The following interview is a conversation we had with Christelle Rohaut, CEO of Codi, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $23 Million Raised to Power the Future of Modern Workspace Solutions
Christelle Rohaut
Thanks, Brett. I’m very excited.
Brett
Yeah. So let’s begin with just a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Christelle Rohaut
Sure. So, as you probably noticed, I’m French and I’m an urban planner and environmental engineer by training. I’ve always been obsessed with how to make cities a better place to work and live in. And I’m the CEO and co founder of Cody.
Brett
And when did you move to the US from France?
Christelle Rohaut
Seven years ago.
Brett
What was that like? Was that a scary move to make or what was going on inside your head as you made that move?
Christelle Rohaut
Yeah, I came for a master’s in city planning at UC Berkeley, so came for school, did not intend to stay more than two years, but seven years later, I’m still here. Yeah. So I guess I love it.
Brett
Nice. Do you ever see yourself going back to France or the Bay Area going to be home?
Christelle Rohaut
I think I would go back to France for family reasons, but yeah, the Bay Area is an amazing place to study, to create a company for innovation. I’ve never seen a place like this, and so it’s a bit of a like it’s going to be hard to leave, but I think ultimately for my family, at some point I’ll probably go back to France.
Brett
Yeah, it makes sense. I think if you just view the worlds in the lens of the professional perspective, SF and the Bay Area is the absolute best place to be. But if you view it from the lens of family and other reasons, it’s hard to say if this is really the best place to be.
Christelle Rohaut
Yeah, I think you can be very happy, like I had like two years ago, and so I’m growing my own family here, but just living on a different continent with 9 hours of difference with my whole family living in France, that’s more the difficulty. But I think San Francisco is a beautiful city and I love living here.
Brett
Yeah, totally agree. Now, a few questions that we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick as a founder and entrepreneur. First one is what CEO, founder do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Christelle Rohaut
Yes, I think that one is an easy one. For me, it’s always been Brian Chesky, the founder of, cody was heavily inspired by like, we started using homes as our workspaces, so I can tell you all about it later. But he’s always been an inspiration, because also what I like about him is that he’s a designer by training. So a lot of the founders that people talk about, like Zuckerberg and Co, they were more engineers. And I think it’s designers are kind of underrated. They have amazing brains, and the way they think about how to solve issues and problems are really a really creative way of designing solutions, which I think A, B and B is, like, the perfect example of this. It’s a very creative solution to an issue. I love the brand that he built, how powerful it is, and his continued focus on community and hospitality.
Brett
Yeah, I’ve watched a lot of his talks on YouTube, and he’s so good. And his whole perspective on the world, I think, is fascinating. And I also just find it fascinating when you compare Brian Chesky to Travis Kalanick at Know. They were both very disruptive companies. They both did require a lot of regulatory change. But Uber came in very aggressively. And I think Brian Chesky and Airbnb came in not so aggressively, but in the end, they have been very successful. They have gotten laws to be changed, but they showed that you can disrupt things and change industries, I think, without causing a lot of chaos and without creating a lot of enemies, which Uber seemed to do in a lot of cases.
Christelle Rohaut
Yeah, I agree with your perspective.
Brett
And what about books? Is there a specific book that’s had a major impact on you as a founder? And this can be a classic business book or just a personal book that influenced how you think about the world?
Christelle Rohaut
Yeah, I think there are two books, really. One more for personal growth and another one for more professional or shaped my idea of the world. The one that influenced me as a founder was the Ellen Markothler Foundation book called A New Dynamic effective Business in Circular Economy. I was a fellow at the Ellen MacArthur Foundation on circular economies, and that’s really how I got into coding. It was more of a research project initially. And then the second book that’s more like, for personal growth, it was Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.
Brett
Nice. I haven’t heard of the first one. The second one I’ve read. That’s a great classic. Have you read the book? The Tower Broker? The story of Robert Moses.
Christelle Rohaut
Oh, I know Robert Moses from what he did to New York City and all his urban planning influences. But I haven’t read the book.
Brett
Yeah, someone else was just on, and they’re from the urban planning space, and they convinced me to get this book. And it sounded really cool. It’s like the rise and fall of Robert Moses. And I said, okay, I’ll get it. I ordered it and it’s like 1200 pages long, so I’m still deciding if I’m going to embark on it. But I’ve heard it’s an incredible book and I’ve heard Robert Moses is a rather interesting person.
Christelle Rohaut
Yes. For urban planning books, I would recommend The Life and Death of Great American Cities. It’s a really good one at the same time than Robert Moss’s. But the other side of it, like The Urban Planner, that was more like Bottom Up, Jane Jacobs, and she was very respected in urban planning.
