Transcriber: Samson Zhong Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
Good morning
Just kidding, good evening!
Ladies and gentlemen, Tedsters
My name is Amarit Charoenphan
the cofounder & CEO of HUBBA Co., Ltd
with the first coworking space
in Thailand for startups, creatives and freelancers.
And today I’d like to share with you
one very simple message
I believe that
coworking can change,
can and will change the world.
And I like you to be part of that movement,
So, how did coworking begin in Thailand
and what is a coworking space?
So, for me the journey towards
building the whole coworking movement
is essentially trying…me trying to solve
a personal, very painful situation,
from a house that was flooded in October 2011
and I had to move out to Pattaya.
So…like most people,
me and my brother, we started working,
of course, at a house.
We rented this small house in Hialeah,
that includes 13 dogs,
all the stuff we brought over from Pattaya,
a very nagging mom
and just general mayhem with no wifi and 3G, imagine that!
And we tried to start a business at that house,
and ok, at first, of course, it's sort of works
it's the quickest office you’ll ever get to in your life.
You just get up and go,
it's also the most cost-efficient
if you're living with your parents.
And also it's comfortable
if you're working from your bed or in your underwear.
Fortunately I do not have pictures of me
working in my underwear!
But, more importantly is that
we soon found out that
if you're working from your homes,
you’ll get the feeling that
it’s just not a place to start anything.
Whether you become lonely, bored
or generally demotivated
and the place is really not suited
for you to meet with investors,
teams, your clients and your suppliers.
Then once you throw in your pets
or you have wives, kids,
visiting relatives and 13 dogs,
it just becomes too much.
So like most people, we just said,
ah…this isn’t going to work,
so where do we go?
So we went to look around for the best coffee
and the best café in town.
And we searched far and wide and we love coffee
and we craved it after a while.
Also we just love the energy and buzz of seeing...
you know...people,
especially good-looking people
working at the café.
And initially it sort of worked as well.
But, you soon found out that cafés
were never meant to be
ah… office substitute.
For a very good reason: you're paying the rent
with 2 cups of coffee a day,
if you don’t drink,
the owner starts looking at you
and getting pissed off
Then, after a while,
the power socket is hard to find,
the chairs are uncomfortable,
the light is dim,
and then, all the tourists from everywhere start coming,
and eventually, you realize that
this is too much distraction.
And, after a while,
you just find out that,
you know, this coffee shop
has one very big drawback:
one I just found out in a very hard way!
It's that, I had diarrhea,
I had to pack all my stuff in my bag,
put everything together, run to the toilet,
and then it’s locked!
Somebody was inside!
And then like...No, I know It
I didn't do it on my pants
There was the lady's room on the side.
So what is there to do for new entrepreneurs?
Essentially, there’s…
it's the house and the café
just didn’t really work,
but, we couldn’t afford for an office
or rent one of those service offices.
So, there has to be a better way
And there is!
Which is this mega trend of coworking,
which is working out for a hundred thousand people
across the world in over 3,000 spaces worldwide
and we read all these articles and said,
this is so awesome
but none of this exists in Thailand
So if there was one in Thailand,
then I would pay money to go and use it.
And, it’s working out for so many people
that it's actually, fundamentally changing
the way we work and for the better.
So what is coworking space?
A lot of you would say,
Yes, it’s basically a whole bunch of independent professionals
coming together to share a facility that has
all the stuff you find in a really nice office.
But that’s the simplistic definition
that only describes the tangible aspects of a coworking space
whereas I’d like to see coworking
as a concept that is a verb and not a noun.
It's the way of working,
not actually a static place,
but also where 3 COs
in the word “coworking” converge:
Cooperation, Collaboration, Community.
That’s where our generation of millennials
and generation Y and people after us
want from work space
a service, a relationship... a community
So, back to my story.
I came back from Pattaya and
I thought this was the big…
very big pain that I want to solve
and I really wanted to work at
a coworking space
There’s none in Thailand,
I've never been to one,
never did any market research,
but we knew
there were more people
going through the same pain as me,
and not just about diarrhea,
but just about working;
so we realized that O.K.
We’re just gonna build it
and we found this really beautiful house
Actually it’s very ugly right now,
but in 6 months,
we turned it into this!
