One Man Rented a Room and Named the Thing

The Room, the Word, the Experiment

In August 2005, a software developer named Brad Neuberg rented desk space inside the Spiral Muse feminist collective in San Francisco's Mission District, advertised it to strangers, and called what he was doing "coworking." The word was his coinage. The space operated two days a week, charged fifteen dollars a day, and drew a handful of participants who wanted the structure of an office without the employment relationship that usually came with one. Neuberg was explicit about his aim: he wanted to combine the freedom of independent work with the community of a shared workplace. That framing — social before spatial — defined the original intent.

The San Francisco Coworking Space did not survive long in its first form, but Neuberg's blog posts naming and explaining the concept were indexed, linked, and copied across the early web. The word "coworking" had existed in an unrelated computing context, but Neuberg's 2005 usage, attached to a physical space and an explicit philosophy of independent workers sharing a room by choice, is the one that propagated. Within two years it was the standard term for the phenomenon it described.

In 2006, Neuberg helped open the Hat Factory, also in San Francisco — a live-work loft that operated as a coworking space for a small group of residents and day members. It was still small, still deliberately communal, and still understood by its participants as an alternative to both the corporate office and the isolation of working from home. The Hat Factory did not scale; it ended when its lease did. But by the time it closed, the concept had already left its founders behind.

Between 2006 and 2010, coworking spaces opened in Berlin, London, New York, and dozens of other cities — each citing the San Francisco origin, most retaining the language of community and independence. C-Base in Berlin, a member-run hackerspace founded a decade earlier, had provided a template for shared, membership-governed technical space that influenced the early coworking ethos without being a coworking space in Neuberg's sense. The distinction between a civic experiment and a commercial amenity was real and, for a time, actively policed by practitioners who maintained directories of "genuine" coworking spaces against a rising tide of serviced offices using the vocabulary.

That policing did not hold. By the early 2010s, operators including Regus were rebranding products as coworking; WeWork, founded in 2010, would eventually carry the word to a forty-seven-billion-dollar valuation before its 2019 IPO collapsed. The word Neuberg coined in a rented room in the Mission District had become the name of a real-estate asset class. That is not what he said he was building.