General Assembly Will Close Its Co-Working Space In New York Next Year, Affecting 100 People

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General Assembly, one of New York’s greatest co-working spaces, is closing that part of its business in 2014, Business Insider has learned.

General Assembly’s co-working space in New York has been touted as one of the city’s best shared places for startups

But beginning in 2014, about 100 entrepreneurs will have to find a new place to call home. 

General Assembly will continue to offer classes and host events, career fairs, hackathons, and panel discussions. The company says it simply doesn’t have room in the building to continue offering co-working space to startups.

Space issues aside, the startup atmosphere has changed in New York since GA first opened its doors a few years ago. There are more co-working competitors now, like WeWork Labs and even VC firms where startups are allowed to work. Also, it feels like fewer startups are launching and raising money than a few years ago. There’s less need for a GA coworking space in the down turn of the startup cycle. 

General Assembly has raised more than $ 14 million from investors such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos through Bezos Expeditions and Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh through VegasTechFund. 

Here’s the full blog post by General Assembly CEO Jake Schwartz:

“When we founded General Assembly, our idea was simple: we wanted to build a new place to support the growing NYC startup community.

Nearly three years later, when I look back at our early goal, I am astonished – we have overshot that goal by a considerable margin. In a very short time, General Assembly has grown from a collaborative space that a small group within the NYC startup community could call home into a global educational institution that has helped empower nearly 70,000 individuals to pursue work they love.

Throughout this period of intense growth, the original idea has remained constant, even while the scope and scale have changed.

Over the past two and a half years, our community has grown much larger than our amazing co-working members. It now encompasses the tens of thousands of students who’ve come through our doors and the more than 3,000 alumni of our long-form courses, not to mention the hundreds of instructors and the 2,000 hiring partners who come to GA in search of top talent. Similarly, support once meant desks and space, but has come to also mean instruction, opportunity and talent for our students and hiring partners.

It is in this context that we have made the decision to stop offering our coworking services in 2014. It is not a decision we took lightly – but it is a necessary one as we work to expand our global network of students and alumni.

When looking at how to continue to serve our ever-growing student and alumni community in NYC, we had to look hard at the community’s needs and our use of our NYC real estate. Since our launch, we’ve seen an explosion in coworking options come available, with great companies dedicating focus and investment in that model. And while we’re making serious investments to grow our New York footprint, there is an almost impossible need for even more space to accommodate our classes, events, students, alumni and staff.

We have incredible appreciation and respect for our members and their involvement in our founding and continued growth. But for a long time now, coworking has been a small part of the “business” of GA, even as it has remained important as a reminder of community as a founding an ongoing value of our company.

For the NYC startup community, we will continue doing what we have been doing all along – hosting events, career fairs, hackathons, fireside chats, and panels. Over the next few weeks and months, we will be working with other great coworking spaces throughout the city to ensure a seamless transition for our existing members as we affect this change. We will have a team dedicated to making sure that our existing members are taken care of, and will continue to be among the most successful group of startups in NYC. Our members are still an important part of GA’s vision to build a global community of individuals empowered to pursue work they love – and they always will be.”

SEE ALSO: General Assembly Just Opened A Sleek New NYC Campus

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