The northern FiDI now boasts another co-working space: HatchTodaySF, which opened last week at 100 Broadway. The 23,000-square-foot space includes 32 private offices and 100 dedicated open desks on four floors, with capacity for 190 workers.
Tenants include venture capital firms, an advertising agency, software engineers, a real estate developer and a textile company, and more are on the way, says Susan Pelosi, director of HatchTodaySF. Unlike some companies that only rent desks by the day, HatchTodaySF requires workers to sign leases for a minimum of three months.
Pelosi (yes, she's related to Nancy, who's her sister-in-law) and her stepson, Laurence Pelosi, are two of the five founders of the company, which began in SoMa in 2011. The others are Richie Goldman, a cofounder of Men's Wearhouse; Chris Gruwell, president of Platinum Advisors; and Rahul Prakash, who's founded several startups and is now a venture capitalist.
HatchTodaySF has all of the typical amenities you'd expect from a work share space: conference rooms, a fully stocked kitchen, lockers, and networking proximity with other startups. But it also comes with a pièce de résistance—a bar designed and staffed by the Bourbon & Branch folks, with complimentary happy hours.
Compared to co-working-crazed SoMa, the northern FiDi hasn't been as much of a draw for these types of spaces. (There are a few in the area, including Regus San Francisco at 75 Broadway and The Vault at 415 Jackson) But the neighborhood is getting more desirable for tech types, says Pelosi, citing the more genteel feel lent by the parks, waterfront, and older brick buildings.
The workers "love being near the water. They depart and go to lunch and go walking," she says. "They love the calmness of the area. It's busy, yet it's calm. There's a bit more of a frenetic feeling in SoMa."
The Broadway HatchToday is actually the company's third outpost; the first debuted in 2011 at 625 Second St. in SoMa. (It has since closed to allow the company to open its new space on Broadway.) The second HatchToday office, also in SoMa, was launched in 2012 at 645 Harrison St.
"We loved SoMa and we still do," says Pelosi, admitting that the team was initially unsure as to whether startups would be willing to migrate to the northern FiDi. But she says it's worked out, thanks to the convenience factor for workers coming from the East Bay, western San Francisco or Marin. (The Broadway location is much closer to the Embarcadero BART/Muni station than the Harrison location.) The Off the Grid food trucks lined up on Front and Vallejo on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays are also a big draw.
In the end, finding tenants was no problem. "It was enormously popular," says Pelosi. "It was all word of mouth. We didn't do any advertising at all." A few tenants even transferred from the Harrison Street HatchTodaySF. Pelosi says that the Broadway building had been empty for about seven or eight years before construction began in April. Some final touches are yet to be added, but as of June 1st, the building is occupied and ready for business.
Each HatchTodaySF has a theme; the one on Harrison, formerly home to Fox Interactive, came with a hand-painted Star Wars mural on the conference room wall, so the company decided to go with that theme. At the now-closed Second Street locations, all of the conference rooms were named after places tagged by graffiti artist Banksy.
The new space's theme is "early San Francisco," with conference rooms named after the Long Wharf, Farallon, Angel Island and other places that existed at the city's founding. The building also has an early San Francisco history of its own: as noted by the above plaque, it sits on the site of the city's first wharf.
