Forbes: SpareChair Aims To Become The Airbnb Of Coworking

SpareChair in the news.

By Laura Shin

When Brooklyn-based journalist Sharona Coutts took a new job in April 2013, her boss decided that instead of relocating all the new hires to Washington, D.C., everyone could just work remotely.

“I love working from home, but I noticed there are some significant drawbacks,” says Coutts. “One is that you get really lonely when you’re working long hours, and you don’t have time to grab lunch with people during the day. You spend a lot of time by yourself. The other is professional isolation. I went to a networking event and realized I hadn’t seen a lot of these people or made new connections for a couple of months, because you’re not just pulled into meetings or invited to an after-work drink where you meet new people, and that’s important especially in a field like journalism that’s changing so quickly.”

She started inviting other friends who also worked from home to her apartment a few afternoons a week, and she also started going over to their places. She preferred this over cafes, where she felt she didn’t have control over her environment.

“You don’t know whether you’re going to get an outlet, you don’t know whether it’s going to be noisy, you can’t do conference calls, you don’t know what the wifi will be doing that day, you don’t know what state the bathroom is going to be in, you don’t even know if you’ll get a chair — and you always manage to spend $10 on coffee and sandwiches you don’t necessarily want,” she says.

Her enjoyment of working with other people in homes inspired her to launch SpareChair, a new kind of coworking startup.

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