 Risen Hopkins coming to you from South by Southwest 2011 I am on the liquid space bus what was the name of the partner that actually provided the bus because turnstone right we're sitting on a former Michigan State football team bus which has been converted into a workspace and very nicely done I may give like a little tour here at the end of the bus because this is a just a really it's definitely the quietest place I've been all week long so kudos on that no no audio problems on this shoot I'm sure but but you guys don't actually do the workspace is you guys are creating a marketplace of sorts for people to find places to work we just had an interesting conversation that we all wish we had captured so let's try to talk a little bit about that first let's do the elevator pitch on the company what it what is it how do you guys encapsulate into a few sentences what you guys do sure so liquid space is a mobile application that lets you use your phone locate book and securely check into great spaces to work right now which is something that I think just about anybody can relate to whether or not they're working for a big corporation or as an independent person because we all are working remotely these days either whether it be a you know on a trip business related trip or if we're you know actually working from home or working from a co-working space it always gets loud at my house around three o'clock when the kids come home sometimes I need a place to go do that conference call and so that's that's part of the the need you guys have looking to fill but it's a big undertaking so you're focusing on certain areas in certain ways and categories of places that people can work right that's right we've categorized sort of the real estate opportunities for those billion mobile workers and planet into three categories public priced and private and public spaces are those familiar third places like the coffee shop or the library where we we know we might be able to find Wi-Fi and a place to sit possibly the price venues are places like co-work facilities and office business centers and hotels that have conference rooms and day offices that can be booked and paid for and then the big the big tail and really the largest sort of bucket of space that's out there are private venues they are the conference rooms in the offices that are sitting unutilized or underutilized and every company and every service provider of the planet because what's happening as a backstory to that is that all of these dedicated assets these conference rooms and offices they're being used less and less because we're becoming more mobile and mobile might be simply down the hall to the conference room leaving my office empty or it might be a way at South by Southwest for a week or it might be a business trip or just working at home on a given day so the the story about how you came to the realization that you could create this opportunity and create this this marketplace is was interesting to me so why don't you guys talk about your personal history because you guys go back a ways yeah you know each other from way back that's right that's right we're been software veterans for about the last 20 25 years this is the third start of the mark and I have done together the prior one was in the Silicon Valley in the 1999 2000 heyday and then this one actually is an outgrowth of an experience that mark had about two three years ago right yeah about three years ago I took an interlude from technology and got involved in commercial real estate but trying to demonstrate a next generation of real estate where we were aiming at improving the utilization of space and we did that by in essence giving users employees or tenants the ability to use a large space almost like a health club and have a whole array of different types of environments they could check into without having to make a long-term commitment to it and we actually built a physical building a lead certified space that was sustainable and technically smart but we learned a couple of really important things at that time the first was that our customers who are predominantly technology and company employees and startups they wanted not just one cool space to work but they wanted you know a hundred spaces to work that matched all the places that they were physically going the second thing we learned the hard way back in 2008 2009 and it hasn't changed yet is that there's a vast amount of available real estate out there and the real opportunity we saw was not to build more cool buildings even if they were green but rather to find a way to tap into that unused capacity I mean the same way that you know zip car is finding ways to improve the utilization of cars or Airbnb is finding ways to improve bedroom usage you know we saw it to create a software solution that could connect mobile workers to great spaces right and and there's there's a an interesting angle at what we're because it's an industry buzzword sustainability and we talk about with our enterprise coverage a lot and there's an interesting angle sustainability kind of green angle to that that you were you were you're talking about earlier and it's it's less about you know the hippie happy good for the environment type stuff which is nice if you're into that but it's also self-serving in a way which is what really drives adoption of sustainability so yeah it's exploring that topic yes yeah yeah sure let's take that story that you talked about before the fact that you live in Dallas right and your co-working place is about an hour across town and our objective is that you can be able to turn on your device no matter where you are and see not just that place across town but go through and see 20 different locations all nearby where you are and that happens because all these other buildings now can make them so that their space is available it's not just paid locations as Mark said it's the private offices the lawyers offices and so forth that become available when that begins to happen now you're not on the road driving for that hour now you've gone through your one less car you've also gotten a lot more time back in your own life and you got the chance to go ahead and get out of home with the noisy kids and actually have a sane conversation with someone or whether it's a Skype call as you're driving down the street the street and you need to go ahead and find a good place to go ahead and work or it's the chance to go ahead and get some real work done the idea of being able to do that right where you are in your buy as opposed to having to go travel someplace really goes to the essence that we're talking about for sustainability I know my co-workers