Impact of Covid in Real Estate - Interview with Tim Draper

Tim Draper
Founder
Draper Associates, DFJ & Draper Venture Networks

Tim Draper: I think commercial real estate's going to go through a real transformation. I think doing a poll - about half the people that are working are really enjoying working from home. The other half of the people are really angry and they really want to get back to work. What that means to me is there's half the demand that there was before for commercial real estate. Now that they've got this social distancing each of us will need more commercial real estate space to operate an efficient business in an office rather than remote.

I think that might all be temporary and I think in the final analysis we might look at this and say “you know the social distancing you know the the number of lives we've saved from before isn't as many as are going to be lost because of the loss of herd immunity and so maybe we're better off all hugging each other” and i'm not sure which way it's all going to go. At first you're going to have commercial real estate having to have the six foot rule, but I think that may go away and we all know being in the venture business or entrepreneur or media business that putting many people together in a dense situation creates much more creativity and much more innovation and much more progress than people who are separated by six feet or separated through zoom. The part I miss the most about working from work is the conferences - getting together with a lot of people, running into people, seeing new ideas and new thoughts, getting various points of view. All of that in addition to the physical thing. Being physically close, sharing energy. I think that's the thing i miss the most. The zoom calls have their own little thing though. There's a group of guys that get together and we all talk about once a week andI get a lot out of that that I might not have got gotten. It feels a little bit more like sitting around a campfire and that's not something I would do every week. I think there's some really good things that have happened and some really bad things that have happened from this.

VR is getting there, but with VR you're wearing this thing so if even if you have a 360 camera on you it shows you wearing this thing, so i think there has to be some sort of technology that captures your eyes and your expressions and then portrays them out in VR so I think it's coming but, it'll be a little while before that's around.