​​I've been watching Teke O'Reilly enhance lives for over a decade. Coworking spaces, startup communities, winter festivals. Each one rooted in the same belief: that the right environment, tended by the right person, changes what people are capable of. I've seen it work. I've benefited from it directly. He's spent his career solving a problem most people feel but struggle to name. And when The Lumber Exchange began to take shape, there was one person who instantly came to mind.

Most people who work remotely will tell you the setup is great. Flexible hours, no commute, full control of the day. They’ll also tell you, if you catch them at the right moment, that something is missing. The energy of a room that’s alive with people doing serious work. Someone who knows your name and what you’re building. A place that makes you want to show up.

That’s exactly what Teke O'Reilly has spent his career creating. And this spring, he’s bringing it to Hayward.

Teke called Chicago and Denver home growing up, but Wisconsin claimed him early. Summers of his youth meant long days in Wisconsin's Driftless, picking berries, chasing chickens, canoeing rivers, and finishing the day in a sauna by the pond. He played college football at Lawrence in Appleton, where he learned something that would shape everything after: that a group of people, given the right conditions, genuine encouragement, and someone paying close attention, will surprise themselves with what they’re capable of. He’s been testing that idea ever since.

CoCo was the first proof. One of the Twin Cities' original coworking spaces, Teke brought CoCo to life every day inside Minneapolis' historic Grain Exchange building. Earlier in my career, one of my software development teams at SportsEngine needed a change of scenery to think differently about a project, and someone pointed us there. Our team spent a month at CoCo, and the work that emerged from it profoundly impacted SportsEngine's trajectory.

I’ve thought about that time at CoCo a lot since. What made it incredible wasn’t just the focus or the proximity of the team. It was the environment Teke had built around us. He noticed things. Who was heads-down and needed quiet, who was stuck and needed an introduction, who had arrived for the first time and needed to feel like they belonged. The work got done because the people doing it felt genuinely looked after. That’s a harder thing to build than any physical workspace.

In 2016, Teke and I launched The Pitch together, a coworking space dedicated to SportsTech startups where entrepreneurs, innovators, and a deep bench of sports industry experts gathered under one roof. The idea was simple and ambitious: bring the right people into the same room, surround them with the right energy, and let the collision of ideas do the rest. It became the Twin Cities entrepreneurial hub for cutting-edge sports businesses.

A pattern began to emerge. The right environment changes what people are capable of. But for Teke,  deeper questions had been forming for years.

What does coworking look like when the place itself is the point? What happens when “remote”  stops being a compromise and starts being the whole idea? Somewhere the pines and the trails and the particular stillness of a Northwoods morning don't compete with the work. They define it.

When The Lumber Exchange began to take shape, I knew who I had to call.

Coworking near the wild has long been a dream of Teke's. Not a watered-down version of what exists in the city, but something better. A genuine community of people doing real work at the edge of a forest, steps from a trail, minutes from hundreds of lakes, surrounded by the particular quiet of a Northwoods morning. Sawyer County, he'll tell you, is the ultimate location for this kind of adventure.

He’s right. And we’re glad he’s here to help prove it.

This spring, Teke O'Reilly joins us as Community and Culture Director. He’ll be the daily presence that makes this place feel alive, learning names, making introductions, building the kind of programming that gives people a reason to show up even when they don’t have a meeting. The tone of a space is set in small moments, repeated every day. Nobody understands that better than Teke.

Hayward has always had what it takes. The trails, the lakes, the magnetism of a town that gets into you and doesn’t let go. The Lumber Exchange is the space on Main Street that channels it all, the one that tells the remote worker, the nonprofit leader, the entrepreneur who moved north because she believed great work could happen anywhere: you were right.

Fill a room with the right people, in the right place, and you change what a town believes is possible. Teke has known that longer than most. Now Hayward gets to find out what it means.

We open this summer. Come find us on Main Street. Teke will be there, and so will your people.