Liquidspace: Finding A Space To Work Wherever And Whenever

I attended the GigaOM Net:Work conference in San Francisco a few weeks ago, and met some of the founders of Liquidspace, a new start-up building something like AirBNB for coworking spaces:

LiquidSpace is an application that connects people seeking workspace with venues that have space to share. High-end business centers, hip startup co-working spaces, hotels, and private spaces are listed on our web site and in our mobile application.

I had the opportunity to speak briefly with Mark Gilbreath, the CEO, and subsequently to read a bit about the company’s vision:

Company founder Mark Gilbreath calls his vision the “consumerization of real estate.” The LiquidSpace mobile and Web-based app capitalizes on a number of important trends: the increasing mobility of workers, the real-time quality of today’s work, the economic and environmental drag of empty commercial space, and the availability of location-aware technologies and cloud services infrastructure such as Windows Azure.

“I have been intrigued with alternatives to traditional workspaces for a long time, from both a business efficiency and an environmental impact standpoint,” Gilbreath explains. This interest heightened as he watched commercial buildings constructed during boom times sitting empty or underused as work patterns shifted.

As a 20-year tech veteran who has started and run multiple companies in his career, Gilbreath also had firsthand experience with the problems of workspaces for startup companies. “Owning or leasing real estate is a huge economic burden, consuming enormous chunks of a startup’s early capital resources,” he says. “Plus, designating a fixed amount of office, lab or manufacturing space limits a company’s business flexibility.”

Fixed workspaces can also constrain individual creativity and productivity. Increasingly, workers are leaving the workplace to get work done. Toiling alone on a project, bouncing ideas off co-workers, presenting to a customer or manager, traveling for business and working from home — different scenarios require different kinds of spaces.

“LiquidSpace is designed to connect mobile and contemporary knowledge workers with the right workspace at the right time, while providing new mechanisms to leverage underutilized real estate assets,” says Gilbreath. “For workers, it means working how and where they want. For businesses, it means turning a fixed cost into a variable, and maybe even some extra revenue.”

After the conference, I had a day in San Francisco where — after a breakfast meeting — I wanted to work productively, and it turned out my hotel room did not have a desk. I thought about Liquidspace, and it worked just as advertised.

I had seen that there were a bunch of places in San Francisco participating in the service, including Nextspace, a cool-sounding coworking space, located only a few blocks from my hotel.

I downloaded the free iPhone app and logged in. I verified my identity and provided credit card information, which in Liquidspace’s model meant that I now had a ‘passport’: meaning I now had the capability to reserve space. Correspondingly, participating space providers have the capability to issue ‘visas’ to users like me. That handshake — a trust exchange — is brokered by Liquidspace, who can monitor my behavior over time, and potentially block my access to the network. And, of course, Liquidspace also vets the participating spaces closely, as well, so users like me can be sure of working in a safe, comfortable, and professional setting.

I searched in the immediate area, opting for a full-day of access, not a conference room or closed office, and found the Cafe at NextSpace an attractive option.

I clicked to book it, and then I was told it was confirmed.

Note that Liquidspace manages all finances, so cash and card swiping at the participating space is unnecessary.

The app provides directions:

At NextSpace, the receptionist knew who I was as I walked in, and showed me around. There was some short delay in checking in, but around an hour later that happened. I am unclear what was causing that delay, but it wasn’t an impediment to actually sitting down and working. This delay could have caused problems if it blocked me from using a copier or reserving a conference room, but I wasn’t doing that, and I am not sure that it would have, anyway.

Later on, all was well.

[An aside: I bumped into someone from the Net:Work event, and she invited me to lunch around the corner, which is one of the great side effects of coworking, after all.]

Bottom Line

Liquidspace is a great idea, executed well. I can easily imagine using it in other cities, when I am not parked at Grind in NYC or working at home in Beacon NY. In fact, I might even use it in NYC if I was all the way across town, and simply wanted a conference room for an hour.

The app is another indicator of the transition we are going through vis-a-vis workspaces in the increasingly mobile, freelance, telework world, a topic I drilled into in detail recently in a GigaOM post: see Coworking: The Pivot In Today’s Transformation Of Work?

Liquidspace recently raised its first round of institutional investing of $3.6M (Shasta Ventures and Floodgate), after an earlier $1.6M angel round (Floodgate and the Greylock Discovery Fund), so I expect we will see an aggressive rollout in many cities and countries.