Newly funded startup leaves Williamsburg: Manhattan ‘not substantially more expensive’

Teachable heads west (to Manhattan).

The startup that’s building a marketplace for online courses taught by non-academics told Technical.ly Brooklyn it’s moved from the Williamsburg WeWork to the Flatiron District Knotel.

According to founder and CEO Ankur Nagpal, Teachable has 44 full-time employees, and is hiring three to four new ones a month. It simply ran out of space in WeWork.

“It was just not working anymore,” he said by phone Thursday. “We looked at other WeWorks and none of them had size for a company like us.”

So the startup moved to a Knotel, a sort of WeWork for companies that have outgrown WeWork. Knotel provides large office spaces on month-to-month or short-term leases, helps in buildouts and provides office management support, but each office has only one company in it, unlike WeWork.

“We looked everywhere and Manhattan was not substantially more expensive,” Nagpal explained. “The prices are higher but not that much higher and we found somewhere that’s off the L train. We have a lot of employees who live in Williamsburg.”

When asked why he didn’t just get his own commercial space, Nagpal said that the length of leases for commercial spaces makes it so that you get more space than you need (and pay for it) in anticipation of hiring more. He likes the flexibility of the short-term lease at Knotel, which will allow the company to scale its space efficiently.

Teachable raised $4 million in February. Read our past coverage of the what they’re all about here.