The best ideas don't always arrive fully formed. Sometimes they wait with you for a decade until the conditions are finally right.
In 2013, before a single wall had been touched or a single contract signed, Luke and Shane Burrell stood in front of about a hundred people in a raw, empty warehouse building on Parry Street in Newcastle West and pitched an idea.
Not a finished product. Not a polished prospectus. An idea. This is what we think Newcastle needs. This is what we want to build here. Are you in?
About a hundred people showed up. And they were excited.
There were no coworking spaces in Newcastle at the time. No shared creative hubs, no purpose-built environments for the kind of independent professionals, founders and creative businesses that were starting to emerge in the city. The concept was genuinely new to most of the people in that room, and the response made it clear that the gap was real and the appetite was there.
What made that moment possible wasn't a sudden flash of inspiration. It was the end of a long wait.
Luke and Shane had been talking about building something like INNX for close to ten years before that public gathering happened. They'd looked at sites. They'd had the conversation many times. They believed in the idea. But it never quite came together. The right building didn't appear, the timing was off, the momentum wasn't there yet, or some combination of all three.
That kind of long gestation is more common in the origin stories of worthwhile things than most founding narratives acknowledge. The story that gets told tends to compress the timeline into something more dramatic: insight, decision, launch. The reality usually involves years of the idea living quietly in the background, being tested against different contexts, surviving moments of doubt, and waiting for the conditions to align.
For INNX, those conditions came together on Parry Street. The building was right. The momentum behind Mezzanine (the brand strategy firm Luke leads) and FinalPost (Shane's film post-production company) had given them both the credibility and the network to make something like this real. Newcastle was at a moment in its own development where the idea would land rather than sit unanswered. It was, in the clearest possible sense, the right place at the right time.
So they moved.
What followed was an eighteen-month build process across two stages. The western side of the building came first, opening while the eastern side was still being completed. It wasn't a soft launch by design so much as a practical decision: get the community started, learn from the first members, and build the rest of the space around what was actually needed rather than what had been assumed in advance.
That instinct to start before everything is perfect, to put the idea in front of real people and let their response shape what it becomes, was consistent with how the pitch had worked. Don't wait until it's finished. Show people the bones and see if they believe in it.
The people who came to that first gathering, and the ones who followed, were the ones who made INNX real. Not just as paying members, but as proof that the instinct had been right. That Newcastle had the kind of creative, ambitious, independently-minded professionals who would respond to an environment built specifically for them.
INNX grew out of the same values that had shaped Mezzanine over the previous decade and a half. Mezzanine was founded on the belief that the best businesses aren't just built to be the best in the world, but to be the best for the world. That purpose and profit are not in tension. That the way you build an organisation, the culture you create, the community you cultivate, is as important as the product or service you deliver.
Those beliefs didn't stay abstract in the brief. They became design principles. The spaces at INNX were built to feel open and generous because the people in them deserve an environment that takes them seriously. The community was curated for diversity because cross-disciplinary proximity produces better thinking. The culture was shaped around courage, creativity and genuine connection because those are the conditions that let ambitious people do their best work.
FinalPost's influence is there too. Shane's background in film and storytelling runs through the way INNX thinks about narrative, about the arc of a community and the stories its members are in the middle of writing.
More than a decade on from that public gathering on Parry Street, INNX is Newcastle's home for the kind of people who showed up that night. Trailblazers and innovators. Founders and freelancers. Creators and thinkers who've chosen to build here and want an environment that rises to meet their ambition.
The coworking space Newcastle now has looks very different to 2013. But the instinct behind INNX, that the right room changes what people believe is possible, hasn't changed at all.
Come and see what the right room looks like.
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