Embedded - 361: Have a Dog for the Day

Episode Date: February 5, 2021

Christelle Rohaut (@chrisrohaut) spoke with us about circular economies and how innovation can build better cities. Christelle is co-founder and CEO of Codi. She is on the Forbes 30 under 30 list.  Second Harvest Food Bank

Welcome to Embedded. I am Alicia White alongside Christopher White. We'll be talking to Christelle Rohat about her company, how cities should work, and being on the Forbes 30 under 30 list. Hi, Christelle. Thanks for joining us. Thanks a lot for having me. Glad to be here. Could you tell us about yourself? Sure. So I'm the CEO and co-founder of Kodi, the first company to provide daytime workspaces in private homes.

Our mission is to allow literally anyone to walk or bike to work wherever they may live. I grew up in France. My background is environmental engineering and city planning. I was also a fellow with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation, specialized on circular economies. My passion is to make our neighborhoods a sustainable place to work and live. And that's why I founded Goaty. Cool. Well, we have lots of questions about almost everything you said.

But before we do that, we want to do lightning round where we ask you short questions and we want short answers. And if we're behaving ourselves, we won't ask why and how. And are you sure? Are you ready? Yeah, I'm ready. What's the most important department in a business? That's tricky. Management.

All right. What's your favorite fictional robot? The Bicentennial Men. Oh, okay. If you could teach a college course, what would you want to teach? Love to teach urban innovation. Favorite part of the city you live in? The Italian neighborhood where I live, my neighborhood.

And do you have a favorite animal? I actually don't. I'm not a big animal person. Do you like to complete one project or start a dozen? Complete one, but it needs to be impactful. Okay, so I want to ask you about Cody, which mentally I keep thinking it's like Airbnb for home offices. Is that the right mental model? Or I know that that's not the explanation you give, but am I close?

It is close. Yeah. A lot of people describe it as Airbnb for co-working, Airbnb for offices or Airbnb for home office. That's a good one as well. Or Airbnb meets WeWork. There's a lot of different ways to put it. But yeah, so the gist is there. It's basically about unlocking access to workspaces in private and beautiful homes right in your neighborhood. So the model on the host side is pretty similar to Airbnb. On the member side, it's pretty different, though, because it's a local platform. So it's for locals by locals so that you can go and have more privacy, more focus when you work remotely. This seems like it's a really good idea, except for this whole pandemic thing. Is it still running?

Yes, it is. We actually pivoted during the pandemic. We were born two years and a half ago. So we've been around for a little while before the pandemic. And we've always served remote workers in our neighborhoods, always been the vision. With the pandemic, obviously, the co-working model was more challenging. So we shut down operations for a couple of months during shelter in place. And we created OSHA certified guidelines for hosts so that they're able to reopen their homes as safely as possible for the community. What happened as well is that during the pandemic, the way we work changed forever. And we just made a leap in the future of five, 10 years.

Remote work is literally exploding. 50% of U.S. workers currently work from home. And a lot of stats show that 72% of those people want to stay in their hybrid work model where you spend a couple of days at home and a couple of days somewhere else. And that creates a boost for our model as well. So it actually accelerated our growth with companies. We saw a 29x increase in enterprise partnerships

within a few months. So how does the money work? Do the hosts, I imagine, get paid? Do they get paid much? I don't know how much it would cost for me to want to open a house to someone. It depends on your location and who your customers are. Our hosts make between from a few hundred dollars a month to a few thousand dollars a month. And part of our mission is to help them afford and stay in the home they love by covering on average 30% of the rent or mortgage.

And why go to somebody else's house? Why not stay home? I mean, that's the closest commute I can imagine. Yeah, for sure. There's always been big challenges with work from home full time. And I think this pandemic has actually created one more, even worse. One of the biggest challenges of working from home every day is that you're very isolated that has always been the number one issue with remote workers is that you becomes very separated from any other human beings and so that social component is really

missing in your life when you're a remote worker. And so Kodi helps recreate that and connect you with a local remote work community or your coworkers if they live nearby. Second, a lot of people actually find it challenging to work from home like it doesn't create the right conditions to be productive and feeling balanced. And so you need to get out of your house a couple of days a week. And that's why we provide like some kind of flexibility so that you can have a space to go a few days a week nearby. You said you like to work on things that are impactful. I can see how this would be impactful for reducing commuting. But I think you mean more than that. How is Cody impactful?

