Our story

The founders of The Collaboratory are Miglena Hofer and Severina Ditzov – two legal professionals who found themselves in Vienna, ironically, at the same time. Their first joint venture is the Vienna-based NGO Austria for beginners where they provide legal advice for internationals in Austria. The Collaboratory came as a natural second step when they realized the 40-hour fully onset working does not actually work!

Coming from a legal background, they also believed the (now)outdated mantra that in order to be productive and successful, you basically have to live in your office. What is more, they were craving a community whose needs and interests they identify with. While they have long split the time between working from home and working from the office, it took a bit more until they found their community. 

“What if we create our own space that provides that?”, we thought. Soon after, The Collaboratory was born. 

And soon after that, the pandemic hit. And boy, it hit us hard. Like everyone else, we had to adapt. We quickly realized that spending 5 days at the workspace not only does not mean we are doing more work, but it was demoralizing and counter-productive. In our search for a good alternative that we were not pushed into, we discovered the hybrid working or rather, we discovered we’ve been doing it for ages. Only now, it had a new cool name and people learned about it. 

We like saying that hybrid working gives us the best of two worlds – we can work on the couch in our pajamas when we need to, and we can boost our productivity by surrounding ourselves with other professionals and having the “corporate feeling”, whenever we feel like it. It also allowed us to create a strategy, so we can keep our co-working space open and keep our other ventures working without risks for the team.

Team