{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"Coworking Values Podcast","title":"The Tactical Playbook from Coworking Operators Weekend with Lauren Walker","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":1930,"description":"“One of the attendees spoke about their local government saying that they could not show favour to specific business and therefore couldn’t collaborate with the coworking space. One of the panellists said, We’ll create a downtown alliance. They can work with an alliance.”—Lauren WalkerEpisode SummaryLauren Walker is a storyteller who’s spent 25 years behind the scenes.Reader’s Digest in the 1990s, where she learned direct marketing when things were still on paper. A couple of dot-com startups during the boom. Thirteen years at IBM, writing deep technical marketing before becoming the editor of IBM.com’s homepage.She’s been working remotely since 2005. Twenty years of distributed work before it became the default.Now she’s CMO at Coworks, a coworking space software company. And in February 2026, she helped organise the Coworking Operators Weekend in Raleigh—a small, focused gathering of 40 operators and managers at Raleigh Founded.The event started in LA in 2025. Jerome Chang and Jackie Latragna created it with one principle: small, no bells and whistles, just operators talking. Sean Brown, CEO of Coworks, attended and loved it. Jerome asked if Coworks wanted to bring it to the East Coast. They said yes.Lauren describes the energy simply: “It was folks recognising game. It was folks saying, I do what you do, you do what I do, but how do you do it?”What made it work was what it wasn’t. No vendor presentations. No polished keynotes. Just operators sharing what they’d learned by doing the work.There’s something else worth naming here, because Lauren shared it publicly after the event.She has brain cancer. She’s in remission, but she lives with a tumour on her cerebellum. The radiation treatment left visible effects—her face is droopy, her eye doesn’t blink, she walks with an unusual gait.She’d been hiding. Camera positioned to show her left side on calls. AI-generated headshot. Avoiding in-person events despite wanting to be there.Her anxiety about the Operators...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/WIBJeL0fXbpb8oNZHEtSu5qeC3870OdCYV3XNCIVY1M/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS8yZTBm/NGQ1N2YzYTcyNmE3/NTc2ZmU5NTBlYmNj/OTEwOC5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}