It's a great question. I founded Cody when I was still doing a master's in city planning at UC Berkeley, and I was also a fellow at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation on circular economies. I'm a European, and when I came here to the U.S., I got kind of a cultural shock between the way cities are made in the US and the way they function in Europe. Here, it's much more difficult to access things in general. And so community is part of it. A lot of people are indeed wasting a lot of time every day in a car. And that's creating really negative impact for the environment. Just to go downtown, sitting at a desk with Wi-Fi. We have that around us.

And homes are spaces where you can actually work productively. It's been proven. Now there's mental health issues with that. If you stay in your own home every day without seeing anybody. And so having that, you know, kind of separation, physical separation between your home and your work life is very important for that. Plus your physical health, you get a couple of steps, you know, a day to get out of your space. So that's one part. A big part of COTI is also to actually boost local economies.

If you stay working in your neighborhood, you're going to boost the local economy because you're going to consume locally. And so any $1 that you invest in cody is actually going to the host and to the local businesses that the members go to during the day to consume food coffee happy hours and things like that and the last one is and not the least is housing affordability um our hosts can you know make up to 30 of their rents andgages, and they live in the home because it's only day time sharing. And that's a very meaningful impact in their lives and overall for cities to be able to have an affordable housing model. And so you were getting a degree in environmental engineering

or is that your undergraduate degree? That's a master degree that I have from France. And then I have a master degree in city planning from the US. How did you get from engineering to CEO? I think I just like to make things and have an impact fast. And so when I was studying engineering I was specialized in environmental sciences very passionate about like sustainability right and how can we make our neighborhoods a more sustainable place to live in there's a lot of waste and a lot of resources that are unutilized like a home it's typically sitting empty all day long it doesn't make sense to me and I think there's a logical way to see things when you're an engineer.

When things don't make sense, you want to kind of fix them. And that's how I saw that wide and utilitarian supply that is homes every day sitting empty and people are suffering from not being able to pay their rents or mortgages. And on the other side, people suffer to commute long hours to go to a downtown office where they can have those resources locally and so I think that's the mindset of an engineer that helped me think that way and it got me to city planning because I'm passionate about cities and I wanted to study things in a different way from just the climate change kind of angle that I had with my engineering background. What makes for a good city? A lot of things. City is very, very complex. It's like a

body or a human being. It's extremely complex. Ideally, you know, a good city is a city where you can access what you need easily and locally. And that creates a sustainable virtual circle. So it's about affordability, having access to those resources. And I'm talking about transportation, housing, energy, work, food. Those things are the basic needs for any human being. housing, energy, work, food. Those things are the basic needs for any human being, and they should be available to anybody in their own neighborhood. You've mentioned the term circular economy a couple of times,

and I think that relates to what you're saying, but I've never heard that term. Could you describe what that means? Sure. So we tend to live on a take-make-waste industrial model. A lot of innovations have been made about that model. And circular economy is aiming to create a closed-loop system that basically eliminates waste and continually use the same resources. So you make more and more value out of the same things, basically.

And so you can draw a circular economic process as a circle instead of a linear line. And so it's important because you see growth in a different way and you see innovation in a different way and then you can measure your success based on how much of positive society-wide benefits you made through that system. How does this circular economy concept apply to technology and consumer goods? Does it apply at all or is it just the opposite? It depends what the product or the service is. For us, it's from an economic standpoint. If you give $1 to a Goody host, they're gonna, you're helping, you're basically helping the local economy, you know, grow. And then as a member, you're also giving a dollar to a local business instead of, or Starbuck downtown, you know, like it's just like that difference where you, are you investing your,

your money as a local resident and how it can boost local economy in your neighborhood. That's a way of seeing it. And a lot of platforms or tech platforms have been helping that. And another big topic in circular economies are plastic and products that typically used to create a lot of waste. And now that you can see in a more virtuous way where the materials are never wasted, You can always reuse them, recycle them, and that creates even more value for the product or the service itself. I'm trying to figure out of the projects I'm working on, what things could be part of a circular economy. I guess a self-driving car could because it reduces that as a single owner thing. The car can just drive around on its own, taking people place to place.

