Feb 27, 2022 · 43m · saastr
The Office is Back!! But What Will It Be Like? Jason Lemkin & Justin Bedecarre of Raise.Work
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin interviews Raise executives Justin Bedecarre and Jamie Katcher to examine commercial leasing data, regional office recovery across San Francisco and New York, and how modern tech companies are designing distributed physical hubs.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Jason holds 37% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Jason as informed peer 5.8 Guest teaching 5.6 Guest disagreement 2.6 Jason pushing back 3.8
speaking balance: gold is Jason, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 30:06 Immediate pushback on hot-desking assumption
Justin and Jamie simultaneously interrupt and firmly reject Jason's claim that hybrid models inevitably eliminate dedicated workstations for employees.
Hardest push from Jason ▶ 36:20 Jason challenges the true cost of multi-hub officesJason refuses to accept the idea that maintaining ten separate satellite hubs is cost-neutral compared to a single large headquarters, insisting overhead multiplies significantly.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 4:12 Justin refutes SoMa decline with square footage statisticsJustin directly educates Jason with transactional market data showing SoMa leasing volume hit 9.6 million square feet in 2021, contradicting Jason's perception of a dead market.
Jason holds their own ▶ 28:26 Jason cites Adobe executive experience regarding workspace densityJason demonstrates operational domain knowledge by recalling Adobe's 40% density increase strategy to explain how financial considerations drive real estate layouts.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Jason as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Jason pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Data and Recovery Trends in San Francisco SoMa Market | 5 | 7 | 4 | 5 | Jason challenges the viability of SoMa's recovery based on visible street vacancy and corporate departures. Justin counters directly with leasing data, demonstrating that 2021 leased square footage actually surpassed 2019 levels despite low physical occupancy. | |
| How High-Growth Tech Unicorns Are Reimagining Office Design | 6 | 5 | 2 | 3 | Jason inquires why major high-growth unicorns like Figma and Brex still commit to large physical offices when remote work is viable. Justin details how innovative companies redesign office footprints into social hubs and focused libraries rather than standard desk farms. | |
| Strategic Timelines for Securing Commercial Real Estate | 5 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Jason presses Justin to give an unbiased, concrete deadline for founders to secure San Francisco commercial space before pricing and inventory tighten. Justin and Jamie provide an objective three-to-six-month roadmap ahead of big tech returning. | |
| New York Office Momentum and Sunbelt Market Expansion | 6 | 6 | 2 | 3 | Jamie and Justin present hard market data on New York's leasing surge and Sunbelt badge-swipe rates. Jason synthesizes the findings to highlight how New York's return to office is pacing significantly ahead of the Bay Area. | |
| Workspace Load, Desk Densities, and Multi-Hub Expansion | 7 | 6 | 4 | 6 | Justin and Jamie immediately push back when Jason suggests hybrid setups abolish dedicated desks, citing BLS statistics and client policies. Jason counters by leveraging his past executive experience at Adobe to argue that running multiple distributed hubs incurs heavy soft management overhead. |
Statements from this episode (16)
Lemkin: The hybrid office is dead as companies shift to distributed hubs
“I think the hybrid office even is a dead idea. Now we're all distributed teams going to the office.”
Bedecarre: San Francisco has lowest office occupancy of any major city
“Like the occupancy level in San Francisco is the lowest of any major city.”
Bedecarre: SoMa office leasing rebounded to 9.6M square feet in 2021
“In Soma, as we define it, apples to apples to what I'm about to share 8.2 million square feet of office was leased. In twenty-twenty that sunk down below six. In twenty-twenty-one it was 9.6 million square feet.”
Bedecarre: Apple, Meta, Salesforce, and Slack back in offices by April 2022
“Big tech, you know, that Apple, Salesforce, Facebook, Meta you know, Slack all of these companies are kind of targeting over the next couple months, but by April, they will all be back.”
Bedecarre: Sephora leased major portion of Salesforce's 350 Mission space
“Salesforce themselves put up one of their half of their building at three 50 mission. Sephora took a huge chunk of that.”
Bedecarre: Raise client Brex creates cafe-style perk spaces instead of mandatory hubs
“One of our clients Brex that are creating these amazing cafe spaces that are like you know perks rather than like, you know hubs that you have to go into.”
Bedecarre: Thumbtack is designing offices like libraries for focus work only
“Thumbtack is actually designing like a library. So they're going opposite. They're like, you only do focus work here, you know?”
Bedecarre: Google and Meta expect most employees in office a few days weekly
“Even companies as big as, you know, Google and Meta are expecting the vast majority of their employees to come at least a few days a week.”
Katcher: Midtown South tech office leasing is up 65% year-over-year
“In that market, from like over year to year, there's 500, let's call it 500,000 square feet of leases, which is about, it's up 65%, approximately 65% from a year ago.”
Bedecarre: Big tech leased 18.4M square feet of office space during pandemic
“Our data shows 18.4 million square feet of leases by big tech, Amazon, you know Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Microsoft, et cetera. That's 312 football fields of offices in the US for office.”
Bedecarre: Facebook signed the largest office lease in Austin history
“Facebook just did the biggest office lease in history in Austin.”
Bedecarre: Badge data shows national office occupancy at 30% to 33%
“On average about 30%, 33% across the country are back in regularly according to like, you know, the badge data.”
Bedecarre: BLS data shows only 5.5% of businesses reduced office footprints
“Only 5.5% of businesses have reduced their square feet relative to how many employees they have in the country.”
Bedecarre: 81% of top 160 YC companies adopted hybrid work models
“We did a study of the top 160 YC, most valuable YC companies
published last year 81% of them are going hybrid in some form or fashion.”
Bedecarre: Companies Will Have More Physical Offices, Not Fewer
“A really interesting result of all this is that like, you know, companies are going to have more offices, not less.”
Bedecarre: Fintech Startup Mercury Opened 5 to 6 Offices at 100 Employees
“One of our clients, Mercury, which is like a really, really successful you know, fintech company and they published this so I can share it, like you know, around a hundred employees, they had six off four, you know, five or six offices, and that would have nev…”