Tony Bacigalupo: ‘Coworking continues to evolve the relationship between workers and their work.’

A catalyst of the coworking movement, Tony Bacigalupo resonated with how coworking acted as a gathering place for people who would otherwise be working from home, alone. This was back in 2007, when coworking was just a radical idea, optimised for building community, culture, and connections. 

Tony went on to open Manhattan’s first coworking space – New Work City – zeroing in on serving its community, and helping thousands of people start and expand their businesses when it was in operation between 2008 and 2015. Now, Tony is widening the collective impact of coworking. His consultancy, New Work Cities, supports global community builders and coworking space owners.

When Nexudus last spoke to Tony in 2018, he predicted some of the current coworking trends, so we felt it was time to catch up with him again. In this interview, Tony shares his top tips for community building, which technology tools he likes most, and where the coworking movement is headed over the next decade. 

What has your journey with New Work Cities been like, and what is the brand currently operating as?

Tony: Coworking was a very nascent movement when I first got into it. I was just out of college and working from home for a web development firm. I quickly learned that working from home was wonderful, but only for so long. I ended up discovering the coworking movement and went on to build a coworking space: New Work City. 

Because I found it so early, and because I was in New York City, we got a lot of visibility and notoriety. I started speaking at conferences and getting interviewed in the media. A lot of people knew of me and my coworking space as one of the first things they’ve seen in the coworking world. 

When I transitioned out of running my own space, I became interested in focusing more on my global impact. I knew many people building or wanting to build coworking spaces, and I wanted to support them. That led to New Work Cities (plural).

In all your years working in the coworking industry, what is the biggest change you’ve experienced?

Tony: When I first got into coworking, it was a world where people spent less time on video meetings. Right now, the thing that I’m most curious about is the fact that remote work has grown and evolved so much to the point where there are a lot of video meetings, and a return to office situation. It’s not quite the same as it was in terms of the needs and opportunities for potential coworkers. 

With COVID, and the rapid growth of the remote work world, you’d think the coworking market would be exploding. To some degree, it is, and maybe we’re just not capturing it as well as we could be, but for many people, it’s still an uphill battle. 

Now, it’s harder to sell someone the idea of going to a workspace when they have so many video meetings. Even back when I was running a coworking space, every private space where someone could take a call was at a premium. Now, it seems doubly so. Whenever I would consult someone and give them feedback on their floor plan, I had a kind of ongoing joke that even without looking at the floor plan, I’d tell them they needed more phone rooms. 

That was before COVID. There’s just that much more of that dynamic going on now. Culturally speaking, there’s an interesting challenge around so many people being isolated and in need of a community, and going to a third place. 

There are a lot of wonderful communities, spaces, and coworking spaces, or otherwise, all around the world, but most people don’t really understand that yet. There’s a story that’s still missing. 

What is your top tip for anyone launching a coworking space today?

Tony: Community leaders tend to burn themselves out trying to do too much. The thing you need to do extremely well is: attract people, keep them, and cultivate relationships one-on-one. Focus on people first, and create something really special for them to join as a non-member first, and also as a member.

You don’t build a community through a newsletter or social media, you grow a community using those tools. The first 10, 20, 50 people who join your community will be people whom you message personally, personally meet, and invite. You’ll get somewhere way faster if you cultivate strong, meaningful relationships with those people.

How do you think coworking operators can go about building community without forcing it?

Tony: Getting someone to join a community is rooted in the fact that people need a reason to join. In a lot of cases, joining a coworking space is not something they have an urgent reason to do today. Some people have been meaning to join my coworking space for years, and they don’t get around to it because they don’t have that sense of urgency. 

I like to stress: don’t think of it in terms of selling a space, instead think of selling access to a journey or quest you go on together. So, I emphasise that community builders try seasonal programming and cohorts, things like that. 

Why do you think coworking spaces should adopt technology solutions, and do you have any favourite tech tools?

