When WeWork first tried to hire Wybo Wijnbergen, he thought the flexible office company sounded boring and then – as he heard more about its European expansion plans – crazy.
But now, eight years after he was convinced to join as managing director for northern Europe and three after he left, he is using every lesson, good and bad, to build his own co-working company.
That company is InfinitSpace, co-founded by chief executive Wijnbergen and his brother Wilco. In a twist of fate, it is making a name for itself taking on office space vacated by WeWork.
Last year, developer Helical temporarily turfed WeWork out of its Bower office scheme in the City of London over unpaid rent. WeWork came back on a short-term lease, but within just eight weeks Wijnbergen had struck a management agreement with Helical to take over two floors from his old employer.
Helical had no doubt heard of the success InfinitSpace had found at Brookfield’s Aldgate Tower, where it took on 60,000 sq ft previously run by WeWork as its first site back in early 2022.
It also has a site at Hagag-Gaya’s Kingsbourne House in Holborn, two sites in Amsterdam and two in the Middle East.
That is fast growth. “Not fast enough,” Wijnbergen counters.
He expects to open four more sites in London this year, with two more on the cards in Amsterdam and another new country market in its sights. As his company name would suggest, the co-founder believes that every office should include an element of flexible workspace.
But if that sounds reminiscent of WeWork’s too-far, too-fast growth, Wijnbergen is adamant that the industry has learned how to avoid the errors that come with fast expansion.
Scaling space
We meet in the Bower. It is quiet first thing on a Friday morning but more people drift in as Wijnbergen outlines the InfinitSpace vision – at the time Helical announced that InfinitSpace would take on the two floors, the firm had already signed up six former WeWork tenants.
The office looks largely as it did when WeWork ran it, Wijnbergen says. The co-working company often leaves behind furniture and fittings when it quits space.
InfinitSpace pitches itself to landlords as a white label flex company, although it does have its own brand, Beyond, that it uses across the London portfolio.
Wijnbergen joined WeWork in 2015 from Merlin Entertainments, where he had spent 10 years, latterly as general manager for Madame Tussauds Amsterdam and the Amsterdam Dungeon. WeWork approached him about joining as a general manager.
He thought the office market felt boring, but a few weeks later he visited the company’s first location in Amsterdam.
The expansion plans for the company, which at that stage was pitching a doubling of new openings every year, sounded implausible: Wijnbergen says he just slapped the unnamed WeWork executive trying to poach him on the back and told him: “Good luck.”
All about people
It was when he met a front-of-house community manager that he became convinced there could be a future on the co-working business.
He says: “I asked her, ‘What do you love so much about what you do?’ Her answer was: ‘The fact that I can help over 500 different people in this building to be successful, and I’m getting paid for it. That made me realise: It wasn’t about office space. It wasn’t about real estate. It wasn’t about bricks and mortar. It was about people.”
Since WeWork filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in the US, much has been made of what the company got wrong during its rapid rise and subsequent fall. But as Wijnbergen notes, the company also deserves credit for what it did right.
“We showed the world that you can scale physical space really fast,” Wijnbergen says.
“There’s companies that have done it before: McDonald’s, Starbucks. What I found really interesting is every single time you would walk into a WeWork building, you would see what the added value was. And that for me showcased that real estate is able to change, and there’s a different way of using office space than previously.”
Out of the comfort zone
Growing as quickly as WeWork did is “a rollercoaster ride”, Wijnbergen says.
“You execute on projects where in the beginning you’re like, ‘this is mission impossible’, and then it becomes possible. You quickly learn that nothing is impossible as long as you have people and partners around you that are resourceful, resilient and dedicated.
“Dedication comes from passion, and passion comes from seeing what the product does. And that is the beauty of working in an environment like this. When you see people using that space every single day, it’s super fulfilling. You know what it contributes and therefore that triggers you to continue to do it again and again.”
But there were mistakes, Wijnbergen says, and you learn from them. Chief among them was a focus on taking leases rather than operating via management agreements. The latter, Wijnbergen says, allow for genuine partnerships.
“I truly believe in partnership, it should be a win-win situation,” he says. “In a lease, there’s no win-win situation. It’s a client and a customer, a landlord and a tenant. A partnership should identify, on both sides, that if things go really well, both partners should be rewarded. If things go not so well, both parties should feel the negative side of it. It shouldn’t be just one or the other.”
Wijnbergen is enthusiastic about the future of flex – and there is clearly still some of the WeWork drive evident when he talks of his desire to keep pushing his new business forward.
“Once you’re out of your comfort zone, that’s the moment you’re scaling fast,” he says. “There are plenty of periods that we’re in a comfort zone, which means we’re not scaling fast enough.”
Does it feel like InfinitSpace is out of that comfort zone yet? “There are moments where I feel there’s a bit of friction and we’re on the right track,” he replies. “But then there’s also periods when it’s not there. And those are the moments that we need to crack.”
Photo © InfinitSpace
Send feedback to Tim Burke
Follow Estates Gazette
