An interview with Tony Bacigalupo

LaunchPad Coworking recently caught up with Tony Bacigalupo, a project manager and coworking proponent in New York City. We met Tony in person at SXSWi in Austin, in March. Tony champions the coworking movement through Jelly and CooperBricolage — a coworking community that hangs out in GramStand, an existing café group members inhabit, typically weekdays between 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. The group includes entrepreneurs, designers, programmers, technologists and other independents.

Spike Gillespie: What’s your involvement in coworking and how did you get involved?
Tony Bacigalupo: I’m helping grow the CooBric community and I help organize and run Jellies. I was working from home for about a year when I started to realize that there was an unfulfilled need — people working from home like myself ought to be working alongside one another. I started researching it online, and eventually discovered the coworking movement and Jelly, which at the time was operating only in NYC and is open to anyone. I signed up on the wiki, amazed that I could join up without knowing anyone, and have been increasingly active ever since. Eventually my friend Sanford initiated an effort to do daily cafe-based coworking, and he put word out for people to join and help build it– so I showed up, and ended up getting really involved.

SG: What’s your overview of the state of coworking, from the beginning to now?
TB: It’s really exploded over the last year. This time last year, there were a handful of spaces at most that would call themselves coworking spaces. Now there are almost too many to count, and still more are in the works. Everything I’ve experienced to this point tells me that this is part of a larger shift in the way we work and live, and the coworking movement is going to continue to grow and evolve.

SG: What do you think the future of coworking will be?
TB: Coworking speaks to a specific human need — the need for social interaction between people as they work. When technology gave us the ability to work from home, we loved the idea of not being compelled to work in an office. But working from home isn’t the ultimate solution, because it doesn’t account for the need for social interaction. Working in Starbucks doesn’t really fulfill the need, either. So coworking is tied to the shifts in the way work is being done in general — and as time progresses, I think we’re going to see a lot of changes in how and where people work.

Coworking started out with some fairly specific views — some spaces declared themselves coworking spaces, while other similar places were not considered coworking. But I think, as this evolves and grows, we find that coworking is a very diverse thing, and aspects of it are going to be increasingly incorporated into all sorts of things. Coworking is going to grow both in size and in diversity. You’re going to see it in commercial spaces, cafes, homes, apartment buildings, laundromats, all over. It’ll continue to take on more and more different shapes and sizes.

SG: Do you think coworking is going to require a hard sell/heavy marketing to catch on? Or will it just take off?
TB: Coworking sort of speaks for itself. It addresses the unfulfilled needs of people who work from home, and when a few of them start coworking, it’s not long before their friends want in as well. As technology continues to lower the barriers of entrepreneurship and gives people increasing freedom to choose where and when they work, more and more people are going to be coming into this situation. Coworking helps facilitate that shift.

SG: What’s your “real job” and does your involvement with coworking interfere with that?
TB: I’m a project manager at a web development company. Does it interfere with my typical day-to-day activities? Sometimes. As someone who’s actively engaging the community, I have a much more distraction-prone role than a typical coworker. But ultimately, when you work virtually, the onus is on you to get the work done regardless of your circumstances. So at the end of the day, it’s my responsibility to get the work done. If I don’t pull my weight, it becomes obvious very quickly. So I make it work.

This is a stark contrast to the way a lot of jobs are managed in a lot of typical office environments. Most offices are primarily attendance-based. As an employee, if you show up at 9 and leave at 5, you get paid, regardless of what you did that day. When an employer shifts to performance-based management, attendance doesn’t matter. Where or when you work is irrelevant, as long as you are producing what you’re supposed to. It’s healthier for businesses and can sometimes remove inefficiencies.

SG: What are some bumps you’ve hit along the way?
TB: One of the most important things I learned early on was that no one person is in charge of a community such as this. At CooBric, we started with an offering that didn’t match the actual needs of the community, and there was no way to force it upon them. If you aren’t acting as a facilitator for the community’s needs, people can simply stay home. It’s the comparison of the Starfish and the Spider. Coworking is very much a starfish, so you have to avoid anything that makes you a spider.

SG: How have you resolved problems?
TB: We listened to what the community wanted, and more than that, let the people decide what direction the organization would go in. When we left the cafe we originally had based ourselves in, we rotated among a few cafes in the neighborhood. Eventually, people fell in love with Gramstand, and the community as a whole essentially decided that would be our home. I’m continuing to work on ways to empower the members of the community to help do things in their own way.

SG: There are different models for coworking — what’s yours?
TB: I’m covering three different models right now — the casual, occasional coworking of Jelly, the more frequent but still casual cafe-based coworking of CooBric, and I’m working on opening a space that sits on the other end of the spectrum — a membership-based space for small businesses and individuals with desks, conference rooms, and other resources. The number of possible models is infinite, something I’ve only come to realize recently. Coworking can be a component of a lot of different businesses and organizations.

SG: Are you for-profit?
TB: Neither Jelly nor CooBric deals with any money. The new space we are working on will likely be a “for profit” space, but any profits will be put back into the space. Being involved in coworking does result in personal gain, certainly in social capital and sometimes in financial ways as well– but the space itself, at least in the incarnation we are working on, is not going to directly be somewhere I’m expecting money to come from. In other iterations or versions, it’s possible