EP030 - The future of coworking with Christoph Fahle of Betahaus and One Coworking
About the episode
This episode focuses on coworking and the future of coworking. How will companies use coworking offices in the future? How can coworking solutions help to provide branded office experiences for the distributed workforce? To discuss this, I talked with the founder of one of the first coworking spaces in Europe, Christoph Fahle, the founder of Betahaus and the newly launched One Coworking.
About the guest
Christoph founded Betahaus which was one of the first coworking networks in Europe. In our first two years, they managed locations in Berlin, Hamburg, Barcelona, Cologne, and Sofia (2X the square footage than WeWork by that time). They served freelancers, startups, and corporates with flexible workspaces in an amazing entrepreneurial community.
After Betahaus he started his second company called One Coworking which aims to bring the masses of regular employees into coworking through our on-demand workspace solutions that leverages the vast network of hundreds of flex spaces and enables startups and scaleups to manage the workspace needs of their distributed workforce around the globe. They already have exciting companies as customers and are looking to expand their footprint and aim to entirely change the relationships that companies and individuals have with flex workspaces.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
Quotes from the show
The workplace is not a nine to five one size fits all solution. It is an individualized solution, and it has individualized needs. And now that the office is breaking, we can start catering to individualized needs.
Every larger organization has integrated co-working or a similar format in their workplace or is still working on it. We are literally at the forefront of innovation here for large organizations regarding workplaces.
Now every company is starting to become, operation-wise, like a coworking space. The HQs, they are getting more flexible. They are more community focused. So what we started as coworking has now just turned into working.
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Welcome everyone day to talk about the future of work and the future of leadership. Today we'll discuss the co-working and flexible office solutions. Hybrid work is on the rise, but office spaces couldn't keep up with the flexibility provided by the new work schedule. Meanwhile, co-working was here before the pandemic, offering, desk sharing and all in a very simple model. Could this be the solution for the hybrid needs? To discuss, I have Christoph Fahle, creator of One Coworking and founder of Beta House. Hi Christoph. How are you?
Hello. Thank you for having me. I'm great. I'm sitting in a co-working space looking at all the other people around me working, and I'm super happy to do the podcast with you. Thank you.
I appreciate for coming here. So, the first question, usually connected to remote work and your personal journey. So how did you end up working remotely and creating a business around remote work? Tell me your story.
Thank. Well, I got a start a couple of years back after finishing university and I tried to make it interesting. Cause it's, it's a long time ago. No, basically, you know, beta house, my first company was one of the first co-working space networks I would even say we started in 2009 in Berlin. We were quite famous because we were the first of such location. Then we continued to spread the, the word and help setting up other spaces. We started we had more people to create similar locations in Germany later on around Europe. And today Beta House consists of more than eight locations in four different cities. And the reason we did that in the beginning was we thought we need a good space to work in after university. And we didn't want to go to the office center. We didn't want to work from home. I didn't really know that this is a called remote work or what is remote work. Only later I noticed that many people come to our locations that would not be from Berlin and that we started to be this hub where international travelers come to. And I started to dig a little bit into that and I met a lot of so-called digital nomads early on. We hosted the first huge German digital genomic conference at Beta House and I learned about the topic and only later I realized that I have such a lifestyle myself. I just didn't call it like that. I was traveling a lot. My wife is from the us we spent a lot of time in her family and I was going on holiday, taking my laptop with me, and I guess, you know, it was, Not existing as a topic back then. And luckily today we can call it remote working so everybody knows what we're talking about.
Sorry, sorry. Just relate. I started working remotely from 2014 and back then, I'm not even a hundred percent sure that we had this term remote work. We had the digital nomads by that time. Yeah. So that was a thing. But not, not anything like that. And by the way, what you just said, it's it was way before WeWork and and the big names coming into the picture, right?
Yeah. So 2009, there was a time when we had, I think, doubled the amount of squaremeter as a co-working space than WeWork. So WeWork was starting the first locations and we were already locations in different cities. We became the German trademark for co-working. In the beginning everybody knew be house, but nobody knew co-working, which was actually a problem because it was a lot of work to explain to everybody what it is. But then later on I started my now company called One Co-Working because I realized how beneficial it would to have one membership that gives you access to all different kinds of workspaces, ideally on a global scale. Because I already thought in a city it would be nice to be able to use more than only beta house, you know, if you're on the other side of town or if you're just like to have a different vibe. And then we started to add up co-working space after co-working space to our app and make a big partnership network around the world. This was the first version of it, which really was catered as remote working digital nomads. So you would be able to work from any location in our network around the world. And the only thing you need, you'd only needed a membership at Beta House or a partner space, something like a star alliance in the airline industry. And that's where we got really into remote working. And the, maybe to finish up this introduction in the business world, for me, I was way too optimistic until before the Covid crisis cause in the end of the days, the number of remote digital nomads and remote workers were still really small and the topic of co-working was also still developing. And so the Covid pandemic also changed a lot for us, of course, and in my private life. We just last year purchased a second home in Portugal, and now we are even a more remote family traveling between Portugal, the US, and Berlin. So it became also a little bit more important for me to find solutions for that area.