Are there other examples? You need to see the autonomous vehicle as part of a bigger energy flow, I would say. Where does that electricity come from is it if it's an electric car right um and then um it is like so there's a different angle right like uh is it providing value to the users um not in a linear way but in a circular way uh where the energy use is somehow given back to the community or something. Other examples is typically sharing economy platform have that same intention about sharing resources and therefore maximizing the use of a specific resource. In that regard, if Getaround and Turo,

it's about renting other people's car. That car is an underutilized asset and it's wasted during X hours per day. So you're increasing the value of that asset. I know that Danone and other companies like that have a lot of new models in place to avoid wasting all the plastic. So you can imagine a startup where it's about just glass containers that people can refill, I don't know, milk every day at the local store with their glass containers. That is actually very circular because you're never wasting that glass container to get your milk, plus there's no shipping and things like that.

That sort of thing requires a lot more effort. And so it seems like the sort of thing people who are privileged not to have to scramble can do. It seems like it's a very limited set of people who can have the luxury of engaging in a virtuous economy. That's a fair point. I think I would recommend anyone to check out the Ellen MacArthur Foundation website. There's a lot of work being

done in developing countries as well because that's where you have the most waste and that's by corporations coming from foreign countries um so those corporations have the luxury and have the money to deal with those issues right um and the idea of that foundation is to better educate those big corporations so that they have circular economy in mind where they work in those countries so that it creates less waste and it's more uh creating value for the community um that's one way of like you know kind of applying those concepts in a developing country for instance but you can also say that actually there's a lot to learn from developing countries for the western countries because they typically have very virtuous

loops already in place that are way more sustainable than the way we are living in the United States, for instance. And so we have a ton to learn from them and apply those models here. Can you give an example or two? Well, the milk, for instance, I think I take it from a startup in India where it's based on minimizing the costs, right, of getting that bottle of milk. And because you're getting that milk from local farmers, it's cheaper and it's also less wasteful. You don't need to pay for transportation and things like that.

So I would need to check again that that specific project but um i remember that startup and was very impressed by it because it's about like really creating a virtual sloop for meal delivery in india um and here you know we get delivered by amazon our food and we don't know where it comes from. We are creating way more waste than they are. And so if we can learn things from them and apply it here, that would be a big step, actually. You said that a class you would want to teach would be urban innovation. What would you, what is that? I actually took a similar class at Berkeley.

Urban innovation is kind of a mix between tech and public policy, let's say. So it's about driving innovation that can have a business model, so it can be an actual business for profit, but having always in mind the impact on cities. And actually, ideally, the whole mission of the company is to have a beneficial impact for cities and help like solve one of the challenges that cities have. So urban innovation is kind of a mix of that.

Like what are the top issues in those cities, right? And then understanding, okay, what are the innovations that can arise from those challenges? And typically, the startup need to work closely with city officials, city planners sometimes, and community organizations to make a change. And one of my investors is Urban Innovation Fund, for instance, and they specialize in investing in those type of startups that are about solving issues in cities. I worked at ShotSpotter, which makes a gunshot location system. You sprinkle sensors around a city and then automatically call the police when there's a gunshot.

Is that the sort of thing you mean? Yeah, definitely. Definitely. That's an innovation from a for-profit corporation or startup that directly benefits the city. What other examples could you give? I actually worked myself for a company around the quality of air and air monitoring. So it's about deploying sensors across the city block by block sometimes to better understand what's the air quality in that specific street. And then measure the impact of a policy. In some countries, for instance, they can ban access

from one street entirely and make it pedestrian only. And so what's the impact of that policy on CO2 emissions and particulate matter, for instance? And that helps drive better decisions for cities about where are the places in the city where you should actually implement those policies and where it's going to have the highest impact for the population are cities very excited about data-driven decision making or is it maybe not quite yet? It really depends on the city. European cities are, I tend to see them

