As always, Coworking Europe promised to be a great opportunity to connect with our local European community, and this year's edition in Sofia, Bulgaria, did not disappoint in the slightest.
Cobot was represented by Thilo Utke (Co-Founder) and Georgi Aleksiev (Senior Marketing Expert). We attended and contributed to almost all panel discussions during the conference and connected with the community in the surrounding events during the three-day coworking experience. Here's what we experienced:
Flex Offices dominated the discussion between big coworking spaces
The official event started with a great overview by Carsten Foertsch on this year's coworking trends in Europe, followed by a presentation focused more on the English market by Emma Swinnerton.
The discussion started with a presentation by Design Offices CEO Joachim Gripp and a following panel discussion between him, Yotam Alroy (Mindspace), Jekaterina Kosmaceva (IWG), and Juanjo Martínez (Networkia).
Their overall vision for the coworking sector emphasized a shift toward a growth-focused mindset, naturally evolving to cater more to larger businesses rather than independent small teams or freelancers.
City center megaoffice or rural community?
As the big stage gave the microphone to smaller panel discussions, we got to hear the stories and experiences of many independent coworking space owners, operators, and managers from across the continent. As usual, the discussion there focused more on human (customer) satisfaction as a Key Performance Indicator (KPI).
What did we learn? Way too much to fit in one blog post. Here are some of the highlights:
- Stefania Pasquarelli, Yuta Aoki, Petya Lipeva and Maria Piovano shared valuable insights on fostering vibrant coworking communities through engaging and inclusive environments.
- Some great ideas came from the shared experience between the participants of the panel discussions focusing on diversifying revenue streams for small spaces and what coworking can learn from hospitality.
- The idea that a coworking space is not just a place to work was expertly covered and expanded in the panels focusing on coworking + co-living as well as food & beverages in the coworking space.
- Vanessa Sans, Juan Barbed, Matthias Zeitler, Sedat Adiyaman, and Vedran Šimunović discussed their contributions to rural communities and how coworking spaces* can build the bridge between ever-shrinking villages, flexible employees, and local traditions
*using the term widely here, since some of them are forced by their size and/or business model to become creative and adopt parallel communal activities.
The fun side of coworking!
The last session of the conference (and highlight to many participants) was titled “Coworking Fuck Up Session - Stories of what were your most valuable mistakes”. The stage was shared between many familiar participants, such as Marta Moksa, Nikolay Bonev, Florian Kappes, and Florian Kosak.
Some of the most notable fuck ups were opening a high school ground floor in a coworking space, making rapid changes to pricing models, and incurring significant losses from oversights in contracts and agreements.
Leaving on this positive remark, most of the Coworking Europe participants headed out together to explore a couple of beautiful local restaurants and bars in Sofia, which were rivaled only by the warm reception of Tony Aleksandrov and WorkBetter on the first night.
Thank you to everyone who joined and connected with us throughout the last week in Sofia. We are excited to see you again soon!
