“If coffee shops could have innovated a bit, the coworking industry might have never even happened, honestly, because coffee shops have all the ingredients that coworking movement wanted. It just needed an extra layer of intentionality.” — David Walker

Tired of running yourself into the ground?

Then stop running alone.

On February 24th, the London Coworking Assembly presents Unreasonable Connection Goes Live!—a one-day working session for the people running London’s most vital neighbourhood spaces and the public sector allies working to help them thrive. It’s a day to share the load, find real solutions, and build a new playbook, together.

David Walker is back on the podcast, and this time he’s got a provocation that might sting.

That indie coffee shop you love? The one where you spend eight hours nursing a single flat white, running speed tests on their wifi, hunting for the corner seat with the working plug socket?

It could have been a coworking space. Should have been, perhaps.

The ingredients were all there: the energy, the ambient productivity, the regulars who recognise each other but never speak because it’s against social norms. What was missing was a membership model and a barista willing to connect people instead of just pulling shots.

In our first conversation back in August, David talked about the bias towards design over engagement — how spaces get the aesthetics right but miss the human facilitation that makes community actually happen. This episode picks up that thread and runs with it: what does intentional community facilitation look like when you strip away the fancy furniture?

David has been in coworking since 2008, back when Conjunctured was a refurbished house in East Austin with beer in the vending machine. He’s watched the industry grow from grassroots movement to asset class. He’s always working between two worlds — the grassroots ethos in one side of his brain, the future evolution of the industry in the other.

This time, he’s looking backwards and forwards simultaneously.

Backwards: to the coffee shop owners who watched laptop warriors colonise their tables without ever figuring out how to monetise them. Who posted “no wifi” signs and two-hour table limits instead of building the community hub they were accidentally creating.

Forwards: to how AI might be the “permission slip” that lets small operators embrace the complexity of hybrid models.

Bernie’s been thinking about this too. There’s a café in Vigo where he’s got a sticker on his phone to show his commitment. It looks like a coworking space. It functions like a coworking space. But the people in there would never call it that.

There’s something in that gap between what we call things and what they actually are.

The conversation spirals into territory that matters right now — especially for UK operators watching the business rates crisis unfold. If your model isn’t sustainable, you’re vulnerable. And sustainable doesn’t just mean profitable. It means generative. Building something that creates value for everyone in the room, not just extracting rent from them.

What David loved about the original coworking world was precisely this: it was a business with an element of social activism. A sustainable model that enabled community. The Cluetrain Manifesto’s “markets are conversations” made real in a room where people actually talked to each other.

The episode closes where all the best coworking conversations do: with a reminder that talking to AI all day will get you high on your own fumes. This is when we need to be talking to other coworking people in our area. Get together. Maintain that human connection.

This conversation touches something fundamental to why the Coworking Values Podcast exists: the belief that Accessibility, Community, Openness, Collaboration, and Sustainability aren’t nice-to-haves but the actual point.

Uncertain times. Exciting times. A jungle out there.

Timeline Highlights

[00:04] Bernie announces Unreasonable Connection going live on 24th February in London — tickets on sale in January

[01:37] David on bridging two worlds: “always having the ethos of the grassroots mindset in one side of my brain and the future evolution of the industry in the other”

[02:28] The provocation: “if coffee shops could have innovated a bit, the coworking industry might have never even happened”

[04:43] Bernie’s pricing puzzle: “How do I charge? Is it like you can only sit here if you’ve got a membership?”

[06:31] David on the business model wall: “You saw these coffee shops struggle with this new influx of a new type of customer, but they could never figure out how to properly monetize the customer”

[08:05] The disconnect: “the average user of a coffee shop has never been a member at a coworking space”

[11:57] The unlock: “if a barista was at an hour or two out of the day, almost like a light community manager where they tried to introduce people or catalyse conversations”

[13:33] David’s blueprint: “one phone booth, some external monitors, reliable power, a membership fee for free drip coffee, and a barista who cared to connect people — there, you got a new business model”

[17:17] AI as permission slip: “open up Gemini or Claude or ChatGPT and tell it everything about your business and say, How do I get from point A to point B? It’s going to have a plan”

[20:37] Bernie’s shock: “I was shocked at how many people where they used AI was like spell check in a newsletter”

[21:50] The hard truth: “at the end of the day, if it’s not going to create more money in the door, then it’s just a volunteer effort”

[24:17] David on what made coworking special: “it was a business, a quote, unquote business. But it had this element of social activism... we were enabling community through a sustainable business model”

[27:03] The vision: “A business owner or a coworking space owner has the ability to build a microeconomy in their own coworking space”

[29:15] Bernie’s closing wisdom: “this now more than ever is when we should be talking to other coworking space owners and community people in our area”

The Coffee Shop That Almost Was

Walk into any indie coffee shop and you’ll see the ghost of what coworking could have become.