That's a really long journey, by the way. So it's, it's really rare that I can speak with someone who actually started not just, I also, I already feel as a dinosaur, by the way because of my history of being remote work. But it's really rare to see that someone actually started, not just years, but like many years, before most people.
The thing is about this, it's, I mean, it's a great memories, but I tell you what, it was such a hard work in the first years to explain to people what we are doing, and it nearly killed us many times.
Really.
I mean, you imagine you try to explain co-working to somebody and the average answer is, yeah, but that's like an office, and why would I need to be a member or just want a desk. You know what's a membership fee anyways, right. And yeah, it's nice to be in the community, but I just need a desk and feel it is now accepted. There's lots of benefits to that, and even big companies these days, they kind of allow the employees to work in co-working spaces because they know it's, it's great for them. They have an amazing community and, you know, comparing to employees working alone at home all day where there's no company HQ near. Now you can go to a cool coworking space. They can even choose it themselves. Which one fits best? This is now all there people know it, it's just accepted, and 10 years ago you would not even get, you don't, I didn't even have the language to explain it.
Yeah, yeah, totally. Also, I spoke with Well, shall we say, advocates for digital nomads or digital nomads themselves who are doing this whole traveling and working whatever stuff since like 10 years or more. And they said and I think that applies to you as well, that the audience has changed a lot. So, I don't know, like 10 years ago we had freelancers, startup. Maybe some solopreneurs or whatever as the main audience for co-working spaces. But now that pretty much everyone is working in with some sort of flexibility, I wouldn't say fully, remotely, but at least with some flexibility. The audience became the full-time employee for one single company. Who happens to be allowing for their people to work from anywhere or close to an office location? So I guess the audience has changed, and I think you sold that too, right?
Yes. In the beginning there were mostly entrepreneurs, solo entrepreneurs, freelancers, startups. Then later on when the startup boom happened in Germany as well, in Europe. They would, they would use it as a very flexible, also low cost way to have office space. Then afterwards still before Covid, there were corporates and large organizations looking into co-working either for also the cost effectiveness and scaling, but also for innovation, but connecting to startups and finding a way to work together with them that happened in co-working spaces a lot, and then later on it started to be an actual ingredient in the workplace strategy. And that's where we have nearly arrived in the Covid pandemic, which gave this a huge boost. I assume that every larger organization has co-working or some sort of similar format integrated in their workplace, and they're still working on it. I mean, we are literally at the forefront of innovation here for a large organizations, how do they use it? How much do they operate themselves? What are the branding issues? Do they brand it as the headquarter, but it is in fact a co-working space like operation? Or do they go to WeWork? Do they go to Beta House? It's super interesting. I've never been more happy about when I realized that without Covid, I probably would've to. until I'm 60 to see that happen. I was kind of happy that there was the pandemic was horrible, but that one aspect was really saving me a lot of time to see how the future looks.
Yes. And how do you address that issue? Because that's a really big one. A co-working space is a space that you usually, or like most co-working operators, of course, Predefine in terms of branding, in terms of structure, in terms of how it looks, how it feels, what amenities are there, yada, yada. And they also have, you know, usually they have a community event and some sort of activity there. But when a enterprise or medium sized company comes they already invested a lot of resources to create their office. Usually in one of the hubs or downtown central in one of the big cities. Meaning they also invested in branding. It's part of their culture. Now obviously pandemic happened, everything became, you know, flexible. How do you address that branding question, for example? How can a co-working space that is, Community driven, highly flexible. How can it be turned into an enterprise flex office, shall we say?