We basically put everything
that you find in a really nice office
and more, and shared it with everyone else.
You know,
beautifully decorated work space,
fast Wi-Fi, a lot of books,
shared water, coffee, a printing service,
meeting rooms, everything,
even a trampoline in this garden.
However, all of that is very affordable
for the budget-conscious entrepreneur
and freelancer and at the same time,
so well-managed that
our members just focus on their work
and not actually on the workspace or managing.
So we thought that people love us
for building this,
that they’ll kiss my hands and say,
"Oh, shut up and take my money.
Oh, thank you bringing coworking to Thailand."
But, of course,
that’s a fairytale
and then, the reality is that,
in the first months,
we had 1 member.
And we were like, what is going on?
So we were immediately so close to failure.
I spent millions on this space,
and built it, nobody…you know
everybody came
the investors, media and everyone...
They liked it, but nobody really signed up
Nobody really signed up,
so I realized something was amiss
and asking enough questions, I realized that
people just found coworking as a culture so new
that they didn’t know what was the value
that they were getting out of the space,
and that they didn't know
whether it was more valuable
above and beyond, you know,
just a nice office,
but why should they be there
instead of a house or cafe,
realizing both on to one word:
community.
Community is the lifeblood,
the…what makes coworking space so addictive
because community is what
gets my members and everyone that I know
up from bed traveled far and wide
to come to this space
and pay me to work
because they find that
the experience of working with
awesome like-minded individuals
side by side, every day,
sharing coffee and conversation,
becoming friends,
starting to help, share, learn
and collaborate with one another
is so invaluable, so hard to find
to the point that, you know,
entrepreneurship is so hard for them,
freelancing is so hard
for them for the first time
that they believe that
if they can work with somebody else
the journey is much more fun and valuable.
So, finding that out,
we focus on communities,
making the space fun and friendly
but also adding value where we can
with events, activities, and workshops,
like this event,
start on the weekend, 54 hours straight,
straight complete strangers come together
to do a start-up business
and pitch to investors.
They're so well received
that 200 people showed up, you know
in our the latest event
and our latest conference
for the technology star vehicle system
attracted 400 people
and we filled our entire auditorium.
So, who are all these people
that work out of these spaces?
And, where do they come from?
and the events as well
So, essentially
we’ve met so many different types of people,
the sheer diversity is amazing.
It's not just start-ups and creatives and freelancers
but I’ve met politicians and lawyers
and yoga masters and painters
and corporate warriors and nonprofit people,
social entrepreneurs, actors...
Actually, I had one really nice member recently
who used to be homeless in New York, in the States,
learned how to become a DJ,
and one...one day she decided
she's just gonna fly to Thailand
and she started writing about
displaced people and becoming really famous
about refugee issues.
So basically, anybody can work
out of a coworking space;
anybody in this room,
all of you can work out there
because essentially, coworking is a community.
A community of people that
share ideas, interests and passion,
and once we come together,
we actually create this space where we work together
and because we all bring a bit of our individual soul and character,
coworking spaces are places with a lot of soul.
So now there're 3,000 spaces worldwide and growing.
But, there's a handful in town
and, there's one in Chiang Mai Pun Space.
But I’d like to see this be everywhere
as common as coffee shops
and so common that our new entrepreneurs,
creatives, freelancers, innovators
and changemakers
work out of these spaces and are supported
and are nurtured and become more successful,
allowing us to bring in,
you know, more interested people
who see now that this... their lifestyle is possible,
this career is possible,
working out of these spaces
and are well-supported and
and once they join the community, the community grows.
And I really love to end this with one really simple message:
coworking spaces are the communities
that bring the cooperative
and collaborative cultures back to
our cities, our communities, our society,
and if we can help to
foster more coworking spaces
to be everywhere,
we will have many more spaces
with a soul across the cities
and that will lead to a rise
in the quality of life in our cities.
So I'd like to urge all of you
to join our movement,
to work out of a coworking space from time to time,
to support the ideas, people, projects
that grow out of this space,
and also to… maybe even decide to
open, operate or invest in one.
Because if we cowork together,
we can create a better Thailand
and a better world.
Thank you very much
(Applause)