being there already. There's a lot of organizations around smart cities and trying to get more data-driven decisions. At the end of the day, having the data

helps you save a lot of money, taxpayers' money, and make better decisions for the residents. So I do think it's very, very impactful. Now, not every city has the luxury to think about it yet, right, and to have the right infrastructure in place yet. about school clarity and they worked also for uh for like uh they have actually a pilot program in new delhi in india um and mexico city the cities that are extremely polluted and need to do something about it because every day they're losing money with that pollution um and so i do think yes city are more and more excited about being more data-driven. And being data-driven usually means having more sensors or having more ways to get the data from traffic to particulates in the air to gunshot sounds. I think it's about getting the data, as you said.

First, like a lot of cities are not collecting the right data at all. And so collecting the data is the first step. Second is understanding the data, as you said. First, a lot of cities are not collecting the right data at all. And so collecting the data is the first step. Second is understanding the data. And third is making the right decision based on that data. And that's a level of complexity. It's actually very exciting for engineers, I think. But yeah, for instance,

measuring the impact of a policy through data is very challenging because there's a lot of different factors you need to account for that may be noisy to understand the data. And there's not a lot of things being done right now yet, but I think it's a thriving field. How much do existing large companies work with cities today? Like, I'm sure they do, but I have no knowledge of this. So, like, is Google in, say, Mountain View, do they work really closely with Mountain View to help with the impact that hundreds of thousands of employees make? Or is it more of an after-the-fact thing, like, okay, we moved in here and now we're doing all this and now we have to scramble to kind of address the impact. It's a very, very good question. I can't talk for Google.

I know that Google has sidewalk labs as part of Google. It's a renovation lab that was based in Toronto for a little while. And they're doing good work in terms of innovating in cities and measuring the impact of what they're doing on cities and communities. But in general, is a company tied to a city and working closely with a city about their own impact in terms of kind of housing, for instance.

That's a big problem in the Bay Area. Not really. I think it happens after the fact. But also, you know, it goes the other way around. There's a lot of cities that try to attract Amazon for the new HQ by giving a lot of tax benefits and incentives. And so the city is involved with those big companies when they choose their location.

And taxes typically is kind of an argument for a city to attract that new company. But then you have backlash from the communities about gentrification and all those different issues. So you can see cities in two ways, top down and bottom up. And that's what makes it so complex and i think bottom up it's not there yet in terms of involvement from companies with communities top down i think there is there is a growing

relationship for sure between the company and the ncd. Going back to sensors and data, I thought of two things as you were mentioning the data. One is that it's really easy to lie with statistics and just giving me more data, just giving me more things to lie about and with. Well, I mean, to be slightly less cynical, it's hard to analyze data in a way that necessarily can extract meaning that's useful sometimes. Well, I mean, the meaning is one thing. It's the innate biases that I'm more worried about. Do you worry about that sort of thing or do you have relative confidence that with cities we can get data

that's relatively objective? Oh, I think you're totally correct. That's a big downside of data and ethics. I think ethics should be always part of any kind of data department or company that is trying to help cities or even in general. The right is that I do think you're getting closer to the truth, if I may call it that way, by being informed. And so at the end of the day, data is trying to give more knowledge to the decision makers. And I think you're absolutely right. They should be aware that the data is not 100% objective. It's been built with certain biases that they need to be aware of and have probably a couple of people working on ethics to make sure that the data is as close as possible to representing the reality. And then the other part is one of the problems

we have with the shot spotter is that people don't like their privacy invaded and tend to be very vocal about that. And for all that I say sensors, of course there were microphones involved, but they were always on the top of buildings they never listened to anybody and yet and yet it's it's that's hard that's a very hard case to make are you concerned about the privacy of having more monitoring in cities i think that's uh that's definitely part of the agenda for city planners and city officials, whoever is working on that at the city level. I know for sure that in Europe, it's a very sensitive issue. In France, they didn't want to do the COVID tracing because of the privacy elements of it.

