Avinash Rajagopal: Where do you see the American workplace going?
Carlos Martínez: I was talking last week to a client of mine who had read a post that I did on Gensler’s blog in 2014. The blog post speaks to the advent of coworking. Nobody then knew exactly what coworking was. I had happened to be involved doing two coworking spaces at that time, and it was starting to anticipate some of the shift that we were going to be seeing in corporate America. Now, WeWork has ended up coming onto the scene. But the particular project I’m working on now asks how to bring divergent things together so people communicate, so you accelerate some innovations, where particular teams working on different sides of the enterprise can understand where things need to go.
I coined a term in the blog post called “beta spaces.” And this space is exactly that. It’s meant to come to market in a very short amount of time. It’s meant to last for probably 12 to 18 months. And from there we’re going to take a lot of lessons so we can then apply and scale, so we can scale up.
AR: But what does a successful beta space look like?
CM: There are three big investments that a company makes around their business. There’s people, there’s technology, and there’s real estate. The motto is that you invest and you optimize. So you hire people and you invest in them. Technology is the same way. Nobody buys technology to let it depreciate. Why is real estate the only element that is depreciated from the time that you move in? This notion of beta space is to do the opposite—to create an environment that actually gets better over time. If you go to the beginnings of all these great companies, the metaphor of the garage is legendary. Why? It’s a very flexible environment. It can be many things. And, more important—this is a very risky thing for me to say, being in this industry—the space doesn’t matter that much. Because the workplace, at that stage, is a state of mind.