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The Future of business, future of business, future of business. More global and more decentralised.

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Making sure that enterprises that are a lot more responsible.

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Smart cities. More collaboration. Consumer driven productivity.

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Environmental and social responsibility. Global human centred.

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Purposeful individualised. Automation. Big Data.

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Climate Change. Space Exploration. Renewable Energy.

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Information security. Exciting and digital. Hello and welcome to the Future of Business podcast.

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By Oxford Said Business School. I'm your host Alison McArthur.

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In this episode will be talking to Vanessa Liebowitz, founder of District Technologies and a University of Oxford alumna.

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Vanessa is passionate about shaping the future of cities and is creating a smart city revolution.

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Three Developing Technologies for Smarter Buildings. We met with her during the Oxford Said Entrepreneurship Forum to learn more.

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Thank you very much for joining us today. Thank you for having me.

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So could you tell us a little bit about what District Technologies is?

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Absolutely. District is a digital layer for the built environment.

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So what does that mean?

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We connect the digital with the physical world, starting with buildings, and we work with clients who want to upgrade their building experiences,

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either for their own employees of big companies like WPP, which is our biggest company clients.

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We're rolling out 270,000 employees all around the world and all of their offices.

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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,

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to see what events and services are happening in the office,

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and really just as a employee retention and benefit platform and also in a way of using the building in a more smart way.

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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.

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So, you know, gone are the days of the cubicle and the corner office.

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We want to be an open spaces and then you need platforms to manage these open spaces most efficiently.

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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,

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which are rolling out to 200 million square feet in the U.S. That's a sort of largest square foot client.

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And then we also work with companies like Blackstone, who is our first client.

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They're property owners or developers. If you build and develop buildings, our platform helps create a better experience with tenants.

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So it's about tenant experience rather than employee experience.

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So in, in essence, it's a very flexible customisable platform has different functionalities.

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So like booking a meeting room space or joining an event.

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And these functionalities can be applied to any type of building, whether it's a residential building.

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So we also have residential clients, you know, people who live in their buildings and have shared spaces,

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commercial buildings or mixed use campuses or even like larger neighbourhoods.

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Absolutely. So this sort of feeds into the whole idea of smart cities.

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Mm hmm. Could you give a definition of what a smart city is?

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Yeah, it's a great question, because a lot of people are mystifying or confused or have different definitions for it.

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So it's always good to define what we believe is a smart city.

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A smart city. Firstly, to define smart cities. What does smart mean?

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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.

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Less friction, better user experiences, getting from A to B, getting in and out of buildings,

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you know, getting what you need in your day in that building and then getting home.

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And that's really at the district is at this intersection of live, work and play.

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And if we can get our clients building to be prominent and they have a huge level of placemaking in terms of buildings.

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So what does Smart mean for us? It's all about the human interaction.

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It's not about throwing tech, you know, into a space because, yes,

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there's a lot of Iot now and it's becoming an exponential market in connected devices.

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But unless we connect devices to improve a friction or a user experience.

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So like in our example, if a district we have access, control, getting in and out of a door is a big friction point.

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If I need to register myself with the reception, she takes 10 minutes because she doesn't understand my name.

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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.

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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.

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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,

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which is what our platform does, and you can just walk straight in and it's safer because you're you're pre-registered.

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We know that you're in the hotels. You're in you don't have to speak to the reception unless you want to.

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That's a really good example of removing friction in day to day experiences, and that makes building smarter.

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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.

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And so for us, we're starting we're looking at smart cities from a building and a neighbourhood and then city perspective.

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And actually our cities are filled with buildings and most.

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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.

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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.

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And the real estate industry is extremely outdated in terms of their approach to digitalisation.

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So a lot of the work I did and my background is in building co-working spaces.

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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,

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and I wrote my master's thesis on the DNA of entrepreneurial hubs.

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And then I was lucky enough to take that theory into practice by launching a coworking campus in Berlin and called Factory.

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And then to a big one, three buildings in London called Interchange, and then being surrounded by Start-ups.

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But building, you know, co-working spaces for them is what brought me into real estate.

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And actually there's, you know, very, very little in terms of innovation on the digital side that has happened and buildings,

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especially building tech, Siemens is the biggest building,

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one of the biggest building technology companies in the world,

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and they make 16 billion a year in revenue just from their building technologies department.

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I had no idea how big they were and but nobody really talks about that because it's extremely close and old,

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outdated systems and something we're trying to do.

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And we constantly are educating the market about, you know, putting infrastructure in buildings that are open, that can be updated.

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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,

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like an iOS update? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. So it all comes down really to improving the individual experience.

