In early 2013, Khaled Maher got laid off from his job at Orascom Telecom and decided to team up with two other newly redundant former colleagues to chase his dream of starting a telecommunications consulting firm. But they soon hit an obstacle: where to set up shop. "We found that to have a decent place to work was very expensive," Maher explains. As entrepreneurs still trying to establish themselves, they couldn't commit to the high overhead cost of a steep office rent without first establishing a customer base. On the other hand, they couldn't build a clientele without a respectable place to do business, and the quarters they could afford were dingy and rundown. Maher says: "You couldn't meet a customer there."

Sensing they weren't the only would-be entrepreneurs facing such a dilemma, Maher and his colleagues opened a space called Businessyard in Dokki's tony Messeha Square. Here, freelancers, telecommuters and new business pioneers have access to desks, meeting rooms, copy and printing services as well as spaces to relax, play and brainstorm or socialize with like-minded professionals. With gleaming parquet floors and a Silicon Valley- inspired palette of acid green and cobalt blue, the space is slick enough to impress potential clients, while a variety of packages, ranging from evening only drop-ins to a full-time, month-long subscription for LE 2,000, cost far less than renting a private office with comparable facilities.

More importantly, Maher hopes that the space will provide start-ups and creative professionals with a place to collaborate and be inspired by other motivated, talented people. "The idea is this is not just a place to work but also a community," he says. With a grand opening planned for the near future, Businessyard is the latest of about eight such shared work environments in Cairo, part of a global phenomenon of "coworking spaces" designed to provide small companies and solo workers with the flexibility of working at home, the human interaction of an office and a more focused and comfortable work environment than a café.

Like Maher of Businessyard, Mazen Helmy, founder of the District coworking space in Maadi, hit upon the idea of communal office spaces still confront a business and legislative environment that's proven slow to adapt. "One of the biggest challenges was finding an open-minded landlord who would accept that we are having this dynamic flow of people coming in and out that you don't know really," says Helmy, who searched for a place for the District for around eight months before finding its current premises. Dealing with government bureaucracies has also at times been interesting. During one visit from the social insurance office, Helmy says: "This guy came, and he saw all these people working, and he thought that these are people who should be employed by us, and we needed to pay social insurance for them," he says, recalling that getting the visitor to understand their concept wasn't easy. Even basic procedures such as registering a business at shared premises requires the services of an imaginative and persistent lawyer able to navigate complex regulations. For NGOs, which are subject to even stricter laws, it's sometimes impossible, adds von Ruecker. Trying to jump through such hoops often gets discouraging for fledgling enterprises who are drawn to coworking spaces because they lack the resources to rent their own offices, let alone a dedicated legal team. On the bright side, though, interacting with others who have faced the same issues can lend practical and moral support to fellow entrepreneurs.

The almost three years that have passed since the revolution have seen a small explosion of coworking spaces in Cairo. In addition to old-timers like District and Rasheed, greater Cairo is now home to at least half a dozen others, and other Egyptian cities including Alexandria, 6 October, Tanta, Mansoura and Aswan have shared work sites either established or in the works. But true to the communal spirit of coworking, entrepreneurs and freelancers who occupy the existing spaces seem to welcome the newcomers rather than seeing them as competition. "The more spaces we have in Cairo--perfect," says von Ruecker.

For one thing, given the increasingly horrendous gridlock of the capital, few people voluntarily choose to subject themselves to a grueling daily commute, so coworking tends to remain fairly local. At the District, for example, Helmy says that while people will come from all over the city for special events such as workshops and seminars, regulars tend to live in the neighborhood. Moreover, each space has a distinctive identity and tends to attract a like-minded community. For example, a no-nonsense entrepreneur trying to launch an industrial product might fit in best at Businessyard--where that is the aim of the founders--while those who prioritize a family-friendly space might be more comfortable at Rasheed, where von Ruecker, a mother herself, has tried to make kids feel welcome.

Other spaces have an overt theme, such as icecairo, one of a global collection of spaces supported by German development agency GIZ that focus specifically on green technology. It has a lab with a laser cutter, a 3-D printer and carpentry tools in addition to more commonplace features of the 21st century workplace like a chill-out loft area strewn with giant bean bag chairs. "It definitely creates an identity," says manager Muhammad Radwan. "Everyone knows that this is the environment hub, so they come here to ask about renewable energies or other companies working in solid waste management, water issues, or whatever it may be." By gathering players with a shared focus in one place, Radwan says, "People come together, collaborate and the energy actually creates bigger and better projects that they end up collaborating on after having met here."

Other shared spaces, such as the District, strive for a more diverse mix of specialties in order to encourage consistent creative interchange. "The more variety there is, the more different points of view," explains Hennink. "We like to attract different kinds of people from different fields so they can share their experiences." Her colleague Helmy adds that, ideally, he'd like to see this mingling of ideas and experience go even further. "Imagine like five years from now, all companies in Egypt, whether it's small or medium or large, really breaking all these walls between companies and trying to build a bigger community." This may sound utopian, but then again--five years ago coworking didn't even have a foothold in Egypt, and now it's flourishing. Says Businessyard's Maher: "This is a new concept--but it's coming." n

© Business Monthly 2014