Episode Summary

“It all started at 5 AM. We had explosions. My husband works for the Red Cross — they evacuate people. We’re always awake, tracking the news and knowing what's happened. I don’t know if somebody was injured tonight, but I’ll find out this evening when he comes home.”

This is how Helga Moreno’s morning began. Not with a standing desk and a flat white. With explosions.

With her husband running towards danger, she walks the dog and opens her laptop to write about member retention strategies for coworking spaces.

Helga is a senior marketer at Spacebring, an English Literature graduate and the author of fairy tales about coworking — including one about cyberspace that feels like it was written in a different lifetime.

She lives in Mykolaiv, southern Ukraine, near Odessa and the Black Sea. The sunny south, as she calls it.

Additionally, a frontline region where drinking water hasn’t run from taps in years, electricity cuts out for hours at a time, and heating remains uncertain as winter approaches.

In February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine, Helga and her family made a choice that would define everything that followed: stay together, no matter what. Her husband and son couldn’t leave Ukraine. So she didn’t either.

They’ve lived through displacement to Lviv, the return to Mykolaiv, the daily air raid alerts, the 11 PM blackouts, and the permanent uncertainty that rewires how you think about the future.

But here’s the contradiction that makes this conversation so vital: Helga’s job is to write polished content about optimising coworking spaces — automated invoices, maximised revenue per square foot, reducing churn.

Meanwhile, the coworking spaces in her country proved their value by doing the exact opposite. In February 2022, Ukrainian coworking spaces didn’t optimise.

They opened their doors for free. They became bomb shelters, refugee centres, humanitarian aid hubs. They abandoned the profit motive entirely because survival demanded it.

Helga holds both of those truths at once. She co-founded the Ukrainian Coworking Association, which partnered with CBRE to document the state of the industry under war conditions.

She travels to conferences — two-day bus journeys, flights via Moldova — to experience “normal life,” where the lights stay on after 11 pm. And she comes home to a city where choosing a coworking space means asking: Does it have a generator? Does it have a bomb shelter?

This conversation isn’t about marketing tactics or SaaS metrics. It’s about what coworking actually means when everything transactional falls away. It’s about a storyteller who wrote children’s fantasies about cyberspace, now writing testimony about digital resistance and economic survival.

And it’s about a community that proved — when one of their own needed £1,500 per night for private hospital care to save her son’s life — that community isn’t networking. It’s tangible, life-saving support.

Helga is speaking at two major events: an online conversation with Jeannine van der Linden and Marko Orel on 27th November about displaced Ukrainians and reconstruction, and Coworking Europe in Berlin.

Her conference bio ends with an invitation: “While her focus is on marketing, Helga lives in the south of Ukraine; if you want to know how things are right now, she invites you to come and ask.”

Bernie took her up on it.

Timeline Highlights

* [01:36 ] “It’s Mykolaiv, near Odessa, near the Black Sea” — Helga introduces herself from the sunny south of Ukraine, a frontline region

* [04:45 ] “It all started at 5 AM. We had explosions. My husband works for the Red Cross — they evacuate people.”

* [06:24 ] “We still don’t have drinking water in my city. We have electricity schedules — 2 hours on, 3 hours off”

* [08:02 ] “We decided we must stay together. My husband and my son couldn’t leave Ukraine. So if I go, I leave my men here in the warzone.”

* [09:13 ] “I keep my laptop charged all the time. If I’m out of charge or internet, I go to a café. We have one coworking space that still works.”

* [10:38 ] “Power generator and bomb shelter” — the criteria for choosing a coworking space in Ukraine

* [11:57 ] “To go to Berlin, I go to Moldova and take a plane. Otherwise, it’s a bus for two nights and two days.”

* [15:56 ] “We don’t deal with uncertainty. We have to accept it. We can’t plan for years. We’re not buying an apartment because it can be ruined anytime.”

