A hip hop soundtrack does not change the tedium of sending emails and updating spreadsheets. Still, the future of work looked very much like, well, work. “If I’ve been working at home for too many days in a row and I’m feeling sluggish, it’s nice to go somewhere where there’s a lot of busy people being productive.” Even so, Jensen said, the building’s vibe could feel invigorating at times. “This place must have more Apple AirPods per capita than anywhere in the world,” he said one afternoon, warily looking around. Dane Jensen, a high-school classmate of mine who is now the head of a performance-coaching company, sat at a nearby desk. “I like the idea of seeing people that I can connect with on a regular basis, seeing familiar faces,” she explained. She had spent years working on the road and from cafés before trying out a coworking space. “But more profoundly, the common themes of rap are in tune with the company’s mission.”) While we created, cleaning crews in WeWork T-shirts quietly restocked the citrus water and wiped up our spilled drinks.įotini Iconomopoulos, a negotiation consultant, perched on one of the many couches. (“Rap is urban, and so is WeWork,” the company explains online. Over the next few weeks, we showed up each day and tapped away on MacBook Airs to the sounds of Portuguese house music and old-school hip hop piped in through speakers. The place had a first-day-of-school air, with freelancers holding their phones in front of their faces as they entered their selfies into the WeWork app-the virtual community that would complement our physical community. On the upper floors, startups and established companies occupied small offices separated by glass walls ( RBC, in an attempt to find new inspiration and new customers, had rented nearly an entire floor). Rows of simple wooden tables ran across the common area, and there were booths for private phone calls, couches for conversations, and an open kitchen for contemplative snacking. Fresh pastries were laid out, to go with the bottomless citrus- and cucumber-infused water and micro-roasted coffee. There was a graffiti mural in the foyer, and the prayer hands emoji that Drake has tattooed on his arm was rendered in neon on the sixth floor. The office looked like the lobby of a hipster hotel. T hree months after my tour, my coworkers and I began our new life together. And apparently, that means beer on tap and lots of it. They want an office that matches their personality. It believes that these budding entrepreneurs have no interest in the grey cubicles of the past. WeWork, with its enormous pocketbook and hipster-capitalist aesthetic, is determined to become the default home for a new generation of white-collar workers. A study by accounting-software provider QuickBooks predicts that 45 percent of the Canadian workforce will be self-employed by 2020. The company is now trying to become the leader in a crowded market where dozens of hubs all promise a variation on the same thing: an inspirational environment among like-minded members of the creative class, plus coffee.Īccording to a survey by Upwork and the Freelancers Union, more than one-third of workers in the United States were freelancers in 2016-some 55 million and counting. There are now five locations in Canada, and at the inaugural Toronto office, a “hot desk”-a spot at a communal table or couch-starts at $500 per month, a permanent desk at $700, and a private office at $1,000. WeWork leases buildings, renovates them to a millennial-approved sheen, and then rents them out desk by desk and office by office. It is the fourth-largest startup in America, and it is reportedly valued at more than $20 billion (US), which puts it below only Uber, Airbnb, and SpaceX. Today, the company has 274 offices in fifty-nine cities, from Bogotá to Tel Aviv. WeWork was founded by Adam Neumann and Miguel McKelvey in 2010, and it started with a single office in New York City. I don’t have a dog, but I appreciated the sentiment. “We know your name, we remember your birthday, we remember your dog’s birthday,” he continued. “I’ve heard from people who have tried other coworking spaces and…the other ones aren’t bad,” Jarred said with an exaggerated pause. He opened the WeWork app on his phone, and I watched as a cascade of posts from my soon-to-be colleagues and collaborators flew past. A tequila company had rented office space and wanted to host tequila Tuesdays. They were startup founders and young creative types. My future coworkers, he said, would be fascinating. Jarred was trying to sell me on more than just aesthetics-he was offering a utopian vision of community.
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