Overview
Betacowork was co-founded by Jean Derely and Ramon Suarez on November 19, 2010, during the first Coworking Europe Conference. The space is located in Etterbeek, Brussels-Capital, at Rue des Peres Blancs 4. Ramon Suarez managed and grew the space after Jean Derely shifted focus to other ventures.
The coworking space emerged directly from the BetaGroup community network that Jean Derely had built from 2008, giving it an early membership base drawn from the Brussels internet and startup scene. Betacowork became one of the primary hubs for early-stage founders, freelancers, and digital professionals in Brussels before the wave of larger campuses and corporate coworking spaces that followed.
Ramon Suarez went on to write The Coworking Handbook, drawing on the Betacowork experience, and served as a board member of BetaGroup and Startups.be. Nicolas Frenay, founder of BeTech, identified Betacowork as the physical home of his 7,300-member Belgian entrepreneurs community.
Key people
In the news
- Two days, three tracks, and a room where nobody is on a stage. This is the whole weekend, slide by slide: What happens Saturday morning, what happens after lunch, and what you are doing at 15:30 on Sunday when everyone shows what they built. Worth a look before you decide whether two days in September are worth it. That is the honest question, and the program is the honest answer. Early bird €69 ends tomorrow, 18 September. After that €99. AI Weekend, 26 and 27 September at Betacowork in Brussels. 👉 https://lnkd.in/erZM4DDW
- Most businesses are looking at AI now. Very few have looked at their own business through it. That is what Saturday morning is for in our AI Weekend. The video shows how our canvas works for each participant. If you already know the build weekend format, skip that session and start building with the others in the room from the first hour. That is track 3. Everyone else picks track 1 or track 2 after lunch, and builds until Sunday evening. AI Weekend, 26 and 27 September at Betacowork in Brussels. Early bird €69 ends on 18
- Most AI events send you home with notes. When we started planning this one, Toon Vanagt said something that changed the whole program: "People come to build, NOT to listen to talks. So we cut the stage time down to almost nothing." Here is what is left. You arrive on Saturday morning with a laptop and one real problem from your business. You put your whole business on one page in twenty questions. Then you pick a track, and you BUILD,✌ for a day and a half, with coaches in the room the whole time. Three tracks in three rooms:
- AI Weekend for entrepreneurs at Betacowork, Brussels on 26 & 27 September 2026. Two hands-on days for people running businesses, not research labs. No AI agent background needed: bring a laptop and something you actually want to get done and automate. Special attention to running open-weight LLMs, AI sovereignty and solutions for confidential data processing. There’s still room in the program for your suggestions and to share your own lessons learned. 👇
- We're running an AI Weekend for entrepreneurs here at Betacowork in Brussels, on 26 and 27 September. In July, we did a two-hour evening on local AI. People kept asking the good questions after we'd already packed up. So this is the longer version: two days instead of two hours, hands-on, built for people running a business rather than a research lab. No background assumed. Bring a laptop and something you actually want to get done. The program is mostly set, and there's still room in it. If there's something you'd want
- This one slide explains how AI works better than most articles you'll read this week. Tokens go in. They become vectors. Then the same two operations repeat, layer after layer: Attention, where tokens look at each other and decide what matters, and a feed-forward step, where each token gets processed on its own. At the end, all of it collapses into one thing: a probability for the next token. Then it starts again. That's it. Everything else is scale. It's from Andrew Yourtchenko's deck at our Local AI evening on 14 July, and it
- Some call it "la rentrée", others "de start van het nieuwe schooljaar". September in Belgium starts the same way. Schools go back, the news comes back, and the emails that said "we'll pick this up in September" come due. Everyone is suddenly back. Unless you work for yourself. Then nothing starts. Nobody calls you back in. The kitchen table is where you left it in July, and the to-do list is the same one. The weather doesn't help either. The rain is back, and by November it's dark before five. That's harder if you're not from here.
- A reasoning model doesn't answer you straight away. It writes to itself first, sometimes thousands of words you never see, and only then replies. That hidden writing isn't free. It fills the same context window your actual question lives in, and you pay for it either in money or, if you're running locally, in time. Usually it's worth it. Sometimes it isn't: The model starts going in circles, revisiting the same thought, and never converges. Andrew calls it the loop of doom. The interesting part is why it happens more on compressed
Related profiles
Something wrong or missing? Send an update. Fixed within 24 hours.