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So certainly I lived in London for the past five years and the amount of time that you spend commuting, going into offices,

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you know, booking, meeting rooms, training, you know, lots of administrative tasks like really builds up over time.

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And you know, definitely from my perspective, any way to kind of smooth that process is definitely very welcome.

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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,

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you know, the frictions that you're going to have to deal with in your day to day life.

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So it's very interesting to see the ways in which technology can help that process.

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So are these technologies new or is it just a different, you know, applying technologies in a in a different way?

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In a different way, yeah. I would say it's definitely not new.

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It's been around for ten, 20 years since the revolution of our phones with apps and software.

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But what is new is the way real estate owners think about their customers.

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And this mindset of change has happened predominantly with the rise of we work, which is great for the whole industry.

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You know, let's put aside what we think about the company on the valuation of we work.

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But for the industry, for real estate certainly made all the big players question what they're doing.

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So all of a sudden a new entrant has doubled the valuation of what they are valued at in less time, owning nothing,

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no assets like they used to just rent and I think we work is becoming a real estate owner because they're buying and

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developing buildings where the real margins are in and real estate owners are becoming like we work because they're,

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you know, implementing their own co-working spaces.

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So after I built my own, I started consulting the Crown Estate, which is a property company of the Queen in London,

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and they have now opened a co-working space on Regent Street that I help set them up.

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And so they're one of the most traditional real estate owners.

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And even they have taken the step to provide more flexibility and a better customer experience to people who are tenants in their buildings.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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We were contacted really interestingly the other day, a week ago,

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so by the second largest commercial developer in Japan and they heard about us somehow,

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I don't have no idea how I asked them and they said, Oh, someone just told them about us.

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And so we as a company district were very much client focussed.

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We can go wherever our clients go. So we've opened a building in L.A. with Blackstone.

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We have a very large client in Canada, 40 million square feet that we're doing there.

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And so we can launch a building completely remotely without needing to go to a building anywhere in the world.

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And we can change the language on our platform and no problem either.

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And just to clarify for maybe people listening who haven't heard about my company before.

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Or what we do is we have the plug and play model and we have custom maps.

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So custom maps. And then the brand of the clients will say, WPP, of course, they want all their employees have a WPP app.

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And so we've innovated our back end to be able to deliver these services very, very quickly and very, very cost effectively.

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So with the rise in these co-working working spaces such as we, what do you think?

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This has raised the expectations of what employees working really for any company want to experience on a day to day basis.

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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.

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They expect more, especially when they're working longer hours. Absolutely.

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I think given the rise of we work, I would flip the what you just said on its head.

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I think we work became successful because there is demand in the market for having better office experiences.

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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.

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Nobody wants to work in an office like that. You know, people want to have a better experience even in their jobs.

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And we're very lucky, I think, with the general level of education rising people, especially in the West.

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And we're talking I'm talking mainly about big cities in the West because that's sort of where our client base is.

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And you have a high level of students, like all the students here, like yourselves, that want to have a more rewarding job life.

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So it's a combination of salary, but it's much more than salary.

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It's mostly experiences and freedom.

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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?

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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,

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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,

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the best students they're going to companies that provide that and the companies that don't provide that are not able to hire.

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There's a huge, huge problem hiring, you know, young graduates, especially in more traditional industries.

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Like I had a meeting with the lawyer in Munich. I'm German.

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My parents live in Munich and it's one of my parents lawyers.

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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.

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Look into your office space.

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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.

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This is, like, horrible to be. Even sitting here in a meeting with you is horrible.

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And I. I think, yes, we're spoilt. You know, people are spoilt, but people also it's the rise of nomads, digital nomads.

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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.

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And I think that's a very it's a personal choice.

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Do you want to slave away in a corporate job to get maybe a little bit more money?

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Or do you want to be working on a beach, you know, for bit less money?

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Yeah. What do you think people want to do?

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I think that certainly I would prefer to be on the beach and I think a lot of people would say the same thing.

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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,

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which is everything we just discussed about providing employees a better experience, but also Iot and connected devices.

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So having, you know, offices filled with different Iot, devices filled with things that you need to connect.

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The consolidation of apps, I believe in having one platform, not 20 different apps to do 20 different things in your office.

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You want to have one. And so future of work, connected devices and then flexible spaces like co-working co-living spaces.

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So we have co-working clients, we also have co-living living clients and the platform is so customisable that we,

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you know, we enable our clients to create unique building experiences.

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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.

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Unless you put a good level of information and experiences into the app, you know, the app without any content is also not valuable.

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You cannot create community just with tech. So people we've mainly spoken about privately owned buildings.

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How of these being technologies being applied in the public space will have potential to be applied?

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Yeah, it's really exciting. I think the public space is always a bit longer.

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So my company is two years old.