So even for cases where it's public health you know there's pushback and there's backlashes um so it's a very difficult question i think it really is the job of like the city and makes it also exciting in the sense of like there's a lot of things to think about and be done and um with the right involvement of the community, I think you can get that. If it benefits people and you involve them in the process of designing that service, if it's a private service or even public service, I do think you run into less backlash. They will always be a concern.

But you need to kind of, like, block the noise sometimes, as you said. The intention may be very good, and there won't be any negative use of the data. So when it's really truly helping the population, like public health with COVID, it should actually be implemented and not be blocked every single time there's a complaint. So yeah, I think I do worry about that. And I'm sure cities worry about that as well. And there's a lot of great work being done on that side. Changing the topic entirely. The Forbes 30 under 30, you were an honoree. What does that mean? Well, it means that I got lucky. And I'm very grateful for the recognition. They basically choose 30 entrepreneurs that are under 30 years old per category. There's a few categories.

And you need to be nominated. So one of my co-workers nominated me. So I'm very grateful to be recognized among other really incredible entrepreneurs working on exciting innovations. No, is that not a good question? I mean, because I see these awards and I don't really understand. A lot of them do ask you to apply. Oh, okay. And I don't know about the Forbes one. So, yeah, Forbes, once you're nominated, then you actually have to fill out an application yourself. Okay.

So you are part of the process. And they can reach out to you and ask you more questions it's definitely helping the company get more exposure and yourself as an entrepreneur get more legitimacy and credibility in the space and so i guess that kind of is why are the awards like this important it's to help you get the credibility to build your business. Yeah, definitely. You know, when you're, it's my first startup and I come from France.

Five years ago, I was nobody here. And so you need to like go from, from zero to one and build some credibility for investors and hosts and companies to trust you, to give you service to them and grow your idea into a reality. So, yeah, it's definitely part of, it's very helpful for an entrepreneur to get those kind of labels. It's similar than going to a good college, you know, it's about giving more credibility to your kind of professional profile. So going back to Cody, is it, is it all just software?

Is there an app? Are there, how would people get involved and what kind of technology are you using? Yeah, so it's a web app and mobile app. And an individual can apply to become a host, whether you live in the US. And then we have kind of a process in place to vet the space, screen the person, and then potentially onboard you as a Cody

host. And on the other side, so we are a double-sided marketplace, members can buy an individual membership and then book any space on the platform and limit it per month. And if you're a company, you can sign up your own employees and then we go and unlock workspaces in their own neighborhoods. You mentioned you were doing more enterprise B2B. That's the companies buying spaces for their employees? Yes, they buy monthly memberships so that they can provide an employee benefit

that's about access to a local workspace. So there's a lot of difference. I mean, working from home is a broad term and there's a lot of different spaces that people need. People writing web software, they might need just a desk and someplace to plug in their laptop. Other people might want three monitors or someplace with a equipped lab for, I don't know, some hardware. Is there that kind of thing where people advertise different kinds of spaces for different use cases? Or is it just, here's a space in this district and it's open from 12 to 5? It's a great question.

So the difference between us and a regular kind of AB&B is that we actually have standards in place so that the experience is seamless for the member. And, you know, people go there to work. It's a very important part of their day and life. So we want to make sure they have everything they need and are very productive. So the Wi-Fi is above 100 megabytes in any of our spaces.

There's Nespresso curry coffee machine so that's easy to use um etc etc so there's like a set of amenities where you go and you know you have kind of the quality quality um and that's typically what people like in the co-working space right you have peace of mind when you go you know you're going to be you have everything you need to work um and then with the company uh they have the opportunity to actually add additional amenities as you said sometimes it's about it's uh they're providing spaces for engineers and so an engineer need a specific chair and a specific monitor and then we work with our host to deliver that quality for the members.

