Seats2meet has a name that speaks for itself since the very first day. It is associated with a physical open place, where people can seat, and everything around them is there to help them meet each other. From the lunch line to the coffee machines, and “together tables” that approaches you to other people. All the different environments thought for different kinds of conversations. But things changed a bit since Seats2meet opened its doors for the first time in 2007.
Seeing the potential of all the freelancers and entrepreneurs sitting together Seats2meet hired one of the first webmasters in the Netherlands. Why? Because meetings don’t only happen physically anymore. With that in mind, Seats2meet have been working in the last years in ways of optimizing great encounters. And so it did with the Serendipity Machine. The feature that is both presents in the app, and inside the Seats2meet website itself allows that people see who is around them, what are their skills and what are their needs. Facilitating unexpected relevant connections within its physical spaces.
But what is in the future? Ronald van den Hoff always mentioned that coworking is not in its hardware. It’s not about the chairs you seat, the design table you can lay your notebook on. But about community and about the people in it. And what are the people in Seats2meet doing? As I speak in this January grey Monday morning, only in Seats2meet Utrecht CS I can see 305 knowledge tags from 65 people. Among those people, there are entrepreneurs creating services. Services that all the other 240 people spread in the other S2M locations right now could use, and vice versa.
Beyond the people working in Seats2meet creating services, the Netherlands became a hub for sharing economy companies. Below you can find an image created by Share.nl showing the Amsterdam ecosystem alone.
Our goal is to work with all of them! Why? A big trend that has been showing to gain more and more strength over the past year is to take out the middleman. The big conglomerates are shrinking and more companies that promote the peer to peer exchange are growing exponentially. And Seats2meet’s goal is not to own this ecosystem, but to work together to connect it in a single platform be part of it, of course. Not only together with the services presented in the image above, but also with the services that all the 70.000 people in our network are creating.
We are talking about a system that is as natural as breathing. That knows what is your next move and where you can find everything necessary to execute it. Be it a car, a business partner or a painter for your new house. After all, all those services already exist, we just need them to work together. And as we already started to collaborate, we have a long way to go! So who should be next? Let us know by commenting on this post!
