CCB: Welcome back to the ONEder Podcast, where design innovation meets the future of work. This is your host, CCB, and today's guest is Elena, last name, I will stumble, I am sorry, she's going say it for us. She's the founder and CEO of InSpace. And Elena's story arcs from a background in physics and a career in office furniture innovation to pioneering flexible tech-driven solutions for the hybrid workplace. Her journey has been shaped by a passion for reimagining how people interact with their offices, their spaces, lending technical know-how, entrepreneurial grit, and a human-centered vision. I think you're going to really enjoy this conversation as we explore Elena's insights on building smarter, more adaptive workplaces, the evolving nature of hybrid work and what is coming, and what it takes to lead with purpose in both technology and design. Welcome, Elena. Thank you for joining us.

Elena Beloshapkova: Thank you so much for having me and thank you so much for this wonderful introduction. I'll try to make the best impression.

CCB: I am certain that you will do that. I want to say we first met at an intimate gathering of some workplace industry folks in a conversation around the different trajectories that people and spaces are moving towards these days. And your background was so compelling, I knew you had to join us on the ONEder Podcast. So I'd love for you to share your personal journey. Like what inspired you to pivot from a physics prodigy into workplace innovation?

Elena Beloshapkova: It's definitely been a long journey. So I've started my career as a laser physicist. I have a degree in laser physics as well and business. And then I quickly realized that my passion was with changing the way people work all around the world. So, I started my corporate career in commercial real estate even before 2008, global financial crisis. Then the crisis happened. So I moved to construction, I've been building offices for companies like Google and Nokia, other Fortune 500 companies all around the world.

Then I became a business development director for an office furniture company. I opened one of their first offices and then I moved to a bigger role, and I was managing the entire team basically. And then when I was 24, I knew that, you know, it's time for me to start something of my own. And when I was 25, I've started my own company. That company quickly grew from a seven-person organization to a massive company. And yeah, we quickly went from zero to $2 million within the first year; we became profitable within the first month by signing Cisco as a customer . By year three we decided that it's time for us to start manufacturing our own furniture. By year five we won a 1.4 million square feet project that was the project of the year. I became businesswoman of the year that year and we went from again like just basic 10 production lines to manufacturing 85 different collections in five different countries.

And we were working on projects up to five million square feet, which are some of the biggest projects in the world. So that 10 years of me being the CEO and founder of that company really gave me access to one of the most fascinating office spaces in the world. And I'm so incredibly proud and lucky to be part of that journey. And as I was creating these beautiful, innovative spaces and working with the best architects in the world, like Herzog de Miron and Zaha Hadid, and the most fascinating customers, Fortune 100 companies, they realized that they needed toolkit, a software to actually manage these beautiful physical office spaces. So that's how InSpace was born. One of my customers, Cargill, came to me and they needed a solution like InSpace.

Elena Beloshapkova: And obviously, you know, I didn't have solution in place, but I was like, okay, sure. I will see what I can suggest and what I can offer. And back then there were a few leaders of that market. And I remember I contacted one of them and it took them four months to come up with a simple Excel spreadsheet, a commercial proposal that was like $200,000 for 200 desks.

And even though my customer, and they had a pretty you know significant budget, but they just, they didn't want to spend that much. And they also didn't want to, like they didn't see enough value from paying $200,000 for 200 desks. They told me that if they want to spend this budget, they would spend it on like Herman Miller shares or something. And I completely understood.

So that's exactly what we realized that A, there is a need for a solution like that. B, customers have budgets, but they're just not willing to spend that much on this little. And C, if the leader of the market doesn't have a solution in place, and if it takes you four months to come up with a proposal, you don't have a product. If the leader of this new market that was just emerging is not ready to sell to my customers, my favorite enterprise customers, it's time for me to build something of my own. And that's exactly how Inspace was born.

Again, we started the same way that I started with my innovative office furniture company. We started by covering the basics, such as desk booking, room booking, workplace analytics, then we've added visitor management. then we've added AI capabilities, then we've added conversational AI, then we've added workflows then we've added agentic AI and we launched the first agent on this market we were the first company that did it.

We not only did it the fastest than anyone else, we've also were able to get the 96 sometimes 99% adoption rate, which sounds absolutely incredible. And that's just something that I'm incredibly proud of and grateful that my team and me, we were able to accomplish that. And now customers all around the world in 18 different countries are using InSpace and we are helping them create a better employee experience to create better workplaces for end users. It just makes me very happy.

CCB: Okay, well, you pretty much covered the entire career of Elena, but I do want us to step back and go into a little bit more detail in some of these areas. So does your background in laser physics have any impact on the way that you look at the challenges that you see? That's one part of this question. And the second part of the question is, how do you find the right team members that have either the same vision or the complementary skills to help you deliver on your vision?

