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Information security. Exciting and digital. Hello and welcome to the Future of Business podcast.
By Oxford Said Business School. I'm your host Alison McArthur.
In this episode will be talking to Vanessa Liebowitz, founder of District Technologies and a University of Oxford alumna.
Vanessa is passionate about shaping the future of cities and is creating a smart city revolution.
Three Developing Technologies for Smarter Buildings. We met with her during the Oxford Said Entrepreneurship Forum to learn more.
Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you for having me.
So could you tell us a little bit about what District Technologies is?
Absolutely. District is a digital layer for the built environment.
So what does that mean?
We connect the digital with the physical world, starting with buildings, and we work with clients who want to upgrade their building experiences,
either for their own employees of big companies like WPP, which is our biggest company clients.
We're rolling out 270,000 employees all around the world and all of their offices.
So the app for them connects their employees with the building to book a meeting room to get in and out of the building, to connect with each other,
to see what events and services are happening in the office,
and really just as a employee retention and benefit platform and also in a way of using the building in a more smart way.
So if you have a co-working space in your building or if your company that's implementing hot desking, which a lot of companies are.
So, you know, gone are the days of the cubicle and the corner office.
We want to be an open spaces and then you need platforms to manage these open spaces most efficiently.
So that's kind of what the platform does in a nutshell. We also work with property managers who manage buildings for clients like Cushman Wakefield,
which are rolling out to 200 million square feet in the U.S. That's a sort of largest square foot client.
And then we also work with companies like Blackstone, who is our first client.
They're property owners or developers. If you build and develop buildings, our platform helps create a better experience with tenants.
So it's about tenant experience rather than employee experience.
So in, in essence, it's a very flexible customisable platform has different functionalities.
So like booking a meeting room space or joining an event.
And these functionalities can be applied to any type of building, whether it's a residential building.
So we also have residential clients, you know, people who live in their buildings and have shared spaces,
commercial buildings or mixed use campuses or even like larger neighbourhoods.
Absolutely. So this sort of feeds into the whole idea of smart cities.
Mm hmm. Could you give a definition of what a smart city is?
Yeah, it's a great question, because a lot of people are mystifying or confused or have different definitions for it.
So it's always good to define what we believe is a smart city.
A smart city. Firstly, to define smart cities. What does smart mean?
For me, smart means connecting back with the human element of living and working in cities, so making it better for us to live and work.
Less friction, better user experiences, getting from A to B, getting in and out of buildings,
you know, getting what you need in your day in that building and then getting home.
And that's really at the district is at this intersection of live, work and play.
And if we can get our clients building to be prominent and they have a huge level of placemaking in terms of buildings.
So what does Smart mean for us? It's all about the human interaction.
It's not about throwing tech, you know, into a space because, yes,
there's a lot of Iot now and it's becoming an exponential market in connected devices.
But unless we connect devices to improve a friction or a user experience.
So like in our example, if a district we have access, control, getting in and out of a door is a big friction point.
If I need to register myself with the reception, she takes 10 minutes because she doesn't understand my name.
She writes down my name wrong and then has to call up and then they're like, You don't have a meeting, you're not registered.
It takes me a long time to get in and I have office buildings and that's a big pain point if you're going to meetings.
So if we can take that pain point away by pre-registering you with one click sending you an email that has like a visitor pass,
which is what our platform does, and you can just walk straight in and it's safer because you're you're pre-registered.
We know that you're in the hotels. You're in you don't have to speak to the reception unless you want to.
That's a really good example of removing friction in day to day experiences, and that makes building smarter.
But spending a lot of money on disconnecting every little IP in the light bulb if it doesn't reduce friction, isn't making anything smarter.
And so for us, we're starting we're looking at smart cities from a building and a neighbourhood and then city perspective.
And actually our cities are filled with buildings and most.
People when they think about real estate, you know, they're like, oh, it's really unsexy industry, but actually real estate is everywhere we go.
Yeah. And so everybody yeah, yeah. And people forget how much we're connected to buildings because we live and work in them all day.
And the real estate industry is extremely outdated in terms of their approach to digitalisation.
So a lot of the work I did and my background is in building co-working spaces.