Brett
Nice. I’ll have to check that out. I’ve somehow fallen in this rabbit hole of urban planning and now it seems to be everywhere. I think I’ve talked with five or six founders who’ve talked about urban planning in the last three weeks, which is pretty funny.
Christelle Rohaut
Amazing.
Brett
Now let’s talk about Cody. So can you take us back to the early days and let’s dive into the origin story?
Christelle Rohaut
Sure. So it’s really connected to me arriving in the US. I think when I came here, it was for masters in city planning, as I mentioned. So I was kind of going through that cultural shock of living in the US. City, coming from Europe and also studying how cities work. And it kind of really shocked me in the sense of I’m not used to the way cities are designed here. It’s very different from what I’m used in Europe. Here you have more like small commercially zoned downtown where all the offices are, and then you have very large residentially zoned neighborhoods where everybody lives. In Europe, it’s more mixed use neighborhoods where you have both kind of mixed. And here in the US, the problem, the challenges that this design creates, the zoning issue creates, is massive commutes every day from one zone to the other, with everyone kind of packed downtown during the day while neighborhoods are sitting empty.
Christelle Rohaut
And so I’m talking about this like back in 20, 19, 18 actually, when I was at school, and I couldn’t wrap my head around how inefficient that was. And so I studied a fellowship with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation on circular economies and how trying to study how we can share resources and spaces better at the local scale. And that led me to think we can bring workspaces closer to where people live instead of making them commute far, and that would reduce carbon emissions and boost local economies and revitalizes our neighborhoods. And that’s really how Cody was born. And back then, in 2019, our first model was actually using homes during the day that were sitting empty as a parking space for remote workers in the neighborhoods. It evolved quite a bit over the past two years because of the pandemic and other factors. The market quite changed drastically for real estate, but we’re still on the same mission of decentralizing access to workspaces and making having a space a lot easier than it is today.
Brett
And can you talk with us a little bit about what the pandemic was like for you? I have to imagine that did require some pretty big shifts, and that must have been a pretty stressful time as a founder. So take us back to those days. What was that like?
Christelle Rohaut
Well, when you operate a physical business, like physical locations, it was rough because shelter in place made us shut down all our locations for a little while and then even when were open, people were worried about getting the virus right. There was no vaccine and everything, so the business kind of survived for a year and a half with no real product market fit because of heavily impacted by the Pandemic. But the good thing though, was the acceleration towards workplace flexibility. We’ve always been about hybrid work, remote work, decentralized work, and more than ever, that was like the frontline topic for all companies and for the whole world discovered remote work, basically. So it was both exciting from kind of a long term standpoint and rough from a short term standpoint in terms of operating the business. We ultimately had to pivot quite a couple of times and ended up partnering with commercial landlords and brokers who had a lot of vacancy across the city to kind of make those spaces available for companies and people who wanted just to have access to spaces on a partial week base.
Brett
And what’s the business model like then today? Is it a marketplace? Are you connecting people who have excess space with people who need space? Or what’s the business model behind it?
Christelle Rohaut
Yeah, I think you can define Cody as like the office as a service platform or like a managed marketplace. So we do connect companies who want flexibility, ease, speed with spaces that are underutilized across the city. But then we do manage the spaces. So we make it first a match, offering the most flexible terms on the market, like six month contracts typically, and you can start with just one day a week, if that’s what your workplace policy is. But then it’s kind of like the WeWork model of you come in and you have nothing to figure out. It’s moving ready, it’s managed, you have the cleaning, the coffee, you don’t have to worry about anything. It’s really kind of outsourced office management after you move in.
Brett
Nice. That’s super interesting. And are there any numbers or metrics that you can share that just highlight some of the growth and traction that you’ve seen?
Christelle Rohaut
Yeah, so when we pivoted the business towards getting spaces that were commercial, that was back in the fall of 2021, so like a year and a half ago. And since then we grew by Ten X, our customer base.
Brett
Wow. And what do you think you’ve done right? That’s obviously super impressive growth. What did you do right in this whole thing, do you think?
Christelle Rohaut
I think it’s just as a founder as a company, staying focused on solving a problem and not being too in love with a solution. I was very much in love with residential spaces and utilizing that as a workspace, but there was no product market fit there. And the problem though, remained the same. How can people have access to spaces where they need it, when they need it? And it’s just like staying focused on that and then listening and being very aware of where the market is going. What’s the reality for landlords? What’s the reality for customers? What are the alternatives? And iterating as much as we could to find that right product market fit. I think that’s the biggest learning.
Brett
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Christelle Rohaut
Today we’re completely b. Two b. So it’s only companies who can use Cody? No individuals like no freelancers? I mean, if you sole business owner, potentially. But we’re really seeing Cody used by companies that have at least like ten people all the way. Our bread and butter though, is like a fast growing company that has around 50 folks, I would say.