Elena Beloshapkova: Absolutely. So if you want to study something, study physics. Yeah, you can study a lot of things. I come from a family of physicists, my parents. You've had a chance to briefly see them on a previous call, my sisters, their husbands, like basically my entire family, we are physicists. And I would say that if you know physics, you understand how the world works. And then you can apply it to any field that you want. It can be aerospace and defense, or it can be, I don't know, agriculture. So there are so many, it can be computer software, it can be literally anything that you want to apply it, you need physics. Physics describes how world works. So I'm very lucky again that I had a chance to go to the best program, to the best university and studied. And now I do apply it. You know, one way or another

CCB: Where was that university?

Elena Beloshapkova: So that was back in, I was born in Latvia, but I went to the most competitive program in in Moscow.

CCB: Okay. And a lot of the work that you first started doing on what is now called InSpace did start previously on the other side of the pond. Is that correct?

Elena Beloshapkova: No, it's as we started when I spent seven months at Dartmouth, who were again gracious enough to offer me a phenomenal program where I could take any course from the first year of the business school or the second year of the business school. So by the time I arrived, i already had a successful career before. I had a successful business and I was already business woman of the year. So they offered me a program that allowed me to do market research and network and meet so many incredible classmates. And as soon as I was, I knew exactly what I'm going to build. I moved to Boston and we've started there. Recently, very, very recently, simply like literally last week, I finally fully moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. But the entire in-space journey happened on both coasts, East Coast and the West Coast.

CCB: Excellent. I'm sorry. i I thought I read an article in Forbes that had talked about some of the work previously.

Elena Beloshapkova: We used to have customers in many, many countries. Obviously, when the war started, we had to completely cut all the ties with Russia, which means that a lot of our customers just you know left Russia. And obviously we couldn't do any business with that country.

CCB: Right. So thank you for clarifying that. So the second part of the question was, how do you find the right teammates to work with you?

Elena Beloshapkova: Yeah, we love people who are very passionate, very independent, people who are... excited about what they do, who love working really hard and solve challenges and be extremely, extremely customer obsessive. We are always obsessing about the employee experience. We're all about like putting a place first and trying to look at how do we build the best workplace platform from their perspective.

That's exactly what leads to having this incredible adoption rate. So we are handpicking the most talented people who are interested in this field, who want to change how people work all around the world. And want to make sure that, again, they are talented, they're smart, they're independent, they love challenges, they love to find problems and go ahead and solve them. So these are the kind of people that we are always going to welcome in InSpace. And I'm so proud of my team. They are incredible. Couldn't be happier with with them.

CCB: Perfect. You started to address, and there's such a huge list of product features within Inspace, but I'd love for you to help the listeners understand core function and what sets it apart from those other competitors that you recognized didn't have the right solutions.

Elena Beloshapkova: Yeah, absolutely. There are so many workplace solutions, so many workplace platforms that are there on the market. And at first, they kind of look the same. Sometimes we work with customers and they have like 14 different solutions. So they have a lot of tools. And then we come in with a product that allows them to put in place in the center of everything. We have a unique way of making sure that employees, we're helping them with their day-to-day tasks, which leads to high adoption rate, which means that AI has three times more data points. Then at the end, workplace admins, they have three times higher quality of insights. than they would get with any other platform. Sometimes you have so many different, again, platforms. You have a lot of drop downs. It takes forever to book a desk, book a room, invite a visitor. You have to do it on all sorts of like different systems.

InSpace, you get essentially a very dedicated executive assistant that knows you on a deep personal level, knows what makes you as an individual more productive. What do you need from it to have a better workplace environment? So again, we're all different. Whatever makes me productive is not what's going to make you productive and vice versa. So some people need like a height adjustable desk and like four monitors. And some people just need like a good cup of coffee and quiet corner. We're all different. Some of us, we like to work in teams. Some of us, we like to work by themselves. Some of us, we require a lot of focus time and some people are very social. So again, we're all different and AI should know you on that level.

Think of Harvey Specter and Donna. So we are Donna for them, Harvey Specters all around the world. And we know, again, what makes them successful. And we're helping them. So again, we're helping employees. And because we're helping them so much, and because we are solving, again, like their day-to-day tasks or when it comes to basically anything that has to do with the office except their actual job, we're happy to help them with that. So imagine you are throwing an event for, in your beautiful showroom, you're throwing an event for a group of people, let's workplace leaders. So all that you need to do is type, I'm having, let's say, a lunch and learn with workplace leaders. And we will invite the right people. We know exactly who they are. If you're saying, hey, I'm going to invite Mike, we know which Mike I'm talking about.