I, I studied engineering here at Oxford and then I took, I did a thesis placement with a venture capital company called Early Bird in Berlin,
and I wrote my master's thesis on the DNA of entrepreneurial hubs.
And then I was lucky enough to take that theory into practice by launching a coworking campus in Berlin and called Factory.
And then to a big one, three buildings in London called Interchange, and then being surrounded by Start-ups.
But building, you know, co-working spaces for them is what brought me into real estate.
And actually there's, you know, very, very little in terms of innovation on the digital side that has happened and buildings,
especially building tech, Siemens is the biggest building,
one of the biggest building technology companies in the world,
and they make 16 billion a year in revenue just from their building technologies department.
I had no idea how big they were and but nobody really talks about that because it's extremely close and old,
outdated systems and something we're trying to do.
And we constantly are educating the market about, you know, putting infrastructure in buildings that are open, that can be updated.
And our vision for the company also and for for the industry is that why can't we update building experiences like we update our phones,
like an iOS update? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So it all comes down really to improving the individual experience.
So certainly I lived in London for the past five years and the amount of time that you spend commuting, going into offices,
you know, booking, meeting rooms, training, you know, lots of administrative tasks like really builds up over time.
And you know, definitely from my perspective, any way to kind of smooth that process is definitely very welcome.
So I think it's definitely an area that you wouldn't necessarily you kind of just take it for you just take is given that that's just,
you know, the frictions that you're going to have to deal with in your day to day life.
So it's very interesting to see the ways in which technology can help that process.
So are these technologies new or is it just a different, you know, applying technologies in a in a different way?
In a different way, yeah. I would say it's definitely not new.
It's been around for ten, 20 years since the revolution of our phones with apps and software.
But what is new is the way real estate owners think about their customers.
And this mindset of change has happened predominantly with the rise of we work, which is great for the whole industry.
You know, let's put aside what we think about the company on the valuation of we work.
But for the industry, for real estate certainly made all the big players question what they're doing.
So all of a sudden a new entrant has doubled the valuation of what they are valued at in less time, owning nothing,
no assets like they used to just rent and I think we work is becoming a real estate owner because they're buying and
developing buildings where the real margins are in and real estate owners are becoming like we work because they're,
you know, implementing their own co-working spaces.
So after I built my own, I started consulting the Crown Estate, which is a property company of the Queen in London,
and they have now opened a co-working space on Regent Street that I help set them up.
And so they're one of the most traditional real estate owners.
And even they have taken the step to provide more flexibility and a better customer experience to people who are tenants in their buildings.
So if you are willing and you are aware of that step of that amount of change, you have to have tools to manage your buildings better.
And that's where we come in as a business. That's kind of the the origin of it, but certainly it's about removing friction.
And I believe this type of digital layer to any building is going to become standard very soon and the market is just incredibly large.
We were contacted really interestingly the other day, a week ago,
so by the second largest commercial developer in Japan and they heard about us somehow,
I don't have no idea how I asked them and they said, Oh, someone just told them about us.
And so we as a company district were very much client focussed.
We can go wherever our clients go. So we've opened a building in L.A. with Blackstone.
We have a very large client in Canada, 40 million square feet that we're doing there.
And so we can launch a building completely remotely without needing to go to a building anywhere in the world.
And we can change the language on our platform and no problem either.
And just to clarify for maybe people listening who haven't heard about my company before.
Or what we do is we have the plug and play model and we have custom maps.
So custom maps. And then the brand of the clients will say, WPP, of course, they want all their employees have a WPP app.
And so we've innovated our back end to be able to deliver these services very, very quickly and very, very cost effectively.
So with the rise in these co-working working spaces such as we, what do you think?
This has raised the expectations of what employees working really for any company want to experience on a day to day basis.
So they're no longer satisfied with, like you say, just sort of an open desk kind of situation where sorry, kind of basic needs and things like that.
They expect more, especially when they're working longer hours. Absolutely.
I think given the rise of we work, I would flip the what you just said on its head.
I think we work became successful because there is demand in the market for having better office experiences.
Like I said at the beginning, the sort of age of blue carpets and low ceilings and cubicles, that's a death to an employee.
Nobody wants to work in an office like that. You know, people want to have a better experience even in their jobs.
