Joshua Abram, a serial entrepreneur whose company NeueHouse brought upscale style and a clubby exclusivity to the shared-workspace business as the practice known as co-working took off in the 2010s, died on Aug. 5 in Moretown, Vt. He was 62.
His death, at a friend’s house, was from multiple myeloma, his son Max said. He lived in Lyme, Conn.
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about his career is that it happened at all. Mr. Abram received his first cancer diagnosis in 2009 and was given a prognosis of six to 18 months to live.
With the aid of a stem-cell transplant from his brother Adam, he survived 16 more years and went on to create, with a longtime business partner, Alan Murray, what he considered to be his defining ventures.
He and Mr. Murray built companies in the digital advertising sphere, and in recent years they had been working on a start-up called Conceivable Life Sciences, which aims to to fully automate the in-vitro-fertilization laboratory with robotics and artificial intelligence.
Despite his background in tech, Mr. Abram, along with Mr. Murray, made an unlikely detour in the 2010s, reinventing themselves as style arbiters and social gatekeepers of sorts with NeueHouse (pronounced NOYA-house; “neue” means “new” in German).
This members-only hive of ambition was a business-class twist on the utilitarian co-working space, one that gave globe-trotting start-up types and creative professionals a club-like setting in which to toil and network.
The idea was to merge the social sizzle of Soho House, the London-based chain of private clubs known for their chic interiors and Gilded Age-level exclusivity, with more functional freelancer warrens like WeWork, which had started a few years earlier.
The NeueHouse flagship opened in 2013 in a 50,000-square-foot space in a century-old industrial building a short stroll from Madison Park in Manhattan. The company charged $600 a month to work in the main “gallery” downstairs, which featured a cutting-edge look by the sought-after designer David Rockwell. NeueHouse also featured private upstairs studios, which started at $4,000 a month.
A highly selective membership committee sought a 50-50 gender split. Members included the author Salman Rushdie and the actress Meg Ryan.
NeueHouse, which also featured a bar and a screening room among many other amenities, became a social destination too. On a visit to New York in 2014, Prince William of Britain and his wife, Catherine, the Princess of Wales, dropped in on a reception attended by the actor Patrick Stewart; Jenna Lyons, then the president of J. Crew; and the then-powerful movie producer Harvey Weinstein.
As Mr. Abram put it in a 2015 interview with The Journal, a publication of the men’s fashion online retailer Mr. Porter, “We think the magic happens when people are not just showing up with a check, but when we’re putting together people from different backgrounds, united by a common curiosity.”
In 2016, he and Mr. Murray ventured west, opening a Hollywood branch in the old CBS Radio building on Sunset Boulevard. Plans to open a London satellite that same year fell through.
In the end, the partners concluded that NeueHouse was a better social and cultural experiment than a business, Mr. Murray said, and in 2017 they sold a controlling interest to investors, including the power couple of Diane von Furstenberg and Barry Diller.
Joshua Anthony Abram was born on Aug. 20, 1962, in Atlanta, the youngest of five children of Morris Abram, a civil rights lawyer who was later president of Brandeis University, and Jane (Maguire) Abram, a journalist and author.
His early life was shaped by his dyslexia, which he later said put a chip on his shoulder, particularly since he came from a hothouse intellectual environment and struggled to learn to read.
His parents eventually moved to New York and, in 1974, divorced. Despite his learning disability, he attended the exclusive Riverdale Country School in the Bronx and studied history at Columbia University, although he did not graduate.
He got his first taste of the entrepreneurial life as publisher of Laughtrack, a “Playbill for the comedy club circuit,” as The Times described it in 1989. It was distributed through more than 140 clubs around the country, with a circulation of more than 500,000.
Of the several digital advertising companies he built with Mr. Murray, the biggest was Integral Ad Science. The company, founded in 2009, rated websites for quality and helped steer ads from Fortune 500 companies away from sketchier sites.
In his later years, he devoted his energies to Conceivable Life Sciences, hoping the company might democratize fertility treatments by making them more affordable.
The idea sprung from a conversation the partners had with a member of NeueHouse, a woman who was describing the frustration of her I.V.F. odyssey. Mr. Abram was struck by the unfairness of the current system, in which many people cannot afford treatments whose costs can rise well above $50,000 when multiple rounds are required.
The traditional process involves embryologists “working over microscopes all day,” Mr. Murray said in an interview, “doing single-cell surgery on an egg to inject the sperm in a specific location, just like 40 years ago.”
“We replace human hands with robots,” he added, “human eyes with advanced optics, and some of the brain work with A.I. systems in order to automate the tedious aspects of the job.”
The company introduced its technology in February in a Mexico City clinic run by a partner, Dr. Alejandro Chavez-Badiola; it plans to team with a prominent clinic in California by the middle of next year.
In addition to his son Max, Mr. Abram is survived by his wife, Cristina Azario, whom he married in 1996; another son, Harry; a sister, Ruth J. Abram; his brother Adam; and another brother, Morris Jr.
In an interview last spring with Inside Reproductive Health, a fertility news site, Mr. Abram outlined his ambitions: “If you think about the history of flight,” he said, “we went from the Wright brothers to propeller planes, but we only entered the jet age after 40 years of history. We’re about to enter the jet age of I.V.F.”
Alex Williams is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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