The most valuable U.S. startups owe their success to our willingness to share a ride, share our homes or share our offices. Alongside Uber and Airbnb is WeWork, which has 259 coworking locations in 58 cities and a $20 billion valuation to boot.

Unlike Uber and Airbnb, however, WeWork didn’t create the sharing phenomenon in offices. Freelancers, entrepreneurs and remote workers have been proliferating for the last decade, and they have been carving out spaces between the confines of corporate headquarters and the isolation of a home office. Entrepreneurs and freelancers, connected online, began arranging informal meetups in cafes or each other’s homes.

Sensing that not everyone wants to take a business call from Starbucks, coworking startups like WeWork started renting out desks in hive-like spaces that include amenities like high-speed internet, printers and free coffee—and a peer group. WeWork sells itself as providing a way to plug in to a network of fellow entrepreneurs and freelancers who could become collaborators or partners.

WeWork’s vision extends beyond cubicles and phone booths. Instead of commuting to city skyscrapers or suburban office parks, people could walk to a local WeWork to work remotely for a major corporation or pursue their own business venture. The company’s forays into housing, education and social networks make more sense as part of that larger vision of how communities can be organized.

Countering this idea, however, is the behavior of the U.S.’s biggest employers. Companies are scaling back remote work. Rather than freeing employees to work for any company anywhere, the digital age has led to certain industries becoming more geographically concentrated. If you want to work in media, you probably have to pack up and move to New York. If you’re looking for a job in tech, it’s still probably in Silicon Valley, where Google, Apple and Facebook are undertaking massive expansions to their corporate offices to accommodate tens of thousands more workers.

That many corporations have added people faster than floor space is a major source of WeWork’s revenue, whether it’s renting clusters of desks, an office floor or an entire WeWork building. If these corporate clients remain there is left to be seen. Amazon rented an entire WeWork building in Vancouver, but just while it waits for construction to be done on its own digs.

So who will own the workspace of the future? Your employer? WeWork? Another office share competitor, like Industrious, LiquidSpace or PivotDesk? Perhaps a startup renting unused space in restaurants and other unexpected workplaces? We know this much: anyone with tables, a coffee maker and Wi-Fi could get into the game.