And we're very lucky, I think, with the general level of education rising people, especially in the West.
And we're talking I'm talking mainly about big cities in the West because that's sort of where our client base is.
And you have a high level of students, like all the students here, like yourselves, that want to have a more rewarding job life.
So it's a combination of salary, but it's much more than salary.
It's mostly experiences and freedom.
Can I can I have an employer that, you know, what Google has done for office space and what we work has done for landlords?
Can I be living and working in a also apartment, but also in an office space that makes me feel productive and happy and I get to,
you know, walk around and I'm not stuck at my desk all day. I think that's certainly the future of of talent and the best talent,
the best students they're going to companies that provide that and the companies that don't provide that are not able to hire.
There's a huge, huge problem hiring, you know, young graduates, especially in more traditional industries.
Like I had a meeting with the lawyer in Munich. I'm German.
My parents live in Munich and it's one of my parents lawyers.
And he said, I can't hire anyone. And I looked around and I was in this horrible office of his and I was like, Well, no wonder you can't hire anyone.
Look into your office space.
I wouldn't want to work here if you even if you paid me double what you're paying your normal people, I wouldn't work here.
This is, like, horrible to be. Even sitting here in a meeting with you is horrible.
And I. I think, yes, we're spoilt. You know, people are spoilt, but people also it's the rise of nomads, digital nomads.
More and more people are working as freelancers and they want to travel around the world and do jobs, you know, to increase their work life balance.
And I think that's a very it's a personal choice.
Do you want to slave away in a corporate job to get maybe a little bit more money?
Or do you want to be working on a beach, you know, for bit less money?
Yeah. What do you think people want to do?
I think that certainly I would prefer to be on the beach and I think a lot of people would say the same thing.
So it's definitely a district that my company is at this intersection of what I like to call three key market trends, which is future of work,
which is everything we just discussed about providing employees a better experience, but also Iot and connected devices.
So having, you know, offices filled with different Iot, devices filled with things that you need to connect.
The consolidation of apps, I believe in having one platform, not 20 different apps to do 20 different things in your office.
You want to have one. And so future of work, connected devices and then flexible spaces like co-working co-living spaces.
So we have co-working clients, we also have co-living living clients and the platform is so customisable that we,
you know, we enable our clients to create unique building experiences.
And I always say tech is only a third of the equation. The other third is people, and the other third is operations and content.
Unless you put a good level of information and experiences into the app, you know, the app without any content is also not valuable.
You cannot create community just with tech. So people we've mainly spoken about privately owned buildings.
How of these being technologies being applied in the public space will have potential to be applied?
Yeah, it's really exciting. I think the public space is always a bit longer.
So my company is two years old.
We've been speaking for about a year or a year and a half with several large scale developers and developers that own neighbourhoods essentially.
So an example would be Kings Cross in London or Canary Wharf or Wembley.
These are huge developments that are owned by companies.
We're building the buildings and they have the opportunity and what I'm speaking to them about and speak to all three about them.
And I'm excited to see which one will sign up with us first.
But it's a bit of a longer conversation because you need to get them comfortable with this idea.
The idea is very clear we would do a custom Kings Cross app and then anyone in the public can download the app,
sign up and see things available to the public.
And then anyone who is a residential member, like if you have an apartment in one of their buildings, you login and have a unique experience.
And then anyone that has a commercial building, you can log in and have a unique experience there.
We're also speaking to Expo 2020, the big Dubai, basically new city that's being built in Dubai for the big conference happening in 2020.
And they're building this new event hall as a as basically a new city that's going to stay and have people live and work there.
So again, because of an Expo 2020 app,
that is like the community layer on top of all these buildings to showcase events and services and connect the people actually living there.
So today we don't have any of these live neighbourhoods yet,
but I think it be something that we hope to be doing very soon in the future and will
bring its own challenges and unique insights to how people are living in cities.
But the goal is to get more engagement and more retention in those neighbourhoods.
I think a lot of the problem we have as people is we don't know what's happening in our cities.
Not really. Where do you go? You don't really look at Facebook for events anymore and you don't really look at Google either.
So at least for me,
I live in Hackney and I'm sure there's a lot of things that I'm missing that I would have liked to have gone to if I had just known about it.