are watching this right now laughing because they all know my kids screams by by tone and pitch so that you go ahead laugh it up but this is gonna once we get Dallas propagation here you're gonna have nothing to laugh about anymore so yes yes so I can add a point on that I mean the last five years or so a lot has been covered about how technology choices have moved to the edge of the organization you know the CIO the CTO has sort of lost their authority in terms of dictating enterprise software is really coming in the form of applications on appliances what we're effectively doing is pushing the real estate choice to the edge of the organization we're letting that employee with their phone choose how and where to best work how to be most productive and that decision which is driven by the interest of the user the individual is generally going to make for a more productive employee and in generally speaking a more sustainable outcome economically and environmentally right right and so the yeah that's that's an interesting point is that it's going to be beyond it we're going to see I think with this sort of propagation we already see a little bit of a co-working I mean because there are some large organizations that encourage users that are encouraged employees to go make use of co-working spaces on trips or in public whenever they're on a conference or what have you but when we see your marketplace and start to grow I think that that would be a very very obvious side effect is you know allowing users to stay home allowing employees to stay home even if they're part of a large organization nice vision of the future and it's a global vision I mean this is the kind of thing this is not just happening here in the United States it's happening all around the world as a matter of fact in many respects the rest of the world is ahead of the United States in this case you know they're they're trying to go through and go the next step beyond just co-working and hoteling in these large corporations and in the smaller businesses but really now begin to take advantage like you said of all that other real estate that's already built out there that may not be owned by themselves and that's something that we do and we enable I mean it also creates a possible I mean maybe not profit center but asset for organizations that do have a major investment in real estate that they can they can take advantage of of mindshare of others folks that come in and use their stuff as well as you know make a little book couple bucks yeah it's true I mean most for most major corporations most companies in general real estate is the second largest expense after people and in the vast majority of the Fortune 500 over the last three years they've been on a tear downsizing the real estate footprints because real estate for a large company is a fixed inflexible asset so look at what companies like HP and IBM and Cisco have done over the last decade IBM now has 42% of their employees not working on IBM real estate you know Accenture is looking to essentially eliminate their real estate footprint as the end goal right they may never get there they'll always have buildings but but they've moved dramatically to essentially off a sharing categorically inside how do they drive that real estate cost per employee down as far as possible so there are massive amounts of corporate workers coming at it from the other side of the co-working kind of world who are moving into a mobile sort of work dynamic and looking for places to work yeah I mean that's something that we see I mean because I for years I covered mostly startups and that's all I saw but as I've been as we've delved very deeply in last couple years into the enterprise coverage area I mean the companies we cover they're all big enterprises you know Fortune you know three-digit companies and they're all everywhere you know every week is even a different city so well and certainly you take a look at it like startups for example right you know startups today can get started up for a lot less than they used to when we did our last startup back in the 2000 time period because among other things you can virtualize your infrastructure but now we're giving you the ability to go ahead and virtualize that real estate commitment you had to make before you close the round what's the first check you write it's the lease on the building for five years in Milpitas or San Jose right and you've just taken you know umpteen hundred thousand dollars of your available capital tied it up and you're competing with Facebook for the space too just like you are for those employees right so now let's go through and make it so you don't have to go ahead to spend that money now you can begin to go ahead take advantage of all those offices including the offices of your investors who have all those extra conferences they'd love to go ahead and let you be able to use them from time to time so I mean yeah that's been one of the secrets of Silicon angle success and one of the secrets of a lot of the companies I've talked to that are scrappy and bootstrapped is distributed workforce I mean across the country across the planet and you know anything that aids that obviously is going to you know I mean just continuing the trend of cheaper cheaper startup costs I want you to elaborate on where our people are I was gonna say we're a great example of that you know we're headquartered in Palo Alto I actually have my home in Minneapolis we have developers up in Inoka Minnesota we have another set of developers in mince can be a la ruse we have software people are marketing people up in San Francisco and in San Jose and my co-founder here lives there at where I spent half my time in the mountains of Idaho and half my time in the Bay Area on the road finding new business so you know we and liquid space and what's our fixed real estate footprint about $300 a month nice for one individual office for our 12th person company nice which is probably going away shortly and the rest of the time we're in co-working facilities and office business centers and working from our attorney's offices and our investor's offices and it's it's working quite well eating your own dog food eating your own dog food absolutely cool so let's talk a little bit more on the on your app product side talk about the the third category because public and private are very easy to understand you explain those so how does the visa passport relationship come come about how does that get populated and and what is that because that's always the toughest thing really when you're starting a marketplace is building up you know supply and demand and in this case you you're you're trying