Yeah. I mean, there's several ways of doing that. First of all, you have to look at the basic setting. That's the company have an own hq where the HQ is fully above the company. It's like really controlled environment. Even more important now to have to have it a brand. Aspect or that it's it's branded by the company itself. If that exists in the same city, okay, then it's maybe not super important. To the co-working spaces are a nice add-on, you know, and even if you have, if the setting is that a company retreats every quarter where it brings to the company can bring together all the team and make an effort on the branding side. Then also it's okay. Then you can use it as something like a complimentary thing that is actually enriching the, the brand with the ability. We know, if you think about it, having access to a very colorful and very interesting network of co-working spaces of flex spaces, as you say can be part of the mother brand. It's just as locations, as anything, it's another feature or allowing people to use fitness studios. It attracts the employees and it's part of what the brand, the mother company stands for, right. If you don't have hq, you know, we see lots of young companies, growing companies that, as you know, they don't even bother having a headquarter like us. You know, and, and I think it's a really good way. And so they have to build, I think they're, or they are doing it native mostly they built in the co-working experience into their brands. They're one of those companies that live in co-working space and maybe they choose a particular group of co-working spaces. You know, they kind of in hr, people in culture, they communicated, they live it, that they now are spending a retreat in this location. And I think this is a different it's a little bit different case but it also, Starts to be less important to have this big hq. And I wanna say one last issue thing that, because I thought a lot about this. How can you really use co-working spaces for your brand when you are having maybe a team inside the co-working space? And the good ones, good co-working spaces, they usually offer a lot of intersections for you as a company and the local community, and one thing that is very, very popular is you can run your own company or you invite, you know, imagine you sponsor barbecue in the co-working space. You have your own team there, maybe 10 people, but you invite over the whole community to tell the community of the co-working space, which can be a thousand people, what your company is about. So it's a really good opportunity for hiring for, you know, just even for finding customers sometimes and I think you there's is, we can even call it api where you can connect to the workspace and as I said, the good ones, they actually have a plan for that. You know, you sit down with the community manager when you move in and you are, try to find out what we can do and then in the end can be really, really beneficial.
And you also are for example, you as a, as a company, but have you seen others offering a parallel digital space as well? So let's say the community is also active because one thing be the, I have to explain myself because we know the how co-working spaces usually operate because we've been there. You actually build the, the whole company around that. But most people, most of the listeners, this whole co-working element and how it works, usually, sometimes it's totally new, something. So some companies do offer a digital parallel to the, to the physical space. Do you think that can be a solution?
So the only answer I have to that is in the co-working environment, in the co-working space, usually there is some sort of basic selection based a couple of tools that are used amongst the community to exchange and connect. You know, our beta house lecture has, I think 5,000 members and, and there's only 500 on site. So people, alumni, they're all staying in and to connect back. So I think there's already such thing happening that people stay connected beyond the space. But the best times is, I mean, in the end of the day when you meet once in a while in person, it's just a very different impact on the relationship. It's so funny because in a way now every company is starting to become, the office becomes more like a operation wise, like a coworking space. The HQs, they start to have to be flexible. They're community focused. So my thesis is that actually what we started back then as a co, like co-work. It just has turned into working. Because now everybody has to be flexible, everybody has to be some sort of distributed remote. And it was just a really early on like goofy version of what later became and now is just the standard for working and the offices turned flexible, you know, and you have to have all those solutions for companies that were initially tested in the co-working.
It's super hard to turn a big time office, by the way, into more like a flexible space, especially if you have thousands of people. That's the real, real challenge. One other challenge that I see, and by speaking with others they also see that most of the co-working spaces or within the central hub or, you know, one bigger city in a central location in the downtown or central, whatever. But most of the remote workers, they do work from home. And one of the other thing that they don't like is the commute. So how do you combat the people living in the suburbs? Right. And now they can commute to a flexible office. A co-working space. Yeah. And not the main office, but you know, they still commute.
Yeah. I mean, yeah. It's an important point in the case. So there's also, again, two cases in my opinion. Number one, there's even no headquarter around anyways. So even for commuting to a team meeting where maybe the two people closest to each other can meet in a place, it's still worth it sometimes, even if you have to go 20 minutes or half an hour. For the other case, when you do not want to go to the hq, but you also don't want to work at home, this is where a lot of new spaces are starting to exist right now. In Germany, for instance, those spaces are different than WeWork with what you imagine in, in what you, what you would see in the big cities because those spaces are usually connected sometimes the local city municipality help setting them up. Sometimes it's even we have those models you know, those farms that also have a little farm coffee shop or where they sell the local goods, they start to add now a couple of desks. It's very different, and I think that's also the thing about co-working. It's, in a way, it's a very diverse offer. For people who have never tested it, they need to understand and we try to solve this with one co-working, they have to less expectation management. It's very different to go to WeWork. You know, it's like Starbucks. Everything is always the same. Or to go to in the local village. To go to the city municipality, co-working. But both is valuable for depending on what you need. You know, you just have to understand that this is a very the spectrum is very wide. But to that point, I believe in two, three years from here, we also have a well working infrastructure in the smaller villages or cities in the country because it's not going to be less people needing that. It's just go going to be more people and automatically the supply will start to exist.
