Coworking space

Neuberg had been working at a startup called Rojo and found himself caught between competing needs: the structure and community that came with employment, and the independence and freedom of working for himself. He worked with a life coach to resolve the tension and arrived at the idea of a shared workspace that combined elements of both. He coined the term coworking independently, without knowledge of Bernard DeKoven's earlier use of the word in 1999 to describe collaborative work among equals.

The original space offered five to eight desks, free wireless internet, shared lunches, meditation breaks, and a firm closing time of 5:45 in the evening. After about a year, demand exceeded what Spiral Muse could accommodate, and Neuberg, working with Chris Messina and Tara Hunt, relocated to the Hat Factory, which became the first full-time coworking space. Messina, who later invented the Twitter hashtag, created the Coworking Wiki and helped evangelize the concept through unconferences and online communities.

By 2012, there were over two thousand coworking spaces worldwide. Precursors existed before Neuberg's, including C-base, a hackerspace founded in Berlin in 1995, and 42 West 24, a flexible desk space in New York in 1999. Neuberg's contribution was naming the concept, creating a replicable model, and explicitly encouraging others to take the idea and make it their own.