Jason M. LemkinCEO, SaaStr · Co-Founder of SaaStr AI, SaaStr Fund, Adobe Sign

Unicorns and Mistakes: Lessons Learned from Running a Co-Working Space

19 Aug 2023 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:44

Jason M. Lemkin ran a San Francisco coworking space for three years and calls it a huge mistake. It cost too much, distracted him constantly, and helped maybe 50 companies out of a 200,000-person SaaS community. He learned not to build offerings that only serve a tiny slice of who you're trying to reach.

Questions this video answers

Three years

About 30, 40, or 50 companies (speaker's estimate)

Roughly 200,000 active human beings (speaker's estimate)

If only 50 benefited — or even 500 — then it wasn't worth it (speaker's assertion)

Chapters

Were big mistakes. Like running our CO working space in San Francisco for three years was a big one. It was a mistake. It was a. It was a huge mistake. With hindsight, it was great. We had many unicorns there. But it was so distracting, it was so expensive, it was so time consuming. Learning from the coworking space is that you have to be very careful if you have products that only serve a subset of the community. This was the problem with the coworking space. It made 30 or 40 or 50 companies really happy. Lots of unicorns came out of this thing. But putting that aside, it really only, you know, if. If what? How big is the SAS community? Who knows? But let's say it's 200,000 active human beings, right? If only 50 benefited from the coworking space, or even 500. That's why it wasn't worth it. That was the obvious error.