Tony: I recommend adopting technology that enables core business flows – access control, membership, upgrade, downgrade, onboard, offboard, and all of that. Anything that makes it easier to run your business with as few manual steps as possible. 

I don’t put a lot of stock into using tech tools to connect people, although I recommend making creative use of membership directories to help create more surface area for people to find connections. We’re not relying on a directory to build our community for us. 

What I do think is useful are tools that reinforce the rhythms of cohorts and seasonal community engagement. If somebody joins, for example, we want to integrate them and enable them to participate in the community as soon as possible. Ideally, you should be able to set some communication rhythms so that the system is keeping them engaged and helping to re-engage them along. The strategy side is one of the less obvious uses of the tools.

Back in 2018, you predicted the growth of niche coworking spaces, like women-focussed spaces. How have those trends evolved in the years since, and which coworking trends are you currently following?

Tony: There are a number of niche coworking communities. Coworking was really affected by COVID, and it wiped out a lot of spaces. Now, it’s less about having explicitly niche coworking spaces and more about the spaces that incorporate some of the principles behind coworking despite never using the word. 

There are more local businesses, cafes, and even apartment buildings with coworking integrated in their models. The idea of an independent named coworking space is still a thing, it’s still growing. 

A major part of this conversation is that WeWork dominated the discourse for the 2010s. Although coworking received the headlines in the 2000s, after WeWork came in and soaked up the headlines, the coworking movement continued to grow, silently. Coworking has continued to evolve and be part of the shift in the relationship between workers and their work. 

When I first started in 2007, I was raised with an expectation that my fate as an adult was to work nine to five in a cubicle and sit in traffic. That world is gone. Although those jobs still exist, if you ask the average person: ‘What do you expect your career will look like?’ Nobody will answer that it’s a Monday-to-Friday, nine-to-five job. Although people still do it, it’s not nearly the de facto, because we have laptops, and can go anywhere. It will take decades to integrate into our culture, but it’s continuing. 

You also predicted the difference between ‘working’ and ‘coworking’ would blur, and defined coworking as a movement rather than an industry. Would you say these predictions have come true?

Tony: Yes and no. Obviously, we couldn’t have anticipated COVID, but it’s not a straight line, and now, we’re in an in-between place. For all its trade-offs, the WeWork phenomenon gave coworking a barometer. In terms of coworking and people’s relationship to it, it was an easy way to measure where WeWork was going. 

As WeWork declined from the public spotlight, it made the next steps for coworking less clear. I’d love to see more pluralistic, movement-oriented, community-oriented, local, space-oriented efforts. Maybe coworking starts to intersect with those movements, like Fractal in New York City – this idea of a campus with cohousing, education, and families, where coworking is a piece of an urban or civic vision.

Whether that breaks containment and becomes more than a niche thing – who’s to know? But, there will be some other dynamic defining where coworking goes from here. It’s not just about more people working from home, getting out of their homes, and being around other people. Other dynamics will drive where we go from here. 

Certainly, a big part of that is this massive isolation epidemic and the divisiveness of algorithm-driven media online. The hunger for disengaging from that and engaging with other humans locally is an important part of what happens next, and part of what I’m focussing on. 

Where do you see the future of coworking in 2035?

Tony: When I think about 2035, there’s a big question mark. For decades, we’ve had issues of declining social capital and participation. While I’m talking about it with an American lens, it’s also true in other places. People spend less time together and more time at home on the internet by themselves, leading to isolation and divisiveness. 

The counter movement is forming, but it hasn’t taken root yet. In the same way that when coworking took off between 2007 and 2009, there was the sense that we’d discovered something. I was in New York, and I saw what somebody was doing in San Francisco, and I felt we needed this in New York. We’re not having that moment yet. 

But, I hope that we have a moment like that again, that there is another round of community building movement that counters the growing isolation that we’re all increasingly sick of. In 2035, I’d like to see a movement take root and grow that we’re all excited to be a part of.