The first trend is how the shared office and the network have replaced the solo entrepreneur in her garage as the incubators for new companies and ideas. “Coworking” didn’t exist a decade ago, and today there are nearly a million people globally working alongside peers who aren’t necessarily their colleagues. Workers in these spaces consistently report making more connections, learning skills faster, and feeling more inspired and in control than their cubicle-dwelling counterparts inside large companies. They also have different expectations from cloud workers content to commute from their couch.
“They want connectivity, they want density, and they want fluidity — the ability to move quickly from role to role,” says Jonathan Ortmans, president of the Global Entrepreneurship Network and a senior fellow at the Kauffman Foundation. “I think all three things lend themselves especially well to shared work environments.”
The second, more powerful trend is the steadily climbing number of freelance, independent, contingent, and temporary workers — more than 53 million Americans at last count, including 2.8 million freelance business owners. Survey research by the economists Lawrence Katz and Alan Krueger suggests that nearly all of the 10 million jobs created between 2005 and 2015 fall under this heading, attesting to the rise of the “gig economy.” This structural change is exhilarating if you’re armed with a laptop, Obamacare, and a high hourly rate; not so much if your family needs a steady paycheck.