Brett
Got it. And do they normally stay on for a long period of time? Or when someone uses Cody, is it meant to kind of fill the space in between when they can find a long term office lease?
Christelle Rohaut
I do not believe in a long term office lease. I think that’s like part of the past. It’s ancient history, in my opinion. There’s really no reason why a business would want to have that type of risk and commitment. Honestly, what we do is we offer the same type of product. It’s an office, you can customize it’s yours on the days you want it. And if you want to do full time, it’s full time access. But you don’t have all the hassle and headache of going through brokers and landlords and the 15 page lease and the five year commitment, not knowing what your business is going to be in one year. And you know, that type of commitment, it killed a lot of companies during the pandemic because it’s not appropriate, the risk is way too high. It’s very landlord friendly, it’s not tenant friendly.
Christelle Rohaut
So we really focus on making the office accessible, flexible, easy, outsourced, turnkey and then whenever the business needs to outgrow their space or downsize, they can still do that through us because we are marketplace. So we have a lot more spaces in the network. So our goal is to retain the company as long as they want to. For now, we’re not seeing a moment of time where the company go to get their own lease. It may evolve in the future. What we’re seeing more is like people typically come out of a rework and then come to Cody when they outgrow the co working situation. So there’s kind of a minimum size that we’re seeing to get into Cody to have a need to have your private space instead of a co working space. I don’t see the ceiling quite yet.
Brett
That makes sense. And on the topic of long term leases, I of course agree it’s insane that there’s startups that have been around for one year and they need to sign a five year lease. That just seems very difficult to manage. But on the other side, I can also see that the commercial landlords, they like long term leases and they want long term leases. So how do you balance that? I’m sure that they want a long term lease. What are those conversations like with commercial landlords? And are they open to these types of things or do they really still want that long term lease there?
Christelle Rohaut
It’s a great question. I think the beauty of today is that demand got the power back, kind of. It’s a demand supply problem like any other marketplace. But if all the demand want a one year term, supply doesn’t have a choice. And that’s exactly what we’re seeing. And that’s why the vacancy rates are so high because offering a five year lease is no longer in demand. There’s no demand for that. The demand is for one year. And so if the Nano wants to make revenue, they kind of have to adapt to what the demand wants, right, what companies want. That’s fascinating because the past two years have been quite a shock for commercial real estate and I don’t think it will ever go back. It’s like a permanent shock. Like companies have permanently decided to go hybrid or go remote or have this new way of working.
Christelle Rohaut
And that’s really influenced not just by the CEO who decides top down to get an office or not. It’s really influenced and impacted by every employee’s behavior of how they want to work and where they want to go. So it’s a really fascinating time. We partner with landlords, but we’re trying to bridge that gap between what companies want and what landlords used to want, which is no longer really relevant. But in my opinion, it’s not a bad thing because at the end of the day, the landlords, if they have a one year commitment, they can readjust the rent every year. It’s less risk of people defaulting because one year typically companies will not default. But five years, a lot of landlords got burned through the pandemic with a lot of tenants defaulting, which creates legal challenges, overheads, a lot of expenses on the landlord side, and they can avoid all of that with the flexibility of short term leases.
Brett
That makes a lot of sense. And I can see that where the commercial landlords do like long term leases, but the market says otherwise now. So even if they like that, which is understandable, that’s just not the reality of the market today. And it makes sense that’s probably never going to be the reality, at least for a very long time. It seems like that’s not going to flip. Now. I saw this on Twitter. I think it was David Sachs. But they had tweeted that they were being offered office space in maybe it was SF or somewhere in Silicon Valley, and they were being offered the same rate as 2008. Something along those lines, which I thought was just mind blowing at the rates have fallen that low.
Christelle Rohaut
Yeah, it’s probably an all time low in terms of vacancy rates in San Francisco, especially in downtown. But the fascinating thing from an urban planning standpoint is that we’re seeing a shift in geography for demand, right? I think there’s higher demand in neighborhoods outside of downtown. There’s still demand for downtown, but there used to be zero demand outside of downtown, and now those neighborhoods actually have a shot at being lively and active during the week and during the day because a lot of people live there and they want to have an office there. They don’t want to have an office downtown. And so I think it’s actually very healthy because it helps the city kind of decentralize that office concentration, and it helps all the neighborhoods being revitalized and have an actual kind of life during the week.
Brett
And the companies that are using the platform and doing these more flexible short term leases, are they being punished for doing so with much higher fees? Like just for example, on the personal side, if I go look at renting an airbnb in New York City and doing that for a month, that’s way more expensive than if I were to go and get a twelve month lease in New York City. So is it similar there? Are they paying a big premium for that flexibility?
