Cowerks

Cowerks is a coworking company in Monmouth County, New Jersey, and for about a decade it was the center of gravity for the Asbury Park tech scene.

It started in 2010 in a 700-square-foot retail space and grew into roughly 5,000 square feet of private offices and common space with room for close to fifty people. Along the way it became a real part of downtown Asbury Park and the broader New Jersey tech and startup community. We hosted dozens of companies and startups, along with hundreds of meetups, workshops, and hackathons. The space was also home base for Jersey Shore Tech & Design and Asbury Agile.

We closed the location at The Lakehouse, the building that held the common area, during Covid. We still own the other two buildings, in Asbury Park and Red Bank, and they operate today as private offices. They also, honestly, don’t have the community element we spent years building. That kind of thing doesn’t just come back on its own.

My day-to-day involvement is limited now, but Cowerks is a big part of why I understand the value of owning the real estate underneath a business. We started out leasing. Ownership is the model I care about now. Sixteen years after following through on what was a fairly wacky idea at the time, the business is still here, and a big reason for that is the buildings.

Those years are still some of my favorite as an entrepreneur. A lot has changed since, but I look back on that period pretty fondly.