Saïd Business School Alum’s Venture Transforms How Companies Meet
An MBA alumnus from Oxford University’s Saïd Business School recently launched an innovative company that provides unique meeting spaces for businesses.
Julian Jost founded Spacebase in early 2015, which he describes as “the first global peer-to-peer marketplace for workshop and meeting spaces.” The company is based in Berlin and provides meeting locations in Europe, as well as in cities such as Tel Aviv, Cape Town and Hong Kong.
Jost and his partner and friend Jan Hoffman-Keining are former strategic consultants. They observed a trend in the business world of companies investing valuable time and money conducting conventional meetings on their own premises or in conference spaces in hotels. They discovered that the average employee spends 31 hours a month in meetings, and in the United States, this added up to $106 billion in expenditures for companies.
“We offer a new approach to traditional business meetings,” Jost said during a recent interview. “Spacebase enables companies to hold their meetings in unique spaces, such as an old theatre in Amsterdam, an indoor farm in Berlin or even a boxing ring in Munich, which allows them to reinvigorate their staff and find new and unexpected solutions and ideas. Plus our venues often offer a cheaper alternative to traditional spaces, such as hotel conference rooms.”
Jost and Hoffman-Keining developed their business model based upon elements of the sharing economy. “The idea that a venture can create collaboration between different stakeholders and offer a service that meets all of the competing demands of the stakeholders through simple but effective processes made complete sense to me,” said Jost.
About the Author
Maggie Boccella
Maggie Boccella, a lifelong resident of Philadelphia, is a freelance writer, artist and photographer. She has consulted on various film and multimedia projects, and she also serves as a juror for the city's annual LGBTQIA Film Festival.