There’s the guy who’s been here since opening, laptop slowly murdering his thighs, running speed tests every hour. There’s the woman who recognises the regulars but hasn’t spoken to any of them because that’s not what you do in a café. There’s the owner watching their tables occupied by people spending a tenner over eight hours, unable to turn them for the lunch rush.

David calls this the coffee shop’s collision with the wifi revolution. He remembers when not every café had wifi, when you had to scout for plug access like a detective. Now the infrastructure exists everywhere, but the business model never evolved to match.

Coffee shops had everything the coworking movement wanted. The energy. The ambient productivity. The sense of being around other humans doing their own thing. What they lacked was intentionality — a membership model, a mechanism for connection, a way to monetise the all-day laptop warriors without resorting to passive-aggressive “no laptops” signs.

Bernie sees this playing out in Vigo right now. His friend’s café has a huge event space upstairs. He keeps trying to convince Josh to put a big table up there, add some monitors, create a coworking area. The blueprint is obvious. But there’s that gap between knowing what could work and actually building it.

The ingredients were all there. The recipe was never written.

The Barista as Light Community Manager

David’s blueprint for the café-coworking hybrid is disarmingly simple.

One phone booth. Some external monitors. Reliable power and wifi. A membership fee that includes free drip coffee (espresso upsold separately). And crucially: a barista who cares enough to connect people.

That last bit is where most coffee shops fall down. They’ve never thought of their staff as community facilitators. The barista makes drinks, handles payments, maybe asks how your day’s going. But what if, for an hour or two each day, they deliberately tried to introduce people? Catalyse conversations? Unlock the latent community that’s been sitting there all along, held back by social norms that say you don’t talk to strangers?

We’ve created an entire class of workers who spend eight hours in cafés pretending not to be working. They recognise each other. They nod. They never speak. The social code says: we’re all here alone, together. Breaking that code feels transgressive — unless someone gives you permission.

David studied sociology alongside business. He’s fascinated by how you take a retail environment centred on purchasing a product and transform it into something that functions like a community centre. The early coworking spaces did this intuitively. They had that extra layer of intentionality that coffee shops never quite achieved.

The purchase of coffee is actually part of the problem. When you buy a drink at a coffee shop, it codes the space as transactional. This is retail, not community. But if there was some membership fee — even something tiny — that shifted the relationship?

Membership changes everything. You stop being a customer. You become a citizen.

AI as Permission Slip

David’s worked with coworking spaces that have embedded coffee shops and restaurants. He knows firsthand that running food and beverage is already complicated — inventory, spoilage, staff management, massive menus. Adding workspace operations on top feels impossible.

But AI changes the calculation. Not by automating the human connection that makes community work, but by giving operators the tools to manage complexity they previously couldn’t handle.

David’s advice is direct: open up Gemini, Claude, or ChatGPT. Tell it everything about your business. Ask how to get from point A to point B. It’ll have a plan.

Bernie saw this when talking to people about AI in the London Coworking Assembly. He was shocked how many people — working in spaces at the heart of fintech innovation — were only using AI for spell-checking newsletters. They were overstretched, so they never committed the time to learn what AI could actually do for them.

The retail world is struggling. Coffee shops are struggling too. Maybe the complexity of a hybrid model isn’t the barrier anymore — maybe it’s just the existential leap required to try a new highway.

AI doesn’t replace the human facilitation. It handles the operational complexity so humans can focus on what actually matters: connecting people.

The Revenue Conversation We Need to Have

David remembers sitting in business school, thinking about societal impact and change, when his professor dropped the hammer: “The purpose of a business is to maximise shareholder value.” It felt wrong then. It still does.

But here’s what David’s learned from a decade working with real estate developers and building owners: at the end of the day, if your community initiative isn’t going to create more money through the door, it’s just volunteer work that puts more burden on you.

That doesn’t mean becoming soulless. What David loved about early coworking was precisely that it was a business with an element of social activism. A sustainable model that enabled community rather than extracted from it.

