Independent professional, 27, seeking OS for short- or long-term commitment. Politics progressive; Chinese takeout a fave. You: accommodating, not too clingy; quiet but social. Groups OK. Let’s get together and change the world.
So might read the personal ad of a typical young freelancer of the postindustrial, postrecession workforce. She’s not looking for a mate—she needs office space, a “co-working” venue, to be precise.
Whether the term co-working will mean anything to you has everything to do with your age, your occupation and where you live. In big cities, a certain segment of 20- to 40-something professionals (mostly male techies) have already been co-working—that is, sharing communal office space—for more than a decade. Typically they come together under the high ceilings of renovated warehouse buildings; they work alone, but together.
In recent years, co-working has been catching on among a wider range of professional types, including virtual business owners of every sort, designers and writers, and off-site employees of large companies. Renting a desk by the month, or even by the day, these free agents can avoid both the loneliness of working at home and the soul-raking aggravation that comes with table-surfing at Starbucks. A two- or three-person company can use co-working to establish a base without ever signing a commercial real estate contract.
Not surprisingly, a handful of businesses have opened in the last two or three years to connect space seekers with empty desks. Of these, the current category front-runner is Loosecubes, a Brooklyn, New York-based online directory and booking service created by a 33-year-old former investment banker named Campbell McKellar. Loosecubes is the most human-friendly online service that office managers can use to list empty desks; it’s far less anonymous than Craigslist, and it allows members to search, book and pay for reservations directly on the site.
McKellar launched the Loosecubes alpha site in June, 2010, at the time listing 20 locations. Within four months, that number had jumped to 600. There are now 3,000 office spaces at 1,500 locations in the company database, covering more than 500 cities in 67 countries. Toronto is the fifth most-searched city on the site—and the only Canadian city in the top 10—trailing larger centres like New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles but leading Berlin.
For the first year, McKellar and her small group concentrated on building the network—“This is about introducing people to people, not people to space,” she says—and offered all services for free. In September, 2011, the company began charging hosts a 10% transaction fee for every booking, though there’s no cost for membership. Users sign on via Facebook, a key component of the site’s social grid; create a Loosecubes profile; and look for their next office by postal code, social connections, professional alignment and user ratings. A desk can cost between $50 and $350 per month, depending on office amenities and location.
In short order, McKellar has become a visible champion of the new-to-the-mainstream movement, says Marissa Feinberg, founder of Green Spaces, a co-working site in New York’s SoHo district. Like McKellar, Feinberg believes that the movement’s success relies on its ability to foster communities, and so the members of her office loft, a popular Loosecubes pick, hold an “ideas bounce lunch” over steamed veggie dumplings every Wednesday. In a given week, one’s tablemate could be an industrial designer from Spain; the maker of an online encyclo–pedia for kids; or the fellow who’s introducing the world’s first fair-trade vodka, made from quinoa, to the U.S. market.
