GCUC Podcast Recap: Caleb Parker

Colleagues, friends, and industry OGs Caleb Parker, Founder at Bold, and Liz Elam, Founder at GCUC, take us on an in-depth tour of the missing middle of the industry, the great real estate awakening, finding the community you vibe with, and the epidemic that touches us all in this episode of the GCUC Podcast.

Discover your favorite flavors of coworking with these juicy sound bites:

It’s confusing to people because they hear the buzzword ‘coworking’ but then they hear real estate people talk about ‘flexspace’ and the new term ‘space as a service’. What does it all really mean? My view: Space as a service is the wrapper, it includes flex; flex is a feature of space as a service. Coworking is the community aspect. -Caleb Parker, Founder at Bold

Five pillars of space as a service: technology that is needed, the hospitality, space, community, and management to optimize all of that. -Caleb Parker, Founder at Bold

Space as a service sounds like just selling space as a service and that you’re not interested in community, per say. Flexible work is real estate’s term to describe selling space on shorter term contracts and people who generally don’t necessarily understand community. Coworking is people that sell space in a flexible manner, but they understand community. -Liz Elam, Founder at GCUC

The key word is ‘Human’. We need to put people at the center of the universe in commercial real estate because it’s been all about making returns for investors. Certainly, investors are people but really the people we serve – bringing it back to that human level is important. -Caleb Parker, Founder at Bold

People need a community. People deserve a community and it’s critical for our society. The loneliness epidemic is through the roof and not getting better, suicide rates and addiction are off the charts. The only thing that really solves for depression and addiction is a community. -Liz Elam, Founder at GCUC

Most of the independent coworking operators around the world set up trying to solve a problem for themselves. Then they thought oh! I solved this problem so let’s find more people like me and let’s all work together and champion each other. That is the ethos of coworking. -Caleb Parker, Founder at Bold

It’s interesting that the big players at the top at 15-20%, then there’s that middle layer of multiple locations but it’s being bought up so that middle layer is gone. The layer below where they got 1-2 locations, thinking about it, coming over from across the pond to expand, those are the people that are most interesting. -Liz Elam, Founder at GCUC

The future of commercial real estate is space as a service, coworking and I think the future of all of that looks like the hotel industry. Where we’ll have a few major global players, 4 or 5, we’ll have lots of local, maybe country brands, and then many independents underneath that. -Caleb Parker, Founder at Bold

One thing we’ve always talked about at GCUC is the flavors of coworking. I hate when somebody’s like oh I went one day to this big provider ‘insert name here’ and I didn’t like it, so I don’t like coworking. I’m like whoa whoa how about going to the other 70 coworking spaces in Austin. You got to try all the flavors to figure out which one you like. If you go to a coworking space and it’s not your vibe, go to a different one-there’s so many out there. -Liz Elam, Founder at GCUC

Click HERE to listen to the full podcast with Liz Elam and Caleb Parker. It’s juicy!