The problem comes when the public loses faith that businesses are doing good things with their money. When they see shareholder payouts while train services collapse, when privatisation becomes extraction. Bernie brings up Thatcher selling off the trains and water and everything — even hardcore capitalists are now furious at what that “maximise shareholder value” mindset produced.

This is the tension at the heart of indie coworking. The dominant business logic says scale beats community, transaction beats relationship, extraction beats generation. What David’s describing — a café that becomes a membership hub, a barista who becomes a community facilitator — that’s not just a different business model. It’s a different economic philosophy. One that says sustainable can mean generative, not just profitable.

And at a moment when UK business rates are threatening the viability of independent spaces — when the Valuation Office Agency is reclassifying coworking in ways that strip Small Business Rate Relief from member businesses — the question of sustainable models isn’t theoretical. It’s survival.

There’s a sweet spot though. Business models that tick all the boxes including profit, whilst doing something genuinely valuable. Coworking at its best lives in that space.

Markets Are Conversations

This is where everything David’s been saying clicks into place.

Bernie resurrects the Cluetrain Manifesto, published in 1999/2000, with its provocative thesis: all markets are conversations.

At the time, it felt revolutionary. The internet had unleashed a way for humans to connect that bypassed corporate gatekeepers. We could either use it to blast horrible marketing messages at each other, or we could actually talk.

Coffee shops missed this. They had the physical space for conversation but treated every interaction as a transaction. Buy coffee, sit down, leave. The “market” was the till, not the room.

What early coworking understood — what David’s been circling this whole conversation — is that the room itself can be the market. Not in the extractive sense, but in the generative one. A business owner has the ability to build a microeconomy in their own space. Not just renting desks, but enabling transactions, connections, collaborations between the people who gather there.

This is what gets David excited — disruption, thinking in terms of “this is how things were, but now they can be something else.” AI gives us new ways to think philosophically about our businesses because we can essentially have a conversation partner helping us open new neural pathways.

The warning though: you can ask AI all day, and David loves it, but if you’re not also talking to actual humans, you’ll be high on your own fumes.

This is when we need to be talking to other coworking space owners in our area. Getting together. Maintaining that human connection. Because markets are conversations — and conversations require showing up.

From Point A to Point Z

David’s been in coworking since 2008, working between two worlds.

One side of his brain holds the grassroots ethos — the messy spaces, the beer vending machines, the collaboration that felt like social activism. The other side watches the industry evolve into an asset class with NOI calculations and franchise disclosure documents.

The question he’s always asking: what are the parallels and evolutions between these worlds? How do we get from point A to point Z without losing the soul along the way?

The coffee shop question is really a proxy for this larger tension. Here’s an institution — the indie café — that has all the ingredients for community. It just never figured out how to sustain itself whilst serving that community.

David’s not prescribing answers. He’s suggesting we need to embrace uncertainty whilst moving forward anyway. You don’t always need to know where you’ll end up before starting the journey. Sometimes just having the conversations is the point.

The jungle’s out there. Time to start walking.

Links and Resources

David Walker’s Work

* CoworkingConsulting.com — David’s consulting practice for flex workspace strategy

* Coworking Ecosystem Network — Industry directory and collaboration platform, David is prototyping.

* David Walker on LinkedIn — Connect directly

Previous Episode

* The Messy Spaces Where Magic Happens with David Walker — Our first conversation exploring design vs engagement and why collaboration happens in public

Books and Ideas Mentioned

* The Cluetrain Manifesto (1999) — “All markets are conversations.”

Projects & Community

* Join this and other conversations with people in the LinkedIn Coworking Group

* Unreasonable Connection Monthly online gatherings for Coworking Community Builders.

* Workspace Design Show London 2026

* European Coworking Day May 2026

* London Coworking Assembly

* European Coworking Assembly

Bernie’s Projects

* London Coworking Assembly 5-Day AI Crash Course for Coworking Spaces

* Connect with Bernie on LinkedIn

One More Thing

Coworking brings communities together, helping people find and share their voices.

Each episode of the Coworking Values Podcast explores Accessibility, Community, Openness, Collaboration, and Sustainability — values that shape the spaces where we gather, work, and grow.

If this resonates with you, rate, follow, and share the podcast. Your support helps others discover how coworking enriches lives, builds careers, and strengthens communities.

Community is the key

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit coworkingvaluespodcast.substack.com