Greetings,
I've been lurking for about 2 months but it's time to introduce myself - hello all, and thanks for this great resource!
My name is Andie Grace, a cofounding partner The Factory 510 in San Leandro, CA. My biz partner and I have been running our space in beta mode with a few early members, but are about to formally launch this month.
The Factory 510 is located inside a large commercial building that's been operating as a light industrial/office space since the 70's --over 1 mm feet of office/light industrial/warehouse suites on the top floor, and big tenant retail on the ground floor. This opportunity comes our way to create the space here because we were originally hired by building ownership to help reinvision the building as a creative center for artists, tech startups, and makers. We've achieved this through tenant programming, new tenant profiling and acquisition (especially a lot of 3D printing and other advanced manufacturing), our marketing and pr support, and lots of events and community building. We're having so much fun!
Out of the building program effort came our idea for launching coworking space here (http://thefactory510.com) which through partnership with building management is able to make short-term use of various suites throughout the building, and we're now adding a coworking/hotdesking center. Like the building itself, The Factory 510 is aimed at this creative Artist/Tech/Maker client profile -- we have a lot of large scale art, filmmakers, photographers, visual artists working here alongside other more traditional commercial tenants.
  Some of our coworking members become long term tenants and move into their own suites over time, and remain part of our community, and some existing long term tenants use our coworking areas for their own meetings and events or day by day coffee klatching. Because the hotdesking area finally got permit clearance (yay!) we can open this month for real -- so aside from getting it all running, a big current concern is creating a true sense of communitas amongst 3 very different user profiles as these communities blend. Our 3 types of users are:
- drop in hot desk/coworking members using semipublic/cowork area in our new atrium
- short term members leasing out private spaces that may convert to long term tenants in their own suite eventually
- existing and new long term tenant users who get access to the atrium space and our events as a benefit of their long term lease
For this reason, the current discussion today about anchor tenants and the challenge of teams vs. individuals in a space comes very timely!
Anyway, already learning so much from all your posts. Thanks to every contributor on the list -- it's great to be here.
Smiles,
Andie Grace
TheFactory510.com