#33 "Our coworking activities grew twentyfold in 6 years thanks to Lisbon's sex appeal"- Idea Spaces

Joao Simoes is the co-founder of Idea Spaces, a Lisbon based coworking operator which started its activities in 2014 within a 400 m2 big space. Six years later, Idea Spaces is soon to open a third location, cumulating a total of 10.000 m2 surface under coworking management.
"The strategy initiated in the early 2010's to make Lisbon a magnet for tech and foreign talents clearly delivered. The quality of life, the cost of living, the culture, food, climate has transformed Portugal into a great place to gather teams for international scaling up tech companies looking for talents. It's easier for a Finnish startup to open a brand in Portugal to lure qualified foreign developers or marketing experts than to make them move to Helsinki. And from that perspective, coworking spaces like ours is perfect, as it brings the team directly into the local community and ecosystem, while allowing them to scale up rapidly"; explains Joao Simoes, for whom the work on the community and networking is critical.