Larry Gadea wants to grab your desk — and rent it out to the highest bidder. That empty boardroom, too. Gadea, the chief executive officer of San Francisco-based Envoy, founded his firm a decade ago to help companies more effectively manage office visitors and deliveries. Then the pandemic hit, and buildings went dark. But Gadea — who landed his first tech job at Google while still in high school and was later one of Twitter Inc.’s first 50 employees — found a workaround, using his software to verify Covid-19 vaccinations for employers and sort out hot-desking schedules.
Now, armed with data on the occupancy habits of 9,000 clients including Zoom Video Communications Inc. and Lions Gate Entertainment Corp., he’s created office “heat maps” so companies know which areas get used the most. Down the road, he plans to offer up those unused desks and meeting rooms to companies that need them. “We expect a world where traditional real-estate brokerages won’t exist because companies will expand and contract to the exact space they need,” he said. Gadea spoke to Work Shift about his office-marketplace plan and why some people are just bad at remote work. (Responses have been edited and condensed.)
Q: Were you a hacker growing up?