Do you have like, is there spaces that are large enough where a small team comes in or is it always individuals? It's mostly teams. So it's typically on average five people, six people per space. Oh. Yeah. With COVID, we also now allow like individual seats so that there's less kind of interactions between people but typically a company will go to Kodi to open satellite hubs so that if you have 10 employees living in similar neighborhoods you know they can go to one hub with like five seats

for instance and they can go meet that and it becomes the company-only Codi workspace. This may sound like a silly question, but do some of the spaces offer dogs? Well, we had a crazy stat one day. I think it was like 30% of our spaces at some point had pets. And that was very popular

among our members uh so yeah you can potentially have a dog for the day if you choose the right cody do you have a favorite uh host that you go to or that you have checked out yeah definitely um i love all our hosts in general because they all have different stories and they obviously very hospitable. And so they have this type of personalities that I love. But yeah, there was a host prior to COVID that I used to go a lot to. She's a single working mom uh and uh it's very rewarding when you work on something with a mission um to to feel that you actually help that person and you know the person personally you know um we actually

helped her pay the mortgage of her of her home and she was born and raised in san francisco and struggling at that moment when we met her um she has a little girl and we uh we all know her in the cody team uh it it was uh yeah that's a it's a it's a beautiful story and i i really like that host is cody does do you have a headquarters or is it bootstrapped with cody itself where you're actually using your own service to that space? Definitely using our own service. Never have an office and never will. You know, the whole idea is like that. We don't want to waste resources by having offices

and say it should be more housing. And then we can work and live in our neighborhoods. So we do use Kodi as our main workspace. And then my team members live in different areas of the city or sometimes of the country. And so they can use their own local Kodi hub. I have two more questions that I probably should have put in lightning round

from Susan who introduced us. First, do you have a favorite invention from the last five years? Oh, wow. I didn't think about that one. Not sure how I'd answer that. I don't know how I'd answer it either. That's a hard question.

I don't know. It's very hard. Let's make it 10. 10 years. Oh, I it 10. 10 years. Oh, I'll be definitely, okay. So if it's last 10 years, it's probably like communication platforms, like WhatsApp and Slack.

I'm far from a family and just being able to call them and see their faces and feel like they're close to me, that's amazing. I love that part of technology that made people feel closer to each other physically. And the other question was, do you have a most innovative leader that we've never heard of?

These were hard. These are hard questions. I'm not sure she likes you. Maybe the answer to that is Susan. You may have heard of him, but I would say Darren Murph is a leader on remote work. He's the head of remote at GitLab. He was probably one of the first to have that title in the company head of remote and now you see that like flourishing in companies um head of dynamic work was just a new title that

octa um created like last week um and you see a lot of more companies now having head of remote like a facebook actually just created one as well um And I think that's very telling about the transformation that is happening in a company. And it's an amazing kind of title because the whole goal of that person is, Darren compares that title to chief diversity officer. The whole point is that you are in the intersection between ops and people and real estate.

And your goal is to make sure that you are creating inclusive policies so that your employees have the same experience at work wherever they live. And so that means, you know, if you live in a studio and you want to be remote, like how can the company support you? If you want to go to the office five days a week,

how can the company support you? And how can we make sure that those two people have a similar experience at work? Because that's typically very different, right? It's a very challenging role. And I think it's amazing that large companies are going in that direction and reshaping completely how we work and treat employees. Yes, I think that's a really good point. And I hope it continues because it makes sense to start working more in our neighborhoods

and less far away. Christelle, it's been wonderful to talk to you. Do you have any thoughts you'd like to leave us with? I would encourage engineers to go down the tech for social good type of road um i think that's uh it's been very exciting for me and your question about how did i go from like

engineering to um entrepreneur i think was actually very natural for me and i am i have a lot of friends that can fit in that category and they're need a little push to go down that road. And I think engineers have a lot to offer in terms of innovation and entrepreneurship. Our guest has been Christelle Rohat, CEO and co-founder of Kodi. Thanks, Christelle. Thank you. Thanks a lot for your time.

Thank you to Christopher for producing and co-hosting. Thank you to Susan Lovegreen at the Second Harvest Food Bank for connecting me with Christelle. And thank you for listening. You can always contact us at show at embedded.fm or hit the contact link on embedded.fm. And now a thought to leave you with. Speaking of Second Harvest Food Bank, since COVID started, food distribution has doubled. For the Santa Cruz Second Harvest Food Bank, every dollar you give them is for healthy meals because they have wholesale purchasing power. And they work with partners and programs throughout the county.

I'm not saying you should donate to them, but you should find your local and make sure that the kids in your neighborhood, in your community, have enough to eat.