WeWork

WeWork provides offices for business-to-business collaboration (co-working). They arrived in London last October 2014, and have just inaugurated their third building in the English capital (and they have another two under construction). This third center opened on June 1, 2015, is located in Devonshire Square, next to the majestic Gherkin building. WeWork’s other two London locations are in Soho and on the South Bank. Two more buildings are in development at Bishopsgate and Moorgate, both in the heart of the City of London district.

This New York company works as a start-up, raising venture capital, working on the constant growth of the company, developing and strengthening the WeWork brand, etc. It is a “physical social network”, its main objective being to promote collaboration between companies. For this, apart from social events, it provides offices of all kinds. Among these offices, there are also luxury, “Google”-style offices (sophisticated, spacious, technologically advanced,…) for entrepreneurs and small businesses, which do not usually have access to these well-equipped facilities.

Its hard-working and caring environment has helped attract “cool” customers such as BuzzFeed and Airbnb (US customers). Thanks in large part to these additions to its client portfolio, the company, which has only been in business for 5 years, has reached a funding round of 5 billion dollars (£3.28 billion) last year. Additionally, banks such as Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan have invested in WeWork.

Miguel McKelvey, co-founder of WeWork in a statement to Business Insider: “Being not very big, it fills up very quickly. We often experience internal growth within our current locations. We have realized that London is a great market for us, although we will continue to be aggressive in looking for more venues, until we feel or believe we have reached the limit of our market capacity.Currently among their clients present at their London headquarters are the music platform < a title="Souncloud" href="https://soundcloud.com/explore" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Soundcloud and the Festicket ticket sales website. According to the predictions of the New York company, London will become its second largest location after New York.

“I think we are seeing a global movement towards entrepreneurial culture. We see its push both in the US and in many other cities around the world that we have been to. In London we have connected with entrepreneurs, including a large number of small businesses, which have been really receptive to our open collaborative environment.

He also stated that the same thing will not happen to WeWork as to Regus (a dotcom office provider) years after the dotcom boom: “We have incredible diversity in our community and that diversity is what will protect us, difference from what happened to the dotcom companies“.

Additionally, McKelvey does not believe that the current wave of tech companies is part of a bubble or overtrend. He believes that this is a much more global or expansive change in terms of people’s ideology when it comes to doing business.

Beyond London, WeWork is also looking for other European cities to establish itself. According to McKelvey, Berlin is very interesting for them, but they don’t have anything concrete yet. They are attentive and open to new opportunities that may arise…