Loosecubes

» see loosecubes.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

In 2012 the question of where you worked had one answer in Ankara, and it was the building that employed you. You went in, you sat at the desk with your name on it, and nobody looked down the hall at an empty chair and saw inventory. Loosecubes was built for a world where that chair was worth something, and in 2012 that world ran through a handful of American cities.

The idea came out of Campbell McKellar's own problem. She was working remotely, she did not want a kitchen table or another afternoon in a cafe, and she noticed that the offices around her were full of empty chairs belonging to companies that would probably not mind. She started Loosecubes in Brooklyn in June 2010 with Anna Thomas. You listed your spare desk, a stranger booked it, and for a day the stranger worked in your office.

It grew the way a good marketplace is supposed to. By the autumn of 2012 there were about 1,400 workspaces listed, 25,000 people signed up across more than sixty countries, and a membership number climbing at something like forty percent a month. The money followed: $7.8 million in June 2012 from New Enterprise Associates and Steve Case's Revolution Ventures, on top of earlier rounds that brought the total to roughly $9 million. The team went from two people to sixteen.

Five months after that round, on 13 November 2012, the company posted a farewell letter. Friday 16 November would be the last day it honored a reservation. Asked why, Loosecubes told reporters that what was on the website and the blog was all there was.

~ the dossier ~

~ the word in the title tag ~

The archived homepage from September 2012, two months before the end, carries its own diagnosis in the title bar: free access to happy and productive shared offices. Not cheap. Free. The invitation underneath reads the same way, offering free access to happy and productive spaces, and the sign-up button asks you to request an invite.

A marketplace makes money by taking a cut of a transaction. Loosecubes spent its last summer advertising the half of its inventory where there was no transaction to cut. The volume had collected on the free side. Growing forty percent a month is only a good number when the thing growing eventually pays for itself. Twenty-five thousand people had signed up to a service whose main promise was that it would not charge them.

~ the five months ~

The gap between the June round and the November letter is the part that unsettled people at the time. Investors had looked at the numbers in the summer and put in nearly eight million dollars. By the autumn the company was telling its community to make other plans. Whatever was discovered in between was never said out loud, and the press filled the silence with the obvious guess, which was that signups had never turned into bookings at a rate that could support sixteen salaries.

TechCrunch read it as a verdict on the whole workspace-marketplace category, and that part aged badly. The idea was fine. What was wrong was the layer Loosecubes chose to occupy: brokering access to space it did not own, from hosts with no particular reason to care. WeWork, which was two years old when Loosecubes closed, did the unsubtle version instead. It signed the leases itself, put its own name on the door and charged rent. Its own much larger catastrophe arrived eleven years later.

~ so long for now ~

The farewell letter is warm and slightly stunned. It talks about two and a half years and about going from a team of two to a company of sixteen, it counts the 25,000 Loosecubers in sixty countries, and it signs off from Campbell and Anna and the team with the house phrase they had used for years: keep work loose.

The domain kept answering for a while. By January 2013 everything had been replaced by four lines reading "So Long for Now. Loosecubes is now closed. Thank you for your support, and keep work loose!"

Then the DNS went somewhere else. Request loosecubes.com today and a proof-of-work challenge from an unrelated operator decides whether you are a robot before letting you through to a site that has nothing to do with desks.

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