Coworking spaces are awful but important

When you look at the business of coworking spaces, they’re pretty unappealing: they don’t employ many people, their members are often building intangible things that are hard to measure and their business models are tough to justify.

But yet, they’re popping up all over the place. Big cities, small towns and everywhere in between — it’s hard to not find a coworking space in many of the smaller cities across North America. Coworking spaces are one of the four most important things in any tech entrepreneurial hub.

Our current measuring stick for coworking spaces (and startups) is wrong. When you try to measure them like any other business, it’s hard to explain their importance to anyone outside our community. Instead, we should measure the economic footprint of coworking spaces as the sum of their member companies.

we should measure the economic footprint of coworking spaces as the sum of their member companies. Click To Tweet

It may not be perfect but it’s far better than the current measuring sticks.

And, if you’re reading this and running a coworking space, you’re in the best position to help bridge the gap between the tech and the non-tech leaders in your community.