By Futurist Thomas Frey
When You’re Right But Too Early
In 2012, we launched DaVinci Coders at the DaVinci Institute—the second coding school in the country, training future developers in Ruby, Python, JavaScript, and game design. We saw the massive demand for coding skills years before bootcamps became ubiquitous. We built curriculum, attracted students, and delivered results.
Then the state insisted all our courses be approved through their regulatory board, which met every other month. While we navigated bureaucratic approval processes, the market exploded. By 2017, over 750 coding schools existed. The combination of intense competition and state mandates requiring months-long approval cycles for curriculum updates made it impossible to stay current. Technology moves in weeks; regulation moves in quarters. We couldn’t compete while handcuffed by regulatory lag, so we closed DaVinci Coders.
We pivoted to what we’d actually been doing even longer—coworking. Colony Workspace operated at nearly 100% occupancy, serving remote workers, freelancers, and small teams who needed professional space and community. Then COVID hit. People stopped coming. The numbers dwindled week by week. With no light at the end of the tunnel, Colony Workspace became another victim of the COVID era.
Two businesses, both ahead of their markets, both killed by factors we couldn’t control. But here’s what I learned: being early to the right idea teaches you what the successful version looks like when timing finally aligns. The coding school model we pioneered is now a massive industry. And coworking—the model that seemed dead in 2020—is about to explode in ways the first generation never anticipated.
Why First-Generation Coworking (Like Ours) Failed
Colony Workspace followed the standard model: shared desks, conference rooms, free coffee, “community” through proximity. We assumed people needed affordable professional space and would value being around other workers. For years, that worked. 100% occupancy validated the concept.
But COVID exposed the model’s fundamental flaw: we were competing with home offices. When remote work became mandatory and people discovered they could be productive at home, the value proposition of paying for shared desks evaporated. Why commute to sit at a desk that’s not yours when you have a desk at home?
We were solving the wrong problem. People didn’t primarily need cheaper office space—they needed things they couldn’t get at home. We provided space; we should have provided capabilities, equipment, and genuine professional community that home offices can’t replicate.
What Coworking 2.0 Actually Looks Like
The coworking that’s coming solves problems remote work created rather than competing with it. It’s not about desks—it’s about what you can’t have at home.
Hyper-Specialized Professional Spaces: Not generic coworking but specialized facilities for specific needs. Podcast studios with professional equipment. Video production spaces with lighting and green screens. Maker spaces with CNC machines and 3D printers. Medical professionals sharing diagnostic equipment. Legal professionals sharing law libraries and research databases.
If we reopened Colony Workspace today, we’d specialize—maybe focusing entirely on video content creators who need professional studios, or developers who need access to high-end computing infrastructure, or manufacturers who need prototyping equipment. The value is equipment and expertise you can’t afford individually, not just desks.
Neighborhood Third Places: Forget downtown high-rises. The future is hyper-local—coworking within 10 minutes of residential neighborhoods. People work from home most days but need to escape house distractions 2-3 days weekly without commuting downtown. These spaces aren’t about impressing clients with fancy addresses. They’re about getting work done without kids, pets, and household distractions interrupting.
Activity-Based Environments: Not assigned desks but environments optimized for different work modes. Deep focus rooms with zero distractions. Collaboration zones for team meetings. Creative spaces with whiteboards covering walls. Phone booths for calls. Recording studios for content creation. People move between zones based on what their work requires that hour.
Integrated Service Hubs: Coworking becomes a platform delivering services remote workers need—on-site childcare during working hours, mail handling, printing services, professional development workshops, business consulting, legal and accounting support. You’re subscribing to an ecosystem, not renting a desk.
Community-First Models: The spaces that thrive will be genuine professional communities. Not “community” as marketing but as the actual product. Carefully curated membership ensuring people in complementary fields who actively collaborate and share knowledge. A space of 50 people in related industries who help each other is worth more than 200 random desk renters.
The Business Model That Actually Works
Subscription tiers based on usage and services rather than desk ownership. Members pay for ecosystem access—use the space when needed, access the community always, tap services à la carte. Revenue from multiple streams: memberships, equipment rentals, service fees, event hosting, and percentage of deals made through community connections.
Successful operators will curate members carefully rather than maximizing occupancy. Quality of community matters more than quantity of desks filled.
Why This Time Is Different
Remote work is permanent, but fully remote has severe problems: isolation, difficulty separating work and life, lack of professional development, missing equipment and resources, no genuine community. Coworking 2.0 solves these specific problems rather than competing with remote work’s convenience.
If we reopened Colony Workspace in 2025, we’d build it completely differently—specialized for a specific professional community, hyper-local to neighborhoods, focused on providing capabilities people can’t replicate at home, and curated for genuine collaboration rather than maximizing occupancy.
Final Thoughts
Losing DaVinci Coders taught us that being early to the right idea with the wrong regulatory environment kills businesses. Losing Colony Workspace taught us that being early to the right idea with the wrong business model does the same. But both failures clarified what the successful versions look like.
Coworking 1.0—generic shared desks competing with home offices—died during COVID and isn’t coming back. Coworking 2.0—hyper-specialized, community-focused, solving problems remote work created—is just beginning. The opportunity is building the right version with lessons learned from the first generation’s failures.
After all, sometimes you have to build and lose the wrong version to understand what the right one looks like. We did that twice. Next time, we’ll get it right.
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