Tech View: Local coworking grows despite work-from-home pandemic

As the year got underway, I joined the ranks of self- employed. After years of circling the startup and entrepreneurial community, I had to take the leap myself.

Having worked from home for over two years, I figured I’d be able to continue being productive for myself from the corner of my bedroom.

As it turned out, when I became my own boss, I became a lousy employee. After 15 years in a cubicle, now with full control of my time, I did almost anything and everything except work.

I soon realized that I needed to get out of the house to focus and to force myself to be productive. And for weeks I bounced around a half-dozen different Starbucks, setting up my laptop and paying my rent via pricey drinks. I also borrowed desks at generous friends’ offices, but I knew I shouldn’t rely on their generosity indefinitely.

It was time to join a coworking space.

Coworking is not a new idea. Old-school tech heads might point to the original vision for the Mililani Tech Park in the 1990s, a telecommuting hub where employees of various companies could work remotely with local amenities.

The modern vision has the same basic components: space to do your own work as part a larger space where you are part of a diverse community that encourages networking and collaboration. Good Wi-Fi is a must. Coffee and snacks are a plus.

Thirty years ago, shared community workspaces were tool-centric and called hackerspaces. Twenty years ago, widely available broadband brought the rise of modern coworking in New York and Belgium and Spain, then just about everywhere.

And in 2011 — on Feb. 26, more specifically, in a meeting room at Windward Community College — a group of Honolulu entrepreneurs committed to bring coworking to the islands.

Since then more than a dozen coworking spaces have come and gone in Hawaii. There were also other businesses offering variations on shared, flexible workspaces and offices. Then came the pandemic.

COVID-19 brought a double whammy upon coworking: corporate employees were relocated from offices straight to homes, bypassing other configurations, and bringing strangers together into shared workspaces itself became forbidden. All coworking spaces had to adapt or shut down.

Fortunately, in Honolulu, at least two coworking spaces didn’t merely survive the pandemic, but grew during the downtime. Both were able to leverage the parallel disruption in the commercial real estate market with landlords who were also thinking differently about their spaces and tenant mix.

BoxJelly coworking was first envisioned as a temporary pop-up operation when it first opened in the back of a furniture store in Kakaako in 2011.

“The BoxJelly is named after the box jellyfish that comes for a few days a week after the full moon and pops up and then disappears,” co-founder Rechung Fujihira explains.

But it didn’t disappear. Instead, it grew to a now 6,000-square-foot space that also supports local and visiting artists. BoxJelly was also tapped in 2019 to manage the coworking side of the state’s 13,500-square-foot Entrepreneurs Sandbox.

BoxJelly planned to expand in 2020, before COVID-19 hit. Even when everything was shut down, though, Fujihira and his partners and investors decided to move forward.

Now BoxJelly’s flagship location is in Ward Centre: 7,000 square feet of open desks, private offices, meeting rooms, event space, a kitchen and an artist-in- residence studio. There’s also the in-house TRY Coffee coffee shop, helmed by longtime local roaster Timothy “TK” Yamada.

Meanwhile, Hub Coworking Hawaii also made a big move during the pandemic, growing beyond its massive 14,000-square-foot space on Queen Street near Whole Foods Kakaako.

Although COVID-19 scuttled plans for a new location in Hawaii Kai in 2020, a call from the International Market Place in Kakaako put expansion back on the table. A 2,500-foot Waikiki location opened on Level 2 of the center, next to Mitsuwa Marketplace.

The opportunity also allowed Hub Coworking to address big changes in the coworking industry, including building in more private and enclosed work spaces.

“I think there’s going to be a shift away from the open-floor plan,” co-founder Nam Vu says, evidenced by more “sound booths” for quiet work or Zoom calls.

The new location allows for even more connections and collaborations.

“We’ve had a lot of interest so far in the space from local folks, as well as from from tourists and digital nomads,” Vu says. “It is going to be an interesting mix.”

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Ryan Kawailani Ozawa publishes Hawaii Bulletin, a newsletter focused on Hawaii’s tech and innovation ecosystem. Subscribe for free at hawaii.bulletin.com.