Our very own Tom Watson, CTO and co-founder of HubbleHQ, spoke to NASDAQ live at the London TechDay on 27th October 2016.
Catch him discussing how HubbleHQ is disrupting the old-fashioned office space industry using technology, London co-working trends, and 2016 milestones for HubbleHQ.
Ashley: Live from London TechDay, we are here with another amazing company, we’ve got Tom from HubbleHQ. Thanks for coming on the show! So please tell us a little about your company, I recall hearing about it and I think everyone is really excited, can you just tell us a bit about HubbleHQ and what it does?
Tom: Sure! We’re an online marketplace for office space. We help startups and small-to-medium sized business to find space in London. And that could be space such as co-working space, a serviced office like WeWork or a big leased space. Or even, if you have spare desks in your company, we help filling those too.
Ashley: That’s excellent. So have long have you guys been around?
Tom: We have been around for two and a half years now so we’re approaching seventeen people.
Ashley: Are you guys headquartered in London? Where are the customers coming from?
Tom: Yeah, we’re headquartered in London and that’s our main base. Actually London is a huge market! There’s so much office space here and so many companies, so we’re still cracking that market. But hopefully we’ll expand out of London at some point in the future.
Ashley: You mentioned WeWork and when you were describing the business I was wondering, how are you different than WeWork?
Tom: WeWork are actually a customer of ours. WeWork are a provider and we’re the aggregation. We aggregate people like them but also other co-working spaces and serviced offices.
Ashley: Got it. So as we wrap up on 2016, what are some of the major milestones you guys have achieved this year?
Tom: What we are trying to do is really to use tech more smartly in our industry. We’re starting to really experiment and we’ve been exploring how we can leverage tech to automate a lot of the manual processes that are very traditionally in this industry. We’ve been doing a lot of that in the background which often isn’t obvious on our search platform but what it is enabling us to do is make really smart matches between companies and offices. We are matching more and more businesses every day.
Ashley: It sounds like there are some really cool algorithms in the background to match and connect all dots?
Tom: That sort of thing yeah
Ashley: So what are you really hoping to do next year in addition to the milestones you guys have already achieved?
Tom: We are trying to seek out bigger businesses. We’re pretty well known in the startup and small businesses atmosphere but actually we want to start helping larger businesses [too]. So companies are 50-100 people big and using our technology to do the smart matching.
Ashley: So you said you’ve been focussed on some of the smaller companies. Do you work with any of the companies in the Silicon Roundabout? Is that a big area and market for you presently?
Tom: Yeah, Silicon Roundabout and Shoreditch are really popular. But surprisingly we’re seeing a lot more startups move to central and west. Often it’s a case of companies moving where their customer are, so you’ll see a lot of Fintech companies in Canary Wharf etc. So even though Shoreditch is traditionally very popular, it’s actually on par with a lot of the other areas in London.
Ashley: People who want get in touch, what should they do?
Tom: You can find us @Hubble or at hubblehq.com and we’ll be happy to help!
Ashley: Well Tom, thank you so much for coming on the show today and best of luck!
