Commercial real estate is a huge industry and its business practices and models are substantially the same as they were decades ago. From the point of view of venture investors, it's an industry ripe for disruptive change. WeWork has shown it has a business model that's disruptive and, at least so far, highly scalable. This, coupled with WeWork also being a play on the future of work,is why investors are so excited about them.
We've interviewed a number of WeWork members and they consistently talk about the networking opportunities and community provided by WeWork spaces. Because of this, we consider them coworking facilities. But WeWork communities are pretty different from those of traditional coworking spaces. They've targeted startups - including larger startups with 5-10 or more employees - as their primary market. This is a different segment than most traditional coworking facilities serve. And while they do have independent worker members, these folks tell us they are in a WeWork space primarily because of the access it provides to startups. So are they coworking? We think yes. But the broader workspace as a service industry contains multiple market segments and its size, structure and diversity make it unlikely to be a "winner take all or most" industry like many digital business are. In other words, we think there's plenty of room for different kinds of coworking spaces to be successful. -- Visit this forum on the web at http://discuss.coworking.com --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Coworking" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to coworking+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
