For neighborhood co-working space cove, Dupont Circle is just one of many neighborhoods on its expansion list.
Adam Segal, co-founder and CEO, said they have their eyes locked on a slew of different areas, including Northern Virginia, possibly Northeast D.C. and Boston. All this while they celebrate the opening of their newest, and largest, location in Dupont Circle this week.
"Dupont is our home neighborhood. The first location was here," Segal said. "It's very neighborhood centric, we're not in Metro Center. We try to factor in where we are relative to where people live."
cove doesn't follow the typical expansion model found from other D.C. co-working groups. The company focuses on neighborhoods and filling the gap between the inconvenience of traveling to a company office and the lack of productivity in working from home. They aren't the co-working space to turn to for a company of 10+ people looking to all work in the same space, Segal said.
Instead, they're the place to head to for grad students, solo work-from-home employees or small companies. Prices range from $89 to $249 per month.
"If you look at a traditional co-working, about 90 percent of their revenue is generated from traditional offices. We have basically zero of that," Segal said. "Ours is much more in line with a lifestyle. We promote using all of the locations, and it's less about 'this is my office,' and more about 'this is where I can work all around the city.'"
The new Dupont location, which opened Nov. 1, comes after they shutdown their K Street location in December and closed two Boston locations in June 2016. At some point, cove had a Georgetown location that they eventually shutdown because of the high volume of foot traffic. It can be argued that this is just a part of the cove model in the early years. The team would pick a few areas, open a small co-working spot there and expand in the ones that thrive and close the ones that don't.
That's what happened in Dupont. The company started with a 700 sq. ft. at M and 18th Streets, and when they saw the growth, they decided to move down the street to the corner of Connecticut Ave and R St. NW.
"Anything that was too small, we closed," Segal said. "And now we're moving into larger locations like this. You could fit about eight of those in here [the new Dupont Circle location]."
The Dupont location is the company's largest to date at 5K sq. ft. with two conference rooms, eight call boxes, an expanded focused (or "quiet") area, seltzer on tap and fiber internet. cove Dupont also has a dedicated event space of offsites, meetings and other enterprise services.
Neighborhood partners Filter Coffeehouse and La Tomate Caffe provide discounts on coffee and food for cove members.
Let's take a look around the new location—
