Last week, I clicked on a Forbes article about founder cafes, which are spaces described as “micro-ecosystems engineered for building, thinking, and serendipitous collisions.”
Sounds great, right?
It also sounds a lot like what coworking was always meant to be.
These founder cafes are being celebrated as innovative, forward-thinking spaces, but what they’re really doing is reviving something the flexspace industry seems to have forgotten: the power of connection, collaboration, and shared momentum.
As I was prepping to co-host the This Week in Coworking recap, that Forbes article stopped me in my tracks. Because if you’ve read my recent piece on reclaiming the word coworking, you know my argument: the flex space industry has largely sucked the soul out of coworking, while continuing to call it coworking.
A wake-up call to the coworking industry
And that’s why spaces like founder cafes should be a wake-up call to the entire industry.
People are leaving flex-but-called-coworking spaces to create and join places that are actually the definition of coworking. Not because they’re trendy. Not because they have better coffee. But because they offer what coworking promised from the beginning: a sense of belonging, purpose, and human connection.
The collaborative ethos, mutual support, inspiration, and shared momentum are what coworking has always been. And this remains the promise of community-focused coworking.
Which is why this quote from the article should strike fear in the heart of every space that isn’t intentionally focused on connection and community:
“Dimitriy Mishin is more blunt in his assessment of coworking spaces: ‘Co-working rents you a chair and sells you a membership with a 1% chance you might encounter someone remotely relevant to your career path in the same stuffy building.”
A 1% chance you might encounter someone remotely relevant? In the same stuffy building?
That’s not just a bad experience.
That’s a damning indictment of an industry that was built on humanness, collaboration, and the idea that being around the right people changes what’s possible.
It explains why people churn out of beautiful spaces, why loneliness persists even in shared offices, and why “community” has become a buzzword instead of a lived experience.
Founder cafes, and a growing number of spaces, projects, and communities, are recreating what the first wave of coworking spaces did so well: create places for interesting people to connect, create, share, learn, and grow together.
This isn’t a new idea. It’s a revival.
And it’s the future of coworking.
This moment in time represents a massive opportunity for community-focused coworking spaces not just to fill this need (if you aren’t already), but to help reposition and realign the entire industry around what actually makes shared spaces valuable in the first place.
Because the question isn’t whether people want desks and wi-fi.
It’s whether the coworking industry wants to be known for renting chairs or for creating the conditions where people, ideas, and communities truly come alive.
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