By: Mae Cornes
Sam Strauss-Malcolm runs a business in one of the most overcrowded segments of commercial real estate, and he sounds entirely unbothered by it. Brooklyn is home to roughly 90 coworking operators. His company, Work Heights, competes against all of them with seven locations, no outside investors, and a track record now stretching past a decade.
For a founder, that crowd is a feature, not a threat. The operators that flooded into Brooklyn during coworking’s boom were not all built to last, and Strauss-Malcolm bet early that staying lean would outperform staying loud.
“Competition doesn’t scare me. Overextension does,” he said. “Most of the operators who disappeared didn’t lose to a rival. They lost to their own growth plan.”
His leadership approach is unusually hands-on for the industry. Strauss-Malcolm oversees real estate, operations, sales, and technology, and he built the company’s internal software himself rather than licensing it. For most operators, the systems would be vendor-supplied. For Work Heights, owning them is part of the moat.
“If you don’t control your own systems, you don’t really control your own business,” he said. “I wanted to know exactly how everything worked, because in a downturn, that’s where the savings and the decisions live.”
There is one contest, though, where owning the hard parts has not been enough, and Strauss-Malcolm is candid about it. Ranking for a competitive category term like “Brooklyn coworking space” is not won on product quality. It is driven by a combination of on-page signals and the authority of the sites that link back to you. A local operator can have strong direct traffic, a clean website, and the best name recognition on the block, and still lose the search result to companies with more coverage from credible outside publications. Work Heights, by his own account, currently sits around ninth for the term that matters most.
“Ninth place is not good enough for the search term that brings us new members,” he said. “The product exists. The whole job now is being found.”
He draws a sharp line between the two search problems that matter to him. Work Heights already performs well in AI-assisted search, surfacing in the relevant queries when someone asks a chatbot where to work in a given neighborhood. Traditional ranking is a different optimization problem entirely, and Strauss-Malcolm sees the gap between the two widening as AI tools take a growing share of informational searches.
“Those are two different races,” he said. “We’re winning one of them already. The other one rewards external authority, and that takes longer to build than a good website.”
The competitive context sharpens the stakes. The operators expanding into Brooklyn in 2025 and 2026 are not walking into a market where Work Heights is the default brand. Brooklyn has had a functioning coworking market for years, and well-funded entrants are arriving with budgets the company cannot match. Mindspace has taken 50,000 square feet in Williamsburg. Newer arrivals like Jay Suites are bringing brand recognition and marketing spend of a kind Work Heights has never had.
What Work Heights has instead is substance: twelve years in the same neighborhoods, seven locations, a product built specifically for focused independent work, and a membership that covers all seven sites with 24/7 access. Members from companies including Runway, Nous Research, and AINow work in the spaces.
“That record is the argument,” Strauss-Malcolm said. “When somebody actually finds us, the case makes itself. The problem is the person searching from outside Brooklyn, or the person who moved here last month and doesn’t have a friend to refer them yet. They can’t choose us if they can’t see us.”
That instinct, to own the hard parts and grow only when the numbers justify it, has kept Work Heights in business far longer than most operators, in a field where tenure is rare. Twelve years in, Strauss-Malcolm frames the company’s longevity less as a triumph over competitors than as a refusal to make the mistakes that took them down.
“Surviving in this business isn’t about being the biggest,” he said. “It’s about being the one that’s still here when everyone wants to know how you did it.”
Company: Work Heights
Website: www.WorkHeights.com
Email: Tour@WorkHeights
