#305 Malte Koeditz, Founder spaciv: How to create the perfect office with ai

·52 min·4 clips

Malte Koeditz claims most companies don't know what their ideal office is—and his AI startup is solving it.

1. New Work Chat host Gabriel interviews Malte Köditz, founder of spaciv, a Munich-based proptech startup that uses AI to calculate ideal office space configurations from HR personnel data. 2. Malte is an architect by training who specialized in office space strategy consulting at a Munich architecture firm before founding spaciv in late 2019. 3. The episode's core argument is that most companies do not know what their ideal office is, that traditional consulting processes produce opinions rather than data, and that AI-based individual user-need modeling can provide defensible, precise recommendations. 4. Malte founded spaciv in January 2020 after resigning from his architecture employer in late 2019, planning to use his notice period to build early momentum. 5. COVID hit in March 2020 while Malte was on ski vacation in South Tyrol, making him one of the first people in lockdown; he describes the emotional range of that period as 'very different emotions' including moments of self-doubt but also quickly seeing the potential. 6. An early customer had just completed a multi-hundred-person workshop process to plan their office needs — all results had to be discarded the moment lockdown began — which became spaciv's first concrete proof of market need for a dynamic digital solution. 7. Traditional office consulting processes, as Malte describes them, use workshops, interviews, and flip charts to collect stakeholder opinions, but the resulting information is difficult to defend when decision-makers override it with intuition or cost preferences. 8. Spaciv's approach imports HR personnel data so every position is modeled in the system, analyzes each role's office usage patterns (frequency, activity types, meeting sizes), and uses an AI engine to calculate an individual surface program per employee. 9. Individual surface programs aggregate upward to produce company-wide and location-level recommendations, with a unique feature that the calculation is person-specific rather than applying average assumptions. 10. The system can also simulate future scenarios — for example, what space is required if employees return five days per week — which matters because real estate decisions typically lock in for years, not months. 11. Malte distinguishes two main customer orientations: area optimization (reducing total space footprint and costs) and experience optimization (improving employee outcomes regardless of cost), and notes that in Germany the former typically dominates. 12. Miro, the online whiteboard company, is spaciv's leading case study: they ran a 2,500-employee Global Workstyle Study, threw out all prior assumptions, and implemented location-specific solutions including office relocations, acoustic interventions, and free lunch programs. 13. Miro proved a chain of correlations: better offices drive higher employee presence, and higher presence correlates with faster product releases — making office investment a top-line business case rather than a pure cost. 14. Malte notes that very few companies are as data-driven about office decisions as Miro, and that most organizations have not measured soft factors like experience or community at all. 15. On sustainability, Malte reveals that despite asking potential customers for 1-2 years to rank cost, experience, and sustainability in priority order, not one has ever named sustainability first. 16. He notes that the built environment accounts for 40% of global CO2 emissions, and argues that optimizing existing office space for efficient use is a free CO2 reduction lever because it reduces resource demand while also saving money. 17. Malte discusses spaciv's pilot projects that transfer the office space methodology to production and factory floor areas, representing a potential expansion beyond co-working and corporate offices. 18. The episode is conversational and technically detailed, with Gabriel asking practice-focused questions and Malte answering with client examples and system mechanics; the tone is thoughtful and occasionally self-critical about industry limitations. 19. Corporate real estate managers, HR leaders managing hybrid work policies, and founders building in proptech or future-of-work would find the most direct value. 20. Listeners seeking high-level trend discussion rather than specific technical and case-study depth would find this episode more detailed than they need.

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