Convene’s Ryan Simonetti on Premium Workspaces, IRL Experiences & the Future of Business Travel

I love it.

You know, it's interesting.

The hospitality portfolio makes all the sense in the world to me.

You know, you've got, you know, especially on the high end, you know, you command way more price per square foot, you know, with transient rent, you know, hotel stays with people are booking, you know, just for a few nights or a few days.

And especially if you can keep your occupancy high.

Office and co-working has had its ups and downs.

Obviously, with the pandemic, the re-dispersion of people across the country and across the world as digital nomads, people not wanting to come back to an office, but employers really seeing the value of having their people together and the cohesion that comes from, you know, people being able to bounce ideas off each other.

But then there's also this, you know, kind of more new firms and entrepreneurism happening than any other time.

And then also, With the rise of AI, conferences have just absolutely exploded.

There's never been more opportunities to go and fly to some part of the world and immerse yourself into a particular topic and meet colleagues.

It seems like you guys are kind of converging on a lot of different trends.

and kind of riding those waves in a way that's very interesting.

I'd be curious if you could maybe talk about some of the trends that you've seen across.

Maybe we don't have to buy it off all of those at once, but maybe pick a few of those and kind of talk about how you guys have been riding those waves.

Yeah.

And look, one of the things as an entrepreneur and I think a founder is pattern recognition and trying to get a sense for what are some of the trends.

where's the world going and ultimately what opportunity does that create? And if you look at even since the origin of the business, you know, the pattern that we identified was that lifestyle as a movement was going to move across asset class, that brand and experiences were going to become, I think, increasingly important.

And there was a real opportunity vis-a-vis creating these types of third spaces, not work, not home, not the hotel I stay in, and really use that as a place to bring people together.

Our mission since day one is to create the places and experience that physically bring people together, whether that's a small meeting, a large conference, a huge social event, or your office or a coworking space.

We thought that there was an opportunity to build both spaces and experiences in a brand that you could ultimately do that.

The only difference between then is now is we have multiple brands.

Those brands speak to different types of gathering or use cases across the portfolio.

I think a couple of trends that are worth calling out that you started to mention, you know, obviously the lines between work life travel continue to blend a lot of that from technology and hybrid and flexible work.

We also see entrepreneurship, I think, generally speaking, on the rise.

You know, if you look at AI, there's no doubt that there will be job displacement as an extension of that.