---
layout: post
title: "On coworking: you cannot make a profit selling community"
description: "Riffing on William Tozier's post"
categories:
- Community
tags:
- coworking
- seed accelerator
---
<blockquote class="posterous_long_quote">
	That last one&rsquo;s important. We&rsquo;re not communists, we&rsquo;re not anti-capitalists and we&rsquo;re not running some kind of pep club. <strong>It&rsquo;s just that we&rsquo;ve thought about it.</strong> You cannot make a profit <em>selling</em> community.
</blockquote>

<cite>via <a href="http://williamtozier.com/slurry/2011/07/12/the-only-thing-coworking-needs-to-be">williamtozier.com</a></cite>

I saw this via <a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/118432652629200965858/posts/FzkMGiLb1w1">Dave Pollard on G+</a> and nodded my head most violently as I read through the whole thing.

(I could spend a week just posting each of the paragraphs of of <a href="http://williamtozier.com/slurry/2011/07/12/the-only-thing-coworking-needs-to-be">Tozier's post</a>)

Tozier starts by talking about how different labels / terminology start getting corrupted in a mass market to mean different things. It has happened to coworking, and it is happening to startup accelerators.

I had meant to write earlier about Ben Yoskovitz's post <a href="http://www.instigatorblog.com/startup-accelerator-making-money/2011/07/29/">The Sole Purpose of a Startup Accelerator Should Be Making Money</a>, which has similar thoughts as Tozier.

To anyone that has studied (or lived through!) the model of startups and seed acceleration, it's a no brainer. Everyone with a stake in the accelerator needs to be making money for it to continue.

If the money isn't there, whether it is for a coworking space or a seed accelerator, then it's a signal that the environment / people aren't ready for it. And you can't artificially prop it up with government.

Thinking more about this concept of community, I feel a whole other post coming on exploring the role of money in open source communities. My own experience has been that no matter the non-monetary activities that power them, the open source communities haven't really flourished or grown to a large degree without initiatives involving substantial amounts of money.

I have to end this piece with a tip of the hat to <a href="http://www.billmacewen.com/">Bill MacEwen</a> who founded Vancouver's WorkSpace. I was convinced that a coworking space - which I called the <a href="http://www.bmannconsulting.com/archive/innovation-commons-must-get-built-in-vancouver/">Innovation Commons</a> - needed to be non-profit, because I couldn't figure out how to make the numbers work in a sustainable way.

I was wrong. I've written that before, and done my mea culpa's to Bill in the past.

Vote to have something exist by supporting it beyond a retweet: with blood, sweat, and tears, or with cold, hard cash.

Good luck, <a href="http://workantile.com/">Workantile</a>.