Especially by the way, and sorry to be the European on, on the, on the show. But it's also different in Europe compared to the US. So homes in the US they're much larger in terms of size, so it's a little bit easier to, you know, create a home office environment for yourself. Meanwhile, in Europe, it's kind of like harder. Especially if you have family and kids, and I know many people tend to ignore that fact, but it's kinda like hard to work from home if you want to do some heads down work, but you have full of distractions because of the children, you know, people living around you and with you, and the space is limited. So obviously there is a need to go to a secluded dedicated of office space.
Yeah. It's like we are just in the beginning. Most people just have worked for a year or two now in this situation. And, and over time you realize that for everybody. Over time there will be the need for some days or meetings or focused work to go to a space other than your home. And even it could be something, there's a construction going on at home. Yeah. You know, stuff. And I feel that's one of the biggest misconceptions, at least with people's minds that I talk to, that the workplace is not a nine to five one size fits all solution. It is an individualized solution and it has individualized needs. And now that the office is breaking. We can start to cater to individualized needs and everybody has a different need.
And one of the concepts that I heard lately from someone I want to pick your brain, you might find it really a creative solution. Is that what is co-working? Usually what we mean by co-working is a actual space where there are desks and everything is organized around those desks. So meeting room, amenities, events, community people, whatever. And the space is somewhere in the city. Now what if we take the space out from the equation and we just say that these are just desks. Can we put I wouldn't say lease, but cowork it out from membership spa, just the desks who are sitting maybe in a coffee shop, maybe in a library, maybe in a grocery store or restaurant in a quiet, the quietest corner, obviously, but just there is a space of a desk and you can book it online and that's it.
Yeah. I mean, it's kind of what I dream of but I have also learned that and eventually it will work, right? Yeah, but there's a couple of let you forget are needed when you try to build such service, because first of all, usually actual working time is really valuable so you, it's a high stakes thing. You don't want, I mean, imagine how pissed your, if your Airbnb sucks. Right, but then again, it's holiday. You might have even more flexibility on holiday, but if you have an important call and things just need to work, or if you have an important meeting, then you need to be sure there's a professional environment and this can only be provided by a professional service provider. And I'm not saying it's impossible to one day down the road have this kind of packages or software, whatever I mean, no, it's a lot of aspects to make this available in like a coffee shop or restaurant. Mm-hmm. But it's very difficult to provide this quality in any location just by listing the desk. And then there's a second aspect because as you know, There's a lot of implicit knowledge as economics and remote workers that are you, you know a lot about co-working spaces, but you don't know it because you have used them a lot. And you know, from the pictures on the website what space is good for what, and if you're having doubts, you probably call them. For somebody who doesn't have that implicit knowledge there could be a lot of bad experiences and so there are platforms who, who basically also are competitors who tried to just offer an Airbnb like desk booking tool. That can be literally like in a yoga studio, you can say, okay, during the day the yoga studio has some desks there. But expectation from people using it, especially if you offer this to companies the employees will not, will be a little bit shocked or not. They expect something different than a desk in a yoga studio when they book an office. So it takes, it will take some time on both sides to understand that this is different from an office, from the user side, but also to increase and improve the service and the quality on the provider side. And then this is something like you explained will be possible.
And how do you see, what would be the future for offices in general? What would we call office in five years maybe.
I'm very thanks for asking because I'm a hundred percent convinced that number one companies in the future will retreat office as a subscription, and it's starting with co-working, right? But you have to think a little further. Now. You have a distributed organization. You hire new people, you hire the people that fit. But you, the first thing is not to look where they live. Right? So, and when you hire them, you just put them on a subscription and then, and then if there's more than one, you could argue, oh, maybe a team room is good. If there's like more than 20 or 40, whatever, you know, it could be HQ but it's totally fluid. And in the end of the days for a company, you just stack them onto your subscription and then the server, the workspace and office that is needed for them will materialize through a platform like for instance, us, like one co-working. And, and that's the reason why we are working so hard at the building blocks right now. We provide day passes and we provide meeting rooms and we provide through an extend team rooms that are bookable. But ultimately this will be the major interface for workspace for both individuals and companies and the use of it employees in the end. I mean, it's just one in like, they will take care of their workspace needs through the app, through a mobile phone and, and figure. By the teams, by the subunits, rather than a top down decision made from, from the head of people in culture for every employee, it's impossible. I mean, it'll be decentralized as well.
