Why every entrepreneur should start at a coworking space

So, if you're a young entrepreneur starting out, I have a strongly held belief that the best way for you to get ahead is to start working from a coworking space, whether it's a WeWork style or one of the local kind of off-brands or somebody that you know that has an office full of people kind of doing badass stuff. If you are a young entrepreneur getting started, you don't have a super strong network, but you're trying to be entrepreneurial, The absolute best thing you can do is start in a coworking space rather than try to do it at your house or at a coffee shop or whatever. And so in this video, I will talk about my story and how doing this technique absolutely worked for me and the things I learned from it, and then hopefully encourage those of you that are starting out and starting businesses to do the same. Hi, my name's Michael. If you're new here, I go for walks, and I talk about things that I've learned in 30+ years of business and entrepreneurship with the idea of helping other people avoid some of the pitfalls and mistakes that I've gone through. I talk about different sort of stuff around business. I explained the diamond market in a previous business video here. And if you're interested in that kind of stuff, click the subscribe button. I also send out a newsletter twice weekly. You can subscribe to that on my bio page. So it's absolutely free. And I would appreciate it if I got to send it to more people. So my story around using a coworking space to kickstart my entrepreneurship journey actually dates back to about 2012, 2013, which is 13 years ago here in San Antonio. And, you know, at the time I felt kind of stuck. I hadn't really been able to find my tribe of people who were other folks that were entrepreneurs. And I, I knew a lot of people that were friends who were friends through— they also had kids, so they were kind of parent-based friends that way. I knew people through my gym, and I knew a lot of people that worked at kind of big corporations like USAA or Rackspace or places like that, but I hadn't really been able to find like other people who wanted to be at the creative side of business, this entrepreneurship and, well, frankly, a little more risky end of the business spectrum. And I think how I felt then was pretty consistent with how a lot of other people feel as a business owner or an aspiring business owner. Like, it's really lonely. Like, if you already have employees running a small business, like, you don't have peers because you can't— there's a lot of conversations you can't have with your employees when you're a CEO or you're their boss. And then similarly, like, like a lot of your friends, it's pretty natural if you meet friends through parent groups or activities, like it's pretty natural for those people to have no idea, right? If they have W-2 jobs, they don't know the kind of challenges you're experiencing, you know, as an entrepreneur. And so back around this time, like, I read in the news that some local kind of civic leaders had started a co-working space here in San Antonio called Geekdom, and, uh, kind of like geek kingdom for the idea of being like technical and forward-looking companies, uh, could like co-locate out of this coworking space. And the idea was kind of genius. Like, they created a coworking space, but it really wasn't meant to be a coworking space. Uh, the real intention of the thing was to spark entrepreneurial activity in the community, with the idea being that if you take like-minded people who all kind of aspire to the same things, in this case being entrepreneurial, creating things of value, uh, trying to make more things happen in the business world, if you put those people like in a place together and you give them a place to just kind of have collisions and meet each and network and start to talk about ideas and help each other, like potentially good things could happen. And for me, I bought into this idea. I was like, this sounds cool. Like, it's exactly what I need. This is potentially a group of people who is going to be a peer group for me that are going to be, well, like the type of people that I've been searching for and haven't been able to find because, well, frankly, like, I was living out in the suburbs. It's hard to find your entrepreneurial community when you're like driving on the freeway at 75 miles an hour. So I got my laptop, which by the way, was a total piece of crap back then. It was not a good computer. And I got my laptop and I said, here's what I'm going to do. I have my day job, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to go spend one day a week down at this coworking space and I'm just going to see what happens. Like, I'm not going to have any expectations. I'm just going to get a desk and like, I'll just be there and go from there. And I remember going down the first few times and the place was kind of deserted. They were just getting started, and I would set up at this computer, and I would just kind of get on the internet, surf the net, and it wasn't expensive. Like, I was paying $50 a month or whatever to have unlimited access, and basically just spending time down there. And I remember setting up at a conference room, uh, at a desk there, and, uh, this guy walks in and he goes, he goes, uh, He sits down, kind of walks in, starts fidgeting around. He looks at me, he goes, "Who are you?" And I was like, "Whoa, well, this is a level of aggression I wasn't really expecting here at the coworking space." And it turned out that guy was Nick Longo, who's since become a friend. And he was the guy who had started the whole place and was managing it. And so I got to know Nick, and Nick was terrific because he understood part of his job running the place was to connect people together to other like-minded folks. And what I saw with Nick was this giving attitude where if you just start helping other people, like eventually the universe will pay you back. And that was the approach I tried to take in the first years that I spent around the Geekdom kind of ecosystem and all that place was like, I'm just going to give, I'm not going to expect anything in return. And eventually, like I just can trust that the world will pay me back for my investment in doing that. And so that's what I did. Like I would help other companies when They had problems. They needed somebody to test their design. They wanted feedback on an idea. They wanted, you know, referrals to potential customers. Heck, I'd even buy some stuff from people, even if I didn't really want it. And that give-first mentality for me just totally ended up paying off. Fast forward to 10 years later, I look back at a lot of the ventures I've started and the people I've partnered with, like, they all came from that initial just giving-first attitude. So look, in the end, your mileage may vary on what it will take to kind of build a network and start to be able to find a great platform to launch your own business ideas and become an entrepreneur. But for me, like, this path just seems so obvious and so cheap and such high ROI. Plus, frankly, it's just healthier to be out of your house when you're starting a new company. All those things together just make it an absolute no-brainer to leverage a coworking space and make it the launchpad for what you're doing into your journey into entrepreneurship. And I have friends that are younger folks that are doing this too. You know, a couple of my business partners now are located in markets like in New York, and they're younger folks. Like, they've seen huge advantages from being in a place like a WeWork or a similar kind of coworking space, even as simple as like they run into potential customers for their service and business, you know, at the coffee machine. And so it's a huge, a huge benefit and something I think everybody should do. And hopefully my story around it is inspiring for people. So let me know what you think in the comments below.