to fill that out in the San Francisco area and branching out geographically from there so what what does that look like how is that graph built sure we're building a two-sided marketplace you have members and you have venues the members carry passports which is the liquid space application which runs on their device today runs on iPhones and iPads and the venues grant visas which are like permission slips that allow you to go through and be able to use that space it's building that kind of trusted sharing relationship that allows us to go ahead and not only open up the public places as other listing services do in the paid locations but also really the mountain of real estate that exists that we call the private real estate that kind of real estate where people want to go through and make it available to a select group of people a law office doesn't want to make it available to everybody who's just driving by but is very keen to make it available to their clientele same with our investors and so forth they want to be able to control that usage the visa mechanism which defines not only that who can use it but also the terms of that use allows you to go through and enable that trusted sharing relationship in a very unique way and it's fundamental to how our product works so in many cases our new members will be learning about liquid space from some private venue owner like their attorney who says hey mark I'm turning you on to the liquid space passport and I'm issuing you this private visa for our space so that you can more efficiently use our conference rooms we'd love to have you take advantage of that asset so I so I then load my liquid space passport for the first time I find my private visa for that particular attorney or investor but then it's well what else can I do with this application and that and then I begin to unlock and find the public venues the price venues the other alternatives right so I mean you could you know almost like well the go wall of four square types thing where you know it's a bad side benefit for being our customer and checking in right here you also get yeah and similar to one of the mechanisms that they've sort of driven their growth with with go wall or four square anyone can create a spot or a place right they can find they can put some tag on the map that they've checked into well as Doug explained in the product we're going far deeper into the experience than just the check-in you know we securely check you in but also then connect you to the space but we will be leveraging the same mechanism that the go walls and four squares have which is to allow anybody any member any passport holder to put a pin on the map right so if you have a workspace which is you know useful to you and you want to you know put that in into the passport into the system you can do so so so we'll be leveraging the masses to sort of crowdsource the finding of great spaces to work democratize co-working right so if you're a venue and you're interested in getting listed in our our liquid space go through and send an email to venues at liquidspace.com and we'll be looking for you I mean I think this is a very Austin idea or at least a very Texan idea because I we debuted I debuted conjunctured on Mashable back when I was over there I've done a lot of coverage of since I moved to Dallas of the Dallas co-working spaces and they've been popping up like crazy and so I mean it's something that I identify with the type of scene you see at South by Southwest type of scene you see in like Texas tech journals and that sort of thing so I think that it's gonna be it's something that always has legs people are all interested in learning about even from all walks of tech all interested learning about interesting and new ways to work I mean one of the most popular tech sites out there lifehacker right it completely generic in terms of tech orientation but a highly tech oriented audience so yeah we're doing actually here at South by Southwest right now is giving everybody a chance to have that kind of liquid space experience in a place where the demand for that kind of experience is probably one of the highest I was just walking down the street looking at all these people waiting to get their latest iPad to sitting on the street all of them typing away trying to go ahead and get work done we're right around the corner and a couple other places around here are a number of space venues that now now have the opportunity to go ahead and use right I mean Texas has always had this we got too much space problem right I mean we got we got more places with more buildings on it than meant probably any many other stage and most of it sits unoccupied because we got more buildings and people so this is a good way to to take care of that yeah so what we've done here in Austin is we partnered with the turnstone division of Steelcase which is the world's largest furniture company and you know think of them as the Xerox park or the HP labs of work they're studying how to make an environment more productive so they were a natural partner for us because we're trying to make people more productive by mapping them to great spaces so here in Austin we've set up with the turnstone division for pop-up workspaces around town so we're sitting in this bus right now but in addition there's a wicked cool workspace set up inside of an art gallery up on North Congress there's a workspace set up inside of a bar restaurant over the copepar and grill and we're opening up a workspace tomorrow over the Hyatt Hotel right next to the social media tracks so it's really about sort of hand-crafting an experience with liquid space and turnstone that illustrates the way this is going to play when we take it to a town near you you know in the not too distant future right I mean I think we could talk about all the different aspects this is something I'm obviously very interested in and you guys are very passionate about but we got to cut it off at certain point for everyone everyone tells me to shut up at certain points I should probably cut it off now but I've really enjoyed hearing more about it I want to follow you guys so definitely keep me in the loop real quickly before tag out what platforms can they download the app on I know we've got iOS what is it iOS only right now or you got Android on iOS only right now and more coming yet more coming more coming yet any timetables yet no time tables yeah no no coming soon coming okay we'll go with that I'll be checking it out you should as well mark risen Hopkins here with liquid space folks at South by Southwest 2011 stay tuned to silicon angle commonsilicon angle TV for more coverage coming out of the conference