We're going to send them in invites. we will make sure that they have the right instructions on how to get to the right space. We know that everything will be booked on their calendars. If that event requires like catering or cleaning or any equipment, it will be ordered automatically. So the agent will act as your teammate, will think of what needs to be done for that to happen, and will do that for you. And also will remind you, hmm, maybe you should do that. Or for example, like your boss will be in town, maybe you're going to schedule like one-on-one with that. So think of that again as a very helpful assistant that knows you, knows not just who's going to come to the office to meet you, but who's going to offer them the right cup of coffee and you know, just for you.

If you're having an event, we'll order lunches for everyone. We'll make sure that people who are allergic to peanuts will not get anything in their salad. So, there are a lot of things that kind of usually takes like 10 people to organize it. And here you just type, I'm having a lunch and learn and everything will be taken care of.

CCB: So that raises the question, how does that integrate with all the other systems within the organization?

Elena Beloshapkova: That's the best part. So in order for it to work the way that we envisioned, integrations will have to be set up properly, which is sometimes tricky because again, we work with large enterprises. Sometimes they have like, you know, 20 different access control systems and they all work differently and they all have like eight. you know, issues with their like APIs. So we have to deal with a load of issues. And because again, we've been doing this for quite a while, we know exactly how to work with them. We have most of the integrations already out of the box, which means it just takes like one click to integrate with all the major systems from Google, Microsoft products, to access control systems, to video conferencing tools, to cleaning, catering, employee benefits, like all of the things that you typically have on an enterprise level, you will immediately be able to connect to all of them.

It gets trickier when you work with smart buildings, because we see Inspace as essentially Jarvis for workplace. But instead of serving one Ironman, we are serving every individual employee. It's a system that connects to whatever you have already. And essentially, it is also an infrastructure for, let's say, delivery robots. It connects to all of your systems through direct-integration or through multiple ways. i'm not going to go too technical. But there are multiple ways how you want to get connected to all of your systems.

Elena Beloshapkova: And that level of precision, that's what allows you to have this really unique experience where you essentially talk to your office and the office knows you. You walk into the room and everything's set up for you the way you want. You probably heard of our AI receptionist as well. So we created our new product that welcomes and serves not just your employees, but also all of your guests and all of your visitors. So it knows exactly where they're going to have a meeting. It's going to show them exactly how to get there. It's going to know their favorite coffee order. It's going to offer them like refreshments and show them like you know how to get to, where is the Coca Cola.

So everything that they need to get the right visitor experience will be offered through InSpace. So it's like, think of that as a centralized system um that knows employees, guests on a personal level, and delivers them the best workplace visitor experience you can ever dream about.

CCB: Okay, I'm going to throw a little wrench here in the fact that our IT department has the largest firewallsI've ever seen in my life. There are, I can only imagine, challenges from many organizations that have high levels of security. So just talk, I know you're not going to be able to explain in great detail because none of us would understand, but how is that addressed on the highest level?

Elena Beloshapkova: Yeah, so it is important. Like sometimes when you work with enterprises, it's not about having you having the best product. It's also about having the safest product. And I'm happy to say that's one of the reasons why we win a lot of projects. And that's the reason why we decided that we should be enterprise-grade from the first day from the first customer. Our first ever customer was an enterprise client. Our second ever customer was an enterprise customer in Australia. Our fifth customer was government. So right now we work with...enterprises in all kinds of different sectors, including energy and government and like the Navy, you know, a lot of companies that cybersecurity for them is crucial. It's even more important than having cool features and making sure that, you know, it's AI remembers what kind of coffee you like.

Security is the key. There are a few ways how we make sure that it is set up properly. There are also a few ways how companies tell us how they want their data to be stored. Obviously, you know, most companies, they work in cloud. They can also decide which cloud they want to use. by default, it's going to be AWS, but, you know, there are other options. And sometimes it can even differ, you know, company to company or one country to another country. So, for example, the way data will be stored in the United States can be very different from the way data will be stored in France. There are so many, again, like different things.

And there are, very lengthy data processing agreements where you tell exactly how you want the data to to be stored. Maybe you want your data to be stored on-prem. That's also an option. Even with AI, you still have this option. So there are so many cool ways how you can customize it for your needs that even within one organization, you can have different ways how we store the data, how we process the data, or what do we do with the data. even not just on a company level, but even on like office to office.

CCB: Oh my goodness. I will say that in the last few weeks, I attended both Cornet Global Summit and a WORKTECH event at Meta that