Sam Altman says coworking sucks. How do we plan to beat the charges in 2026?

The fourth day of Moxmas: swinging for the fences

Let’s be clear here: nobody thinks that running a coworking space is a good way to make money. The question I get asked the most is: “Are you guys gonna make it? Is Mox financially sustainable through another year?”

There are two answers.

The first and more defensive answer is: yes, we’re improving revenue month over month and by pushing consistently we can break even before we’re out of runway, and keep going like that indefinitely, but in doing so we’d expend all the efforts of a hardworking team into providing a resource to very few people, with very little equity built. The adage is do things that don’t scale, not build things that don’t scale. There is a reason Solaris dropped out of the game before us, despite being marginally profitable.

So then the question becomes: what makes a coworking space worth running?

As I referenced before, Sam Altman thinks that coworking spaces are not in fact worth running. Here is his quote in full:

“Coworking spaces have two big classes of problems. Number one, they are a band-pass filter. Good ideas — actually, no, great ideas—are fragile. Great ideas are easy to kill. An idea in its larval stage — all the best ideas when I first heard them sound bad. And all of us, myself included, are much more affected by what other people think of us and our ideas than we like to admit.

If you are just four people in your own door, and you have an idea that sounds bad but is great, you can keep that self-delusion going. If you’re in a coworking space, people laugh at you, and no one wants to be the kid picked last at recess. So you change your idea to something that sounds plausible but is never going to matter. It’s true that coworking spaces do kill off the very worst ideas, but a band-pass filter for startups is a terrible thing because they kill off the best ideas, too.

The other thing is the average level of ambition and willingness to work hard at a coworking space is incredibly low. There’s this reversion to the mean that is not what you want in your life.”

Austin was considering this before we even got going. He even put the full quote on a poster that we hung in Mox for a while; a thing that Austin and I share is an impish desire to constantly play devil’s advocate against ourselves. Austin started Mox by drawing on a strong network and on latent demand, so a couple months in, he felt the answer was simple: “Do you actually think that we have these problems? When I look around Mox, I think people here work harder than normal, and have better ideas than normal.” It is true! I am proud of what we built and who we have, as I hope is clear from my last post.

But in the long run, incentives will work against us: our pricing model is like a gym membership, where we get rewarded for people who sign up but don’t show up, and second, our desire to call Mox a community runs up against the fact that it really harshes the mellow to kick people out for being lazy. And compared to management within an organization, our staff has terrible visibility into what our members are doing, and how productive they are at it, and we would be creating an awful, adversarial relation with the Mox community by asking people to account for themselves in such a manner.

Additionally, hardworking companies/organizations grow up and leave. The best companies mostly don’t want to be in a coworking space forever, for reasons besides the self-fulfilling prophecy. Just on practical grounds a coworking space eventually becomes too small to have management hierarchies and company secrets held within, let alone production lines or serious hardware. So we have an evaporative cooling effect, where we’ll always be working to bring in new people who are working hard who soon graduate, and slowly building up a remnant core of people whose projects don’t take off or are less ambitious, who are taking it easy. Under this model, we’ll always be working against ourselves.

So, what is our answer to the band-gap filter, and to maintaining a baseline expectation for ambition, so that we have a place worth running?

Our answer in 2026 is: be fucking weirder.

Yeah we have a band-gap filter. It is called: have some interesting ideas, please. What is our particular taste in “interesting ideas”? It is roughly: things that would get funded on Manifund, like irradiating pathogens with far-UVC lamps, or by ACX Grants, like building drones to slaughter mosquitoes. Near-term applications of technical AI safety research. Or, be turning out banger blog posts. Have a weird fucking website. Do community building, by which you mean getting people together to pick each other’s noses.

Oh, you’re working on some B2B SAAS / LLM for X / Crypto for X thing? Cool, good luck with that, go apply to YC or something, I hear they don’t have coworking spaces.

Wait on the side you programatically generate stochastic ambient music from Go endgames using Berlekamp theory translating semivalues into semitones? Please come back we love you we didn’t mean all the things we said oh come on you know it’s not like that baby we’d do anything for you

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But I do mean it seriously.

Why does this work?

• First off, we are already well equipped to evaluate interesting ideas. This is a core strength of being part of Manifund, and having access to its network, and also something that I see in our team, and that I hope I personally have some of.

• Secondly, we have a pre-existing weird cultural scene, weirder even than the SF baseline. Guys, let me be TESCREAL with you here, the cultural niche gathered at Mox isn’t going to stop looking weird in the next decade, even as it coasts towards political power.

• Finally, it’s an intellectual’s weird scene, doubly preselected by being in SF. The people doing it are smart and usually have had or could get Real Jobs™, with all the benefits that come with this, like self-confidence and financial runway and social permission to Just Do Things. Native ambition is often mediated by these qualities, so we have the easier task of finding (ambition | competent), rather than trying to simultaneously draw (ambition & competent).

And yes, there are consequences. On one end, we will be filtering out a lot of intelligent, hardworking people with practical, implementable ideas we decided to call boring. At the other end, we’ll end up with the people who we think aren’t cranks or scammers but everyone else does, and sometimes we’ll be wrong and common sense will be right. And in the middle, we’ll still end up pushing some people the wrong way, by telling them to have cooler-sounding ideas instead of more actionable ideas. But like, you gotta have a thesis. And this is the kind that Austin and I can both get behind.

In specific terms, this means changing and tightening expectations around membership and membership applications. And, it does not relieve us of the need to keep working hard and doing outreach to bring in new membership, as successful projects grow up and leave. Finally, it also means creating more separation between Mox-as-community and Mox-as-workspace, in order to create separate expectations around a place where everyone is welcome, and a place where hard work and creativity are expected. Luckily, our expansion plans mean that this is feasible spatially. Mox will be able to dedicate the upper 3 floors to coworking and workshops, and open up the bottom floor to the broader community during the weekday and for events at night and on weekends.

It also means that Mox will need to fundraise again this year. More on that soon. Before then, I’ll be back at Mox this week working with my hands, and I hope to offer you some insight into the changes we’re making to upgrade the space!