A Physical Social Network℠

When WeWork acquired Meetup.com in 2017, WeWork executives were baffled. Why would a coworking company built on leasing and renting out office space acquire a platform for organizing social gatherings?

It could be dismissed as another idiosyncratic move of ambitious-yet-impulsive WeWork founder Adam Neumann. But there was something deeper at play.

“Meetup organizers often need to find venues to host Meetup events, and WeWork was looking for more events in its spaces to deepen the community bonds of its sublease tenants,” explained David Siegel, former CEO of Meetup. “The acquisition would solve a core need of each party and create a symbiotic relationship.”

In practice, the two companies did not solve each others’ problems. Of course, the merger dissolved as WeWork itself collapsed. But more specifically, the attempted union failed because the two companies did not fit together on a practical, day-to-day basis. Meetup events happened mostly in the evening or outside, while WeWork spaces were designed for indoor, daytime use.

The WeWork-Meetup experiment was not an isolated instance but rather an attempt to solve one of the two key problems of the coworking business model. Coworking spaces struggle with two fundamental challenges: scaling sustainably and building real community. Many fold under the weight of expensive leases and inconsistent revenue streams. And despite marketing themselves as hubs of collaboration, most fail to create structured ways for members to meaningfully connect beyond their immediate colleagues—what Neumann hoped Meetup would provide. 

To solve the scalability problem, some companies leveraged underutilized space to avoid expensive leases—turning commercial and hospitality spaces into daytime coworking locations. Three such businesses were founded in 2016 and two in 2018. All received early attention but struggled with traction despite experimenting with different methods of community building.

UNDERUTILIZED SPACE SOLUTION

The Pub Hub, a pub-based coworking startup in Tel Aviv, “​​organized productivity practices (i.e. daily stretching).” The founders had “interest from big companies who want to use [the space] for off-site meetings,” a way to accommodate an existing work community, but not actually connect new people. KettleSpace in New York hired community managers to introduce members who could help each other, held weekly events, and wrote newsletters. The 2018 DC underutilized-space coworking startup WorkChew raised $2.5 million and acquired the coworking assets of KettleSpace but closed in 2024.

Spacious, the largest underutilized-space coworking startup of that era, transformed high-end restaurants during off-hours and underutilized commercial spaces into coworking spaces in NYC. Marketed as a “network of drop-in workspaces where city dwellers can plug in and focus,” it scaled to 45 locations within three years. WeWork acquired Spacious and shuttered it in 2019 as part of its own collapse.

“Sometimes we just sit next to each other and occasionally ask for input,” said Alie Stone, then Spacious Head of Brand and Community. For her, these ad hoc interactions created meaningful connection. But this organic approach was not sufficient for everyone; real estate industry writer Samantha Colin wrote of her day trying out Spacious that it was “convenient and productive,” but “aside from my [Spacious] host John, I didn’t have a single interaction with another human being.” The novel idea of leveraging underutilized space only solved half the coworking equation.

NICHE COMMUNITY SOLUTION

Other startups tried solving the second half of the equation—community building—by curating coworking spaces around specific identities, professions, or interests to create stronger bonds. The Wing, a coworking company designed for women, generated initial excitement—even attracting Adam Neumann as an investor. The company ultimately sank because of the discrepancy between low occupancy and expensive long-term leases, the same unsustainable business model as traditional coworking spaces. Leasing problems aside, the Wing lost the trust of its staff and membership in scandals involving racism, transphobia, and worker mistreatment, bringing it, like WeWork, far from the intended utopian community of shared identity and values. Just bringing a niche group into a space, even one designed for it, proved insufficient to build a lasting community-based business.

Numerous coworking companies have sprung up with specific amenities for niche professional communities—Art/Work for artists in Chicago, Brooklyn Hourly Offices for therapists in Brooklyn, esq.suites for lawyers in Miami, even WitchWork for witches in the Bronx—but still face the same scalability and financial sustainability challenges as traditional coworking companies because of long-term leases and short-term, variable revenue.

COMBINED-MODEL EXPERIMENTATION

Matthew Weaver and Sarina Chernock founded WEach Seats in Philadelphia in 2018 on an underutilized-hospitality-space model. They pivoted in 2020 to a “niche group” model in home offices, because, as Weaver explained, in a coworking space, “there’s no natural way to mingle.” Weaver and Chernock decided to rely on small niche communities to provide the basis for connection and avoided leasing space by leveraging members’ homes. Weaver and Chernock identified the importance of both underutilized space and niche communities to the coworking model, but failed to properly integrate the two and ultimately closed.

The Cannon in Houston and Fabrik in New York execute niche community coworking in underutilized spaces more effectively. The Cannon turned an underutilized industrial space into a coworking campus for entrepreneurs, a WeWork-type environment, but to meet the needs of a specific population in a specific region. The Cannon has since expanded to multiple sites around Houston. Within its main community of entrepreneurs, The Cannon launched smaller cohorts, including one for religious entrepreneurs and one for the LGBT+ community. Fabrik, founded by former Spacious COO Jaclyn Pascocello, avoids costs by using underutilized commercial real estate and builds community by allowing members to host events for niche groups—“start-up founders, arts and creative groups,…gatherings for fitness enthusiasts, cookbook clubs, the ‘sober-curious.’”

COWORKING AS AN ACTIVITY

But even The Cannon and Fabrik haven’t fully solved the coworking problem. They still lack a systematic way to integrate community into the workday itself. That missing piece is where the next breakthrough is happening.

Adam Neuman’s original vision for WeWork was to create a “capitalist kibbutz,” and he recognized that creating small, niche communities, as Meetup.com does, was an essential part of that experience. However, there is another aspect of the kibbutz experience that has been missing from coworking: community-based, regular “rituals.” Kibbutzim have specific, defining daily activities—communal meals, decision-making meetings, chores—that provide structure to their lifestyle. It’s not just the design of the spaces that builds the community—nor just the people. Even The Cannon and Fabrik, despite their successes, still treat coworking as access to space with some community features rather than a structured, repeatable work ritual.

Coworking as a community-building activity is what we are creating at Tavern Community. Daily communal lunch, panel discussions, focused work sessions, and happy hour provide a social structure to the workday. Community organizers host coworking events to create and maintain niche communities, like at Fabrik. AI-deep-matched accountability buddies ensure that no one has to struggle alone. And underutilized hospitality spaces make the model financially viable, like at Spacious.

WeWork defined coworking as “Space as a Service,” and we have been stuck with that paradigm ever since. But when modern coworking first became possible in the early 2000s—with the advent of laptops and the rise of the internet enabling remote work—coworking was an activity. In 2006, a movement called Jelly brought remote workers together to cowork and mingle in rotating apartments, volunteered by members. Tavern’s renewed focus on coworking as an activity brings coworking back to its original form—structured, social, and flexible. But this time, it’s built to scale—blending technology, hospitality, and community to redefine the future of work.