WeWork is mining customer data to develop apps and service that improve work
WeWork’s bet is that because it is amassing so much office space and studying how thousands of different businesses use it, it can position itself as the company with the most valuable firsthand knowledge about how jobs best get done. Since its inception, WeWork has been collecting data about how people work, where they are most productive, what they need to feel good, and how much space they really require in the first place. (It’s less…much, much less…space than you think.) So far, WeWork has applied this knowledge to its own locations. But for the past year, the company has quietly been experimenting with ways to turn that data into new products for enterprise customers.
In the future, you’re going to love going to the office. Everything you need to do your job effectively will present itself without effort. You won’t have your own desk, because your employer will know you only use it for 63 percent of the day. But you won’t mind sharing it, because said employer will make sure you have a private room with green leafy plants, soundproof walls, and warm light between 2 and 2:20 p.m. so you can call your daughter. At 3:30 p.m., when you need a conference room for the product managers’ meeting, you won’t even have to book it. It’ll just be there. And everyone attending remotely will already be invited.

[#image: /photos/5947e0146c638b3847cde2a7]|||||| Jessi Hempel is Backchannel's editorial director. --------- Sign up to get Backchannel's weekly newsletter, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

“This isn’t right away, of course,” David Fano tells me. “But it’s not that far out.”

We’re standing in the epicenter of WeWork’s cavernous New York City headquarters, where Fano, the company’s Chief Growth Officer, has set up a demo area to show off new technologies for prospective clients. A balding guy with a shaved head and dark eyebrows, Fano stands 5’11”, and when he touches his phone to a desk, it recognizes him and raises itself to rest at his standing height. The smart furniture is just one of many ways that WeWork is wrangling data that it’s collected over the years to quietly reorganize an office around its workers. To Fano’s right is a touchscreen the size of a chalkboard where he can, with a swipe or a pinch, pull up real-time information about any of WeWork’s 164 open locations. Want to know when the air filters were last cleaned in WeWork’s Mexico City offices? Curious how many conference rooms are currently occupied in Charlotte, North Carolina? This program can tell you.

WeWork is counting on this research to form the meat of its business and to justify its newly ordained position at the very top of an elite group of startups. Maybe you thought WeWork was about hip shared offices for millennials and beer on tap, or corporate slogans in twee typeface that read “Do What You Love.” But WeWork has much larger ambitions. Seven years after it opened its first coworking spot in SoHo, it has catapulted into a briskly ballooning global business—and it is now trying to position itself as the foremost expert on offices. In the past two months, WeWork has partnered with Softbank to open in Tokyo, where it will own 50 percent of WeWork Japan; it has announced a Chinese unit; and it has purchased Singaporean competitor Spacemob. It’s operating in 16 countries outside the United States right now, and it has launched upscale, dorm-like apartment buildings—aptly called WeLive—in New York, Washington, D.C., and soon Seattle. In late August, the company raised $4.4 billion from Softbank’s gigantic Vision Fund. WeWork is now valued at close to $20 billion, putting it in a league with Palantir and SpaceX as the most highly valued private US tech startups after Airbnb and Uber.

WeWork’s bet is that because it is amassing so much office space and studying how thousands of different businesses use it, it can position itself as the company with the most valuable firsthand knowledge about how jobs best get done. Since its inception, WeWork has been collecting data about how people work, where they are most productive, what they need to feel good, and how much space they really require in the first place. (It’s less…much, much less…space than you think.) So far, WeWork has applied this knowledge to its own locations. But for the past year, the company has quietly been experimenting with ways to turn that data into new products for enterprise customers. These offerings include building out custom office interiors, licensing software that companies can use to book conference rooms, analyzing data on how people are using those conference rooms, and providing on-site human community managers indoctrinated in WeWork’s community-minded philosophies. Fano calls this grab-bag of services “Powered by We.”

Think of it as office space-as-a-service. To date, big companies like Microsoft or IBM have used WeWork spaces in places where they don’t need to have as many employees or in areas where they believe their employees might benefit from an outside environment. But many of those companies are now testing deeper integrations. WeWork manages an entire building for IBM in Greenwich Village, and it now runs Airbnb’s Berlin office as well as Amazon’s Boston office. Soon, the company anticipates, large enterprises will outsource their office buildings to WeWork, which will draw from its increasingly sophisticated data to insure that enterprise clients get the most productivity possible for the least amount of money. It’s a natural extension of WeWork’s current business, according to Chief Operating Officer Jen Berrent, who explains that the idea of adding a services business is “something that there’s demand for in the market.”

Over time, this could be a much bigger opportunity than coworking spaces, one in which everything WeWork has built so far will simply feed an algorithm that will design a perfectly efficient approach to office space. WeWork aspires to be the de facto source to which businesses will turn when they need help figuring out how to spend the least amount possible for an environment that will delight employees and entice new ones.