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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.

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So an example would be Kings Cross in London or Canary Wharf or Wembley.

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These are huge developments that are owned by companies.

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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.

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And I'm excited to see which one will sign up with us first.

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But it's a bit of a longer conversation because you need to get them comfortable with this idea.

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The idea is very clear we would do a custom Kings Cross app and then anyone in the public can download the app,

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sign up and see things available to the public.

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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.

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And then anyone that has a commercial building, you can log in and have a unique experience there.

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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.

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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.

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So again, because of an Expo 2020 app,

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that is like the community layer on top of all these buildings to showcase events and services and connect the people actually living there.

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So today we don't have any of these live neighbourhoods yet,

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but I think it be something that we hope to be doing very soon in the future and will

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bring its own challenges and unique insights to how people are living in cities.

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But the goal is to get more engagement and more retention in those neighbourhoods.

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I think a lot of the problem we have as people is we don't know what's happening in our cities.

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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.

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So at least for me,

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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.

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But I get my information from my friends and maybe randomly online,

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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.

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I totally agree. Well, I used to I used to live in short it.

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And sometimes you would just like hear like music in the distance and you're like, that sounds really fun.

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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.

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But yeah, it would be good to have somewhere where you could just, like, very easily find deals, find out about so much noise.

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Yeah. And that's why it's important on our platform, our clients curate the information because you could argue on the flipside is,

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okay, Vanessa, why don't you just go and launch Shoreditch and create that yourself?

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And I would say it's about the content, right?

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So it's really you have the unique opportunity when an owner or a developer is actually in charge of the placemaking,

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that they are activating these locations by putting cultural activations and events into them so they know it's happening.

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And they can very easily have, you know, a content platform like ours to showcase these events in a in a better way.

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What's challenging is if it's just a neighbourhood that nobody,

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nobody is really managing and it's very grassroots and organic, then who is in charge of putting the content in the platform?

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Sure. So I guess this will require a lot of collaboration with governments.

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And are governments generally quite receptive to kind of using technology to.

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It's a really good question. I've spoken I've tried to speak with improvement business improvement districts in London

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because their whole remit is to make their neighbourhoods more of more good for businesses.

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And that's just difficult. Speaking to politicians, essentially.

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It's do you think the real estate sales cycle, slow government sales cycle of the urban slow, I should say.

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I would very much like to see more collaboration between public private

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partnerships and more opportunities for Start-ups to work with cities directly.

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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,

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just at the same time in London as a chief digital officer called Theo Blackwell now.

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And he's done some really brilliant work around bringing all the even, which is bring all the councils together.

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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.

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So he's done a lot of that work and sort of defined for London.

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What does it mean to be smart and how do we create a smarter city in the next five, ten years, 20 years?

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And I think we have a lot of work to get there. Yeah.

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So I guess when people are using these things, there's a lot of data that can be collected.

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How would you use that data to kind of you work on what you're offering?

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Yeah, big data play is really interesting. All of our clients have access to their data and their data alone.

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So we would never like sell their data or share it with third parties.

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But maybe in the future there's some anomalies,

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like anonymous trends that we can learn that could improve the way cities and governments are looking at their neighbourhoods and.

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That's, I think, very, very interesting. That's certainly something we're considering right now.

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But we're consistently speaking to users and clients to improve the product.

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I think we have the best user experience design on the market in terms of our competitors, and that's really, really important.

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If the platform doesn't look and feel easy and frictionless, if I have to click twice instead of ones, it's really annoying.

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I want to have to click zero times to get value, right?

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So the more also we're used to having really nice experiences with apps like Uber or Twitter or even Airbnb.

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If you don't, if you're not as a Start-Up able to match these unique experiences, really nicely designed experiences,

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you're going to have problems with your engagement because people are just going to delete the apps.

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I think we have a war for the home screen and people want to have fewer apps, not more.

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Whereas maybe ten years ago people thinking, Oh, we're going to have an app for everything.

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Now I truly believe it's about consolidating the apps and having less, not more.

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One thing I would like to announce is we have launched our smart building tech marketplace,

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which you'll be able to go on to developers district minus TechCrunch.

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And as a software developer registered to have a developer license with us,

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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.

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So then clients can pick and choose what functionality they want and then our back end configures a custom app

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or a plug and play app in self service and in line with that marketplace will also launch in a freemium model.

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So that means anyone in the world can download our district branded app,

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configure it to their specifications completely for free, play around with it, you know, put their little office on to it.

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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.

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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.

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That's been really fascinating. Vanessa, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.

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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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Don't forget to rate review and subscribe to stay updated with our latest episodes.

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We hope you enjoyed this episode. Stay tuned for more interesting interviews.