* [18:55 ] “Every night we have air raid alerts. People in Kyiv sleep in the subway with their kids. It’s really cold already.”

* [20:31 ] “My part is to analyse the coworking industry during wartime — from completely zero when everything stopped, to thriving spaces now”

* [21:57 ] “My son was drafted. He lived in a tent in the snow without heating. He got really sick — 40-degree fever for three weeks.”

* [23:55 ] “The hospital was €1,400–€500 per night. The coworking community did fundraising. We could afford it. My son fully recovered.”

* [27:25 ] Bernie’s reflection: “How do you juggle going to a conference, blogging about member retention, and rescuing your son like that?”

When the Profit Motive Vanished Overnight

In February 2022, Ukrainian coworking spaces had a choice: optimise revenue or save lives.

They chose lives. Instantly. Without committee meetings or PR consultants.

The Future Hub in Lviv sheltered families fleeing from Kharkiv and Kyiv. Startup Depot hosted over 150 refugees, primarily women and children. B-Working in Kyiv turned its concrete basement into a public bomb shelter during missile attacks.

Helga mentions one coworking space in Mykolaiv that’s still open — chosen not for its coffee quality or meeting room availability, but for its generator and bomb shelter.

This is the contradiction Helga lives inside. Her day job is writing about automated invoices, maximised square footage, and reducing churn.

But the coworking spaces in her country proved their value by doing the exact opposite. They gave everything away for free. They ceased to be businesses and became civic infrastructure.

“We decided we must stay together,” Helga says, describing the family decision in February 2022. Her husband and son couldn’t leave Ukraine. So she didn’t either. It’s a microcosm of what happened across the sector.

The transactional gave way to the existential. Revenue per square foot became irrelevant. What mattered was shelter, warmth, electricity, and community.

Helga worked with the Ukrainian Coworking Association. Their first significant act wasn’t policy work or internal strategy. It was documentation. They partnered with CBRE to gather data on the state of the market under war conditions. It was an act of testimony. Proof of existence. We are still here. This is real.

The global coworking industry debates tactics for reducing churn and optimising meeting room pricing.

Ukraine demonstrated the fundamental value proposition of shared space: the capacity to transform into life-saving infrastructure in a single day.

The Philologist Who Wrote About Cyberspace

Before the war, Helga wrote a children’s fantasy book called Journey into the Net. It was about the hopeful possibilities of cyberspace, the magic of digital connection, and the adventure of navigating the online world.

Now she writes testimony. Documentation. Strategies for survival. Her company, Spacebring, isn’t just selling software anymore — it’s on the front lines of digital resistance, helping spaces operate under conditions most Western operators can’t imagine.

Helga has a master’s degree in English language and literature. She’s a philologist — a lover and student of language, literature, and narrative architecture. She’s authored over five books, curates The Flex Factor podcast, and contributes to Coworker, Coworking Resources, and Coworking Insights. But when people introduce her, they lead with the job title: senior marketer at Spacebring.

Bernie pushes past that. “I’m so glad you’re a writer and not a marketer,” he says. “I think people think I’m a marketer, but really I’m in my café, smoking and stressing over a manuscript.”

Helga laughs. She’s working on a sequel to her first coworking fairy tale. She’s keeping it secret until Coworking Europe, where she’ll present printed copies. It’s a small act of defiance — a refusal to let the war define her entirely.

She’s still the storyteller. Still, the philologist believes in the power of narrative, imagination, and language to build worlds.

But the stories have changed. From fantasy about cyberspace to the harsh necessity of cyber resilience. From children’s adventures to testimony about what it takes to keep a tech sector alive under attack.

It’s the ultimate pivot. And it reveals something essential about Helga: she understands both the magic and the machinery. The human and the transactional. The story and the spreadsheet.

Choosing Coworking Spaces by Generator and Bomb Shelter

“Power generator and bomb shelter.”

That’s Helga’s answer when Bernie asks how she chooses where to work.

In London, Bernie used to stand at Old Str