So it's pretty much golden pass golden membership pass above all membership passes.
Yeah, so, right, and, and providers, we catered to that. Providers we were smaller ones like countryside providers. There will be a whole ecosystem around that. There will be also HR tools around that. There will be, you know, right now, you can literally see how an ecosystem for this future of work is starting to and how APIs are built, how culture you know, also need the cultural api, right? Companies are going through that right now, but I cannot see a, a different outcome five to 10 years down the road that this will be the new way. You don't even need to have real estate agents anymore. I think you will have a more, much more fluid and adaptable solution to that and I'm super excited about that.
Totally, totally. And it's, and by the way, it can be a solution for, because one of the conversations that I had with the previous guest was really insightful in terms of what drives the back to the office movement that we have right now. And I mean, it's obvious it's money, of course. So most of the investors in commercial real estate, they are investors big. So these are huge, humongous offices sitting in the city central, and they are right now empty or most of them are empty.
Yeah. Yeah.
But that can be a real great solution to, to mitigate the lease agreements and, and everything else just to rent out the partial parts of the office. And other companies are already doing.
I mean in, there's a intermediate time of course everybody is with empty offices, and you have the problem that is too much on the market. So there's of course, if suddenly you only need half the office space, you don't have the demand to, to cover the, the rest. But eventually, I agree there's also reason to believe that there's a something between coworking, between companies, right? That there could five have different companies saying like, okay, you know what? We are not, we are not competing with each other. We are different areas of business. So why don't we share our infrastructure? So we do like an intra coworking solution. We are working on such projects right now where we wanna enable companies to do that.
That's really interesting.
And another aspect is, you know, here our customers, couple of our customers there now recently, they ran into the end of their regular leases. So it's also really interesting how they handle it. They realize, okay, I have way too much space. Of course I will not renew the lease. But even now, looking at the kind of looming recession or whatever might come around the next corner of economy-wise, wise, they're like, okay, you know, let's move our 50 people or our a hundred people rather, into a flex workspace and add a couple of on demand check-ins in the global network. We are one co-working and, and that feels way more ready for the future than figuring out which office to fit out and what, how to build an hq at least for the time being. And, and it's also, of course, next year we will see we will, everybody will have learned from the experiences and then there will be the conclusions of that but that's, I feel, that's the state of the art. If you are. Not a too big company, let's say up to a thousand employees. You still have maybe enough flexibility you can do this move, move into flexible workspaces and then Europe basically already one foot in the future. It's way more difficult for corporates because they have. So, such a big cultural stack. And also with there like, you know, they really need much more time, but if you're a small tech company, growing company, you can do it now and it, and you save money. It's really because in the end of the day, this is half the office. So It's really cool to see this these companies alive because we, you know, haven't we dreamed of those since 2014 that they will exist one day so it's happening now.
Yes. And I also dreamt about co-working offices that are not just offices, but and then happened to be the new trend of co-living and and cohabit habitats. And, you know, this is really interesting because as the personal's work and personal life kind of like gets blurry and we don't know which is personal, which is work and we don't really want to figure out anyway. But we need a solution to actually manage the two together, which is not two, it's one. So it's like, it's really interesting how it, how it'll build out. Cool. Do you, do you think that, by the way, that will we have some sort of, because I also agree that this year is the figuring out year. This is like, like truly we have no clue what happens, but we see trends, but let's see what happens. But the next year, I think it'll be like a huge shift. Do you think so too?
Yeah, I agree. It's funny in a way because I guess if we would've recorded this a year ago, we would've said the same.
Yes.
But I think it's true. I basically, this, I would call this is still the year of disbelief. You know, it's still, people don't really believe the big change. Some of them. I mean, it's just, everybody's just trying to wait out what's happening. But the facts show that offices are empty. No, literally, I mean, everybody can read a balance sheet and can read how much squaremeter we have, and we don't need that anymore. So I feel it will take this full year and then maybe next year we have much more action, more decisions, you know? So yeah, I'm really looking forward to 2024.
If someone wants to make an action where can people find you?
Yes. If you want to bring your company into, into this future one co-working and me, our team, we are probably the best people to talk to, to make a plan for that. And you can find that www.onecoworking,com or find me on LinkedIn as Christoph Fahle. And I'm super happy to have those conversations and I have a personal mission to bring more people into co-working because that's what I started with early in my career. So please don't hesitate to reach out by anything.
Perfect. Appreciate the pitch and your time as well. That was a really inspiring conversation.
Yeah, man, thank you very much. It was, was fun.
