Lisa Taylor, a former business executive who lives in Newport Beach, was experiencing the same problem that has frustrated so many other entrepreneurs who don’t have their own offices.

She would go to a coffee shop to work but couldn’t find a seat.

“The people who were sitting there taking up spaces were not there for the coffee but the Wi-Fi,” she recalled. “They couldn’t get up to use the bathroom because they were afraid they’d lose their seat.”

And it was a lousy place to work, she said: “It was a cold, loud, disruptive environment, and I thought, ‘I could build a better model.’ I just need to make it comfortable, like it’s their office, home and coffee shop all in one.”

That’s what Taylor did. She founded a new chain of co-working spaces in Costa Mesa that provide all the Wi-Fi, photocopiers, meeting rooms, desks and coffee a startup could want in a space that is colorful and collaborative.

The company, called CrashLabs, is not the first co-working space to come to Orange County, but it is the first home-grown one.

Tech Space, originally founded in New York, is one of a handful of co-working chains operating in Southern California. It runs “full-service,” “flexible office space” in Costa Mesa, Aliso Viejo, New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco.

BlankSpaces, started in 2008, is another chain operating in the Los Angeles area. New York-based We Work runs 30 locations globally, including one in Los Angeles.

Co-working has yet to become a household word, but it’s an idea born from the realities of the modern workplace. The Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that by 2020, 40 percent of the U.S. work force, or 65 million Americans, will be freelancers, temporary workers, independent contractors and entrepreneurs.

Co-working spaces like CrashLabs cater to the untethered worker with a shared environment that lets individuals work independently but not alone.

A global phenomenon that began a decade ago, co-working is prominent in major urban areas like San Francisco, Boston and New York, where there are clusters of entrepreneurs in densely populated areas. Orange County has been slower to the game, analysts say, because much of it is so spread out.

At CrashLabs, members pay an annual flat fee of $25 to join and then pay by the hour, day, week or month to use its amenities. In addition to a kitchen and lockers, there are tables wired with outlets to plug in laptops, private meeting rooms with soundproof sliding glass doors, and walls coated in a magnetic paint that doubles as dry erase board to jot down ideas or make presentations.

“The whole space is movable, flexible – just like people’s schedules and lifestyles,” Taylor said.

Combining a place to crash with a lab environment that encourages cooperation, CrashLabs earlier this month soft launched its first of two Costa Mesa locations in a 2,000-square foot-space on 17th Street.

It officially opens July 17 and will eventually expand to 6,000 square feet. It already counts its membership at roughly 100. A second, 6,400-square-foot location on Randolph Street will open in August and provide space for performances and dinners, as well as open co-working.

Similar to traditional businesses, CrashLabs operates from 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday through Friday, but it also hosts after-hours networking and workshop events to help entrepreneurs of disparate disciplines bounce ideas off one another and learn about topics ranging from finances to search engine optimization.

“It’s not just a place or a space,” Taylor said. “You tap into a community. That’s when collaboration and synergy happens – and innovations.”

Taylor should know. In 1998, she founded the Irvine-based global semiconductor distribution business, NexGen Digital, and expanded it to a $16.5 million company in two years. It was after selling her stake in NexGen in October 2013 – and experiencing firsthand the difficulty of having no office space – that she decided to set up CrashLabs.

Co-working, as both a concept and a term, dates to 2005 when San Francisco computer scientist Brad Neuberg invited strangers to use the loft that was his home and workspace. Neuberg went on to co-found Citizen Space, which is credited as the first co-working environment.

San Francisco has since become a hotbed of co-working, through companies with catchy names like NextSpace and Sandbox Suites. So has New York, where We Work grew into a $5 billion company.

By some estimates, there are now more than 700 co-working spaces in the U.S. The number of co-working spaces has doubled each year since 2006, according to Innovation is Everywhere, an international coalition of co-working entrepreneurs.

Even so, “The demand far outstrips the supply,” said Jerome Chang, founder of the 7-year-old BlankSpaces, which has co-working locations in Santa Monica, downtown Los Angeles and the Mid-Wilshire district, and will open one later this year in Pasadena.

“The supply is barely, even remotely, trying to catch up,”Chang said. “The army of people who are potential clients, users, visitors of these spaces is growing just on an individual worker basis.”

Chang is also the founder of the League of Extraordinary Co-working Spaces, a group of 20 co-working space owners operating 45 locations globally who formed an industry association in 2012 to share best practices and establish co-working standards about membership policies and Wi-Fi systems, among other things.

“No matter how advanced we are as a civilization technology-wise, the success of one business always comes back to building strong, personal, long-term relationships,” said Melissa Geissinger, global collaboration partner with coworking.com, a website that is working to establish collaboration, openness, community, accessibility and sustainability as the core values of co-working.

“Co-working goes beyond the physical desk. It goes beyond the shared workspace,” Geissinger said. “These are real communities full of people who trust one another and rely on one another.”

That has been the case for Erin Leigh Brown, who was like a lot of new Orange County residents when she moved to Costa Mesa six months ago and was looking for a place to operate the independent marketing consultancy she launched in January after 14 years as a salaried marketing manager in New York.

“I was finding it very difficult to get things done working from my home,” said Brown, 38, who moved to the area with her husband and 1-year-old daughter. She experimented with working at coffee shops but was too distracted by people watching.

A member of CrashLabs since May, Brown said that what started as a distraction-free place to work has become a confidence-building tool. She meets fellow CrashLabs members who can help with her website design and other platforms she’s using to build her nascent business.

“CrashLabs is a different dynamic,” Brown said. “I get up in the morning. I get ready as if I’m going to the office, and I treat it as if I’m going to work.”

Contact the writer: scarpenter@ocregister.com On Twitter: @OCRegCarpenter