But I get my information from my friends and maybe randomly online,
but there's there's not really a place I can go to and to see all the events in Hackney, all the public events.
I totally agree. Well, I used to I used to live in short it.
And sometimes you would just like hear like music in the distance and you're like, that sounds really fun.
Like where's was coming from out? Like my doubts about your gig and I like what's going on in East Huntington right now.
But yeah, it would be good to have somewhere where you could just, like, very easily find deals, find out about so much noise.
Yeah. And that's why it's important on our platform, our clients curate the information because you could argue on the flipside is,
okay, Vanessa, why don't you just go and launch Shoreditch and create that yourself?
And I would say it's about the content, right?
So it's really you have the unique opportunity when an owner or a developer is actually in charge of the placemaking,
that they are activating these locations by putting cultural activations and events into them so they know it's happening.
And they can very easily have, you know, a content platform like ours to showcase these events in a in a better way.
What's challenging is if it's just a neighbourhood that nobody,
nobody is really managing and it's very grassroots and organic, then who is in charge of putting the content in the platform?
Sure. So I guess this will require a lot of collaboration with governments.
And are governments generally quite receptive to kind of using technology to.
It's a really good question. I've spoken I've tried to speak with improvement business improvement districts in London
because their whole remit is to make their neighbourhoods more of more good for businesses.
And that's just difficult. Speaking to politicians, essentially.
It's do you think the real estate sales cycle, slow government sales cycle of the urban slow, I should say.
I would very much like to see more collaboration between public private
partnerships and more opportunities for Start-ups to work with cities directly.
London and New York have done a big step towards this. The New York hired their first chief digital officer a couple of years ago in London,
just at the same time in London as a chief digital officer called Theo Blackwell now.
And he's done some really brilliant work around bringing all the even, which is bring all the councils together.
And there's so many different councils in London that all have their own remit and there's very not enough collaboration between them either.
So he's done a lot of that work and sort of defined for London.
What does it mean to be smart and how do we create a smarter city in the next five, ten years, 20 years?
And I think we have a lot of work to get there. Yeah.
So I guess when people are using these things, there's a lot of data that can be collected.
How would you use that data to kind of you work on what you're offering?
Yeah, big data play is really interesting. All of our clients have access to their data and their data alone.
So we would never like sell their data or share it with third parties.
But maybe in the future there's some anomalies,
like anonymous trends that we can learn that could improve the way cities and governments are looking at their neighbourhoods and.
That's, I think, very, very interesting. That's certainly something we're considering right now.
But we're consistently speaking to users and clients to improve the product.
I think we have the best user experience design on the market in terms of our competitors, and that's really, really important.
If the platform doesn't look and feel easy and frictionless, if I have to click twice instead of ones, it's really annoying.
I want to have to click zero times to get value, right?
So the more also we're used to having really nice experiences with apps like Uber or Twitter or even Airbnb.
If you don't, if you're not as a Start-Up able to match these unique experiences, really nicely designed experiences,
you're going to have problems with your engagement because people are just going to delete the apps.
I think we have a war for the home screen and people want to have fewer apps, not more.
Whereas maybe ten years ago people thinking, Oh, we're going to have an app for everything.
Now I truly believe it's about consolidating the apps and having less, not more.
One thing I would like to announce is we have launched our smart building tech marketplace,
which you'll be able to go on to developers district minus TechCrunch.
And as a software developer registered to have a developer license with us,
and you'll be able to then look at our API documentation and actually build integrations or unique functionality on top of our core platform.
So then clients can pick and choose what functionality they want and then our back end configures a custom app
or a plug and play app in self service and in line with that marketplace will also launch in a freemium model.
So that means anyone in the world can download our district branded app,
configure it to their specifications completely for free, play around with it, you know, put their little office on to it.
If it's an office up to 50 people, it'll be free. And then you'll have to put on your credit card for additional functionality or for more users.
And so we're very excited about launching that. And we think anyone in the world can benefit from having an improved office or residential experience.
That's been really fascinating. Vanessa, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.
It was a real pleasure. Yeah, I thank you very much. Thank you for listening to the Future of Business podcast.
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