Downtown recovery index?
Berkeley Haas turns 125; SkyDeck Demo Day
Friends - Happy Friday. It’s been a whirlwind, an everything-everywhere-all-at-once stretch. Visits to the Bay Area certainly seem to have picked up, as have event programming.
In successive September weeks, San Francisco Moscone Center hosted Dreamforce, and then TechCrunch Disrupt, and it was wonderful to see people out and about, not just for tech conferences, but for the ballgame in SoMA. I happened to be in the vicinity of Salesforce Tower twice during Dreamforce, including on a game day at PacBell AT&T Oracle Park. It almost felt like it did, say, in 2002, when I was working in the area of Third & Brannan during the recovery from the dot-com crash. (Hence the title of this post, which is prompted by a reunion with Clusters 2022 student Daniel Huang, who contributed to Prof Karen Chappel’s Downtown Recovery Index. Daniel, great to see you!)
Still, as we discussed in Clusters class this week, Dreamforce turnout was a fraction of its pre-pandemic self. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff didn’t mince words.
The comment was timely - in Clusters class we discussed seed companies and anchor companies, with guest speaker Daniel Witt, VP State and Local with Lucid Motors. Many thanks to Daniel for joining us for the third consecutive year.
While the examples I provided measure an anchor company in terms of share of local employment or local GDP (e.g. Intel in Oregon, Qualcomm in San Diego), the term has an association of stewardship and a two-way relationship between city and employer, and Benioff’s comments are within scope of that definition.
Some more measureables:
BART ridership in August 2023 was at a 12-month high, and I suspect that will be higher in September given back-to-school and the above industry events. It has been nice to ride some of the new BART cars. That said, ridership remains at 42% of pre-Covid levels.
Emplanements at SFO, both domestic and international, are up year on year (data through July 2023 - looking forward to the September data set).
On a national level, the August 2023 sample (US, N=147,421) from WFH Research estimated that 28.1% of paid workdays took place at home.
WFH (Barrero, Bloom et al), August 2023
On a more qualitative note: a trip to the WeWork (floor 36 in a city with not many high-rises) in Salesforce Tower brought a reminder - San Francisco really can be breathtaking. Reason enough to come into the office!
Last week, Berkeley Haas celebrated its 125th anniversary of educating business leaders to challenge the status quo.
The Defining Principles may have been codified later, but one can say they made explicit what had been implicit, and we are better for that. Happy birthday to Berkeley Haas! Here’s to the next 125 years.
Last but not least - it was a pleasure to attend Demo Day for Batch 16 at Berkeley SkyDeck this week. This fall’s event featured 24 SkyDeck-accelerated startups, some of whom I’ve had the pleasure to meet during mentor sessions. The event coincided with an LP Day held on the Berkeley campus. Congratulations to the startups and the SkyDeck team!
Your Berkeley SkyDeck team
Next post - research on Open RAN.
Onward and upward!
Jon