In 2010, Campbell McKellar co-founded a company called Loosecubes, a business built partly on the belief that the traditional office was on the path to extinction. The evidence was there to support her business plan: back then, there were 42 million freelancers and contract workers in the United States, and more than 60 per cent of American companies were allowing employees to work remotely some of the time.
Loosecubes launched shortly after Airbnb and Uber, and it applied the same principle – monetising other people’s under-used property – to desk space. Like other “sharing economy” companies, Loosecubes could grow quickly because it didn’t take on those workspaces as assets, and like those other companies it grew rapidly: by 2011, it was world’s largest community marketplace for shared workspaces, with almost 1,700 spaces in 350 cities and 60 countries around the globe.
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