WeWork would say it’s well on its way to transforming white-collar labor: It seats 175,000 “members” in 207 locations across 20 countries, with plans to double in size this year. Its leaders describe it not as a real-estate venture but as a “community company.”

Whether that’s a $20 billion business, however, is a matter of contention. Companies specializing in shared office space have come before. As The Wall Street Journal noted this fall, the office-leasing company IWG manages five times the square footage but has about one-eighth the market value. Even Adam Neumann, a co-founder of WeWork and its CEO, admits that his company is overvalued, if you’re looking merely at desks leased or rents collected. “No one is investing in a co-working company worth $20 billion. That doesn’t exist,” he told Forbes in 2017. “Our valuation and size today are much more based on our energy and spirituality than it is on a multiple of revenue.”

That’s a striking statement. Shuffleboard tables and free IPAs, however enticing, surely can’t justify the recent $4.4 billion round of venture capital propelling the company’s growth. But these cramped quarters may hold more than meets the eye. WeWork’s real value might indeed be in the elbow-to-elbow “energy” Neumann describes—just not for the community you might imagine.

The office sublet is not an innovation of the digital age. But the idea of a co-working space—a collection of like-minded renters committed to forming a community—is a more recent development. Its history might begin with the European hacker spaces of the 1990s, where independent programmers swapped coding skills in dark basements with an air of techno-anarchism. Americans caught on a few years later. The first true co-working space, so-called, emerged in 2005, renting square footage from a feminist collective in San Francisco’s Mission District. This eventually became the Hat Factory, an industrial loft in the Dogpatch neighborhood, which described itself as a “community office space for geeks and media hackers.” It was co-founded by the guy who invented the hashtag.

The first wave of co-working served a relatively small, scrappy set of independent contractors and do-gooders. The second wave has responded to an economy in which independent work has become more default than choice. The 2008 financial crash forced employers to cut hours and jobs, and the emerging gig economy swelled the ranks of the self-employed. Thus WeWork’s eclectic mix of freelance writers, labor organizers, financial consultants, and app developers hustling for investors.

Adam Neumann was himself a struggling entrepreneur (he owned a company that sold baby clothes) in recession-era New York when he and a couple of friends rented out space in a Brooklyn building to make some additional income. Demand proved stronger than expected. In 2010, Neumann, who was raised in part on a kibbutz in Israel, and Miguel McKelvey, who grew up with five mothers in an Oregon collective and studied architecture in college, leased a few thousand square feet in SoHo and opened the first WeWork: a shared space where enterprising creatives could work and play.