By the numbers, WeWork’s dominance as a collaborative-workspace provider is hard to dispute. With a $16 billion valuation as of March, and more than 900 employees as of June, the company currently leases coworking spaces to 60,000 members at 110 sites in 30 cities across 12 countries. (It also has two WeLive locations, a residential take on the sharing experience.) This includes the 13 sites in seven cities that WeWork opened since the beginning of this month alone, which translate to 9,500 additional desks, each of which can be rented per month.
Aside from bringing in revenue, these hundreds of sites and thousands of desks also serve as one enormous test bed for WeWork’s 13-person product-research team to conduct massive studies in architectural planning, programming, and design. Kicking off this endeavor was the debut of the company’s flagship “beta floor,” the sixth floor of WeWork’s Times Square office, in New York, which hosted the company’s inaugural product roundtable last week.