After nightfall, the bar is busy and the dance floor is full. The lines regularly stretch out into the street. The dancing goes on until 1am. But just a few hours later, the watering hole will be clean, the tables will be cleared of silverware and plates and the nightclub will have been transformed into a cozy office where no one gets fired for drinking at work.

 

Everyone shares desks at Social – photographers, designers, journalists, software programmers. They bounce ideas off one another, hire one another and collaborate to expand their businesses.

 

Everyone is either a freelancer or working for a small start-up. As India emerges as one of the biggest markets in the world for tech-based start-ups, workspaces are transforming from traditional and hierarchical to relaxed and bar-like.

 

“It’s the millennial personality,” says 29-year-old Dinsa Sachan, a freelance journalist who works out of Social.

 

“People don’t want to bow down to random bosses in their offices. They are seeking more meaningful work. So, I think co-working spaces are like a melting pot for individuals like these.”

 

The first co-working offices began springing up in India about three years ago. Today, there are at least a dozen in New Delhi – though Social is the only one that also functions as a restaurant – with similar numbers in Mumbai, Bangalore and Hyderabad, where most Indian start-ups are based.

 

With more than 4,200 new technology companies, mostly phone apps or websites, by the end of last year, India now has the third-largest start-up industry in the world, behind the US and United Kingdom, according to The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), an Indian industry research company.

 

Foreign-based investors are opening their coffers, and now comprise most of the money being pumped into Indian start­ups, NASSCOM says.

 

Funding for Indian start-­ups is growing at more than 125 per cent a year, with an additional $700 million estimated to be invested before February 2017, according to a 2016 report by InnoVen Capital, an Asian venture capital firm.

 

Riyaaz Amlani, the owner of Social and a powerful force in the changing Indian restaurant scene, said he noticed a demand for cheap office space in prime New Delhi locations and decided on a fluid concept for his restaurants.

 

There are now 14 Social outlets across India, all of them also co-working spaces. “Increasingly, offices started becoming more like cafes, right? Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Twitter,” the 41-year-old says.

 

“If you get into a traditional office environment, you know, it’s all very cut-and-dried. It’s all very hierarchal. Your importance is measured by the amount of square-foot [your office has].”

 

Membership fees at most shared offices are usually less than $100 per month. They also come with free access to networking events, investors’ conferences and even parties.

 

Rishi Jalan, a 25-year-old who started a sports management company for student athletes two years ago, said: “I know so many of my friends who actually went to a co-working space and found their co-founders.”