Christelle Rohaut
There is a premium, but it’s not just the flexibility, it’s also the management piece. When you get a direct lease or sublease, you think only on the base rent, right? But then you have utilities and then the deposits and all the upfront cost of purchasing furniture, and then cleaning and coffee and tea. And then typically that’s way too much work for a CEO. So you’re like, okay, I need an office manager. And that’s like one hundred k a year. There’s a lot of hidden costs and fees in running your own office, but also the process itself with the brokers and the landlords. It costumes so much time, it requires legal advice, so it requires legal fees which is super expensive. And so all these things, these are not really fought through especially by early stage companies who want to have for the first time their first office and it’s something that they need to take into account.
Christelle Rohaut
And I do think ultimately when you compare apples to apples, when you add all those fees, cody is actually more cost effective and less risky.
Brett
Got it. That makes a lot of sense. And are there any customer success stories or case studies that you can talk like? I don’t know if you’re able to speak about Airbyte, but we had Michelle the CEO on the podcast a few weeks ago so maybe talk about them or just any of your customers to help visualize what it looks like when they’re using your source.
Christelle Rohaut
Yeah, so Airbite is actually a really good example. So they have a very fascinating use case because they are publicly like a remote first company but they do use a Cody space full time here in San Francisco. I don’t think that mandates any days in the office so it remains very flexible for employees. But they do have that hub kind of model and we’re seeing that a lot more where companies that hit a certain threshold in terms of employee density, like you have more than ten people somewhere, they start to have a hub. Right. They want to have kind of a work home that people can go to whether that’s a couple of days a week or just full time if you have enough people justify that. And I think that’s why I decided to have a space with us and it’s going yeah, and we’ll see if they expand.
Christelle Rohaut
I think they’re starting to have more people in New York City. So similarly we have other clients that have grown from a part time hub in just San Francisco to then wanting a full time hub in New York City because that’s where they had most people after having period of time. And so it’s fascinating to see that hub and spoke model developed by startups right now.
Brett
Nice. That’s super interesting. And you must have such an interesting inside look at what the future office space is going to look like right? Because of these companies that you’re working with and because of what you do. I feel like you must have such an interesting perspective there.
Christelle Rohaut
I hope.
Brett
So what do you think that perfect future looks like? Or if we just zoom out and look at the future office space, how would you define that? Like five years from today, what’s the office space going to look like for an average company or let’s say like an average tech company to make it easy?
Christelle Rohaut
Yeah, I mean, I would generalize to any industries outside of many, probably manufacturing and those type of folks. But I think the future office is hybrid, like a fractional office. I think the mainstream behavior will be to have a twice a week hub, like twice a week office space basically. And the other days it’s a different company using the space. And then I don’t see the five year commitment coming any back. So kind of like flexible terms, like you commit for six months, maybe a year if you have that type of runway, and you lock the space Monday, Tuesday for your team and you come back like twice a week. I think also a lot off sites on top of that, companies are typically even if they have hubs, like they are distributed, so they have more employees in other parts of the country. And sometimes these employees are by themselves in that city.
Christelle Rohaut
And so we’re seeing office space being utilized for that regular twice a week use. But also the bigger offices utilize only for offsites where the whole company comes in for just a week once a quarter. And that’s a new novel way for landlords to generate revenue for their space.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. That’s super interesting. Now let’s talk about Cody here for the final question. So let’s zoom out into the future. What does the company look like three to five years from today?
Christelle Rohaut
Yeah, three to five years from today. I want Cody to be in more markets, right? So like market expansion would be something. Right now we are focused on the SFB area in New York City and we’re expanding with our clients. But I would assume that in three to five years, we are in multiple countries potentially. And I’m really bullish about the Timeshare office model where company A gets a space a couple of days a week and company B the other days. And so I would hope that this model would be mainstream and would be our core product.
Brett
Nice. That’s amazing. Well, we are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap here before we do. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build, where should they go, Cody.com?
Christelle Rohaut
For just the company updates and then for myself. Come on LinkedIn. I’m pretty active there. I post almost every week. So, yeah, I would love also people are free to DM me directly there.
Brett
Awesome. Thank you so much for coming on, sharing your story and talking about everything that you’re doing and educating me on what the future office space is going to look like. This has been a super fun conversation and I’ve learned a lot and I’m rooting for your success and look forward to following along.
Christelle Rohaut
Thank you, Brett. I appreciate the conversation.
Brett
All right, take care. Thanks so much. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast. Visit frontlines.io podcast and for the latest this episode, search for category visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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