "urgent and deeply serious concern" over the changes to business rates. The letter accuses the Valuation Office Agency of changing how it rates for office spaces without informing owners and occupiers.

Previously flex spaces were treated as individual units for business rates, allowing members to claim reliefs such as ‘small business rates relief’. The reclassification now treats flex spaces as a single property, leading to much higher bills. The change has also been applied retroactively, with some operators receiving backdated bills of up to £400k.

It’s going to happen: your amazing team member is going to move on. Coworks asked a veteran HR director how to handle it and got helpful, practical tips to avoid operational fallout.

The emotional fallout? Well, that is different.

Shark Tank’s Daymond John joined Mindspace Miami for The Big Pitch Night, moderating an inspiring live competition where five Miami entrepreneurs presented their ventures before a panel of investors and business leaders. Robert Vasquez, founder of Sail Wellness, took home the top prize for his AI-powered nutrition platform, earning six months of complimentary office space at Mindspace Downtown Miami.

While the event highlighted Mindspace’s mission to empower innovation and connection within Miami’s entrepreneurial community, what’s a fun fact is that Daymond John is no stranger to the coworking industry, having once launched his own premium space called Blueprint + Co in New York’s Fashion District in 2017.

Jerome Chang, founder of BLANKSPACES, discussed the evolution of the coworking industry since opening his first location in 2008 with Lucy McInally. Back then there were fewer than a dozen coworking spaces existed in the US. BLANKSPACES now operates 8 locations across the greater LA region, serving a member base that is 75% entrepreneurs and freelancers and 25-30% corporate clients.

Chang, who has an architecture background, noted the industry is at an inflection point with high vacancy rates creating opportunistic real estate opportunities, though mature operators are favoring revenue sharing or management agreements over traditional leases. Chang emphasized LA County, with 10M people, remains underserved compared to markets like London.

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.

As a coworking space operator, you solve a lot of problems. And so does every other coworking space in the world.

Cat Johnson makes the case that rather than focusing on the problems you solve, which are super valuable, you have to focus on something more compelling, something stickier, something more human.

Ian Minor, who led development of Working From_ by The Hoxton, published Part 3 of a series detailing operational integration of coworking into hotel properties. The framework emphasizes early cross-disciplinary collaboration across brand, technology, project management, and F&B teams to build shared operational ecosystems that respect both transient hospitality and long-term membership models. Minor outlines critical integration points including 24/7 access control systems, membership platforms interfacing with hotel PMS and CRM, dual F&B menus and pricing, dedicated coworking workstreams within hotel project governance, and separate P&L reporting for coworking revenue streams including memberships, day passes, and meeting rooms.

The guide addresses designing for dual operations with separate circulation routes, acoustics zoning, and flexible HVAC systems, while noting stable membership revenue enhances property valuations by reducing reliance on transient occupancy. Minor emphasizes integration success depends on change management and internal buy-in, recommending soft launches to test access systems, Wi-Fi capacity, and F&B service under real load conditions before full opening.

Shift Workspaces founder Grant Barnhill shares with iPostal1 Workspace how his team brings boutique hospitality to virtual members, where seamless digital mail helps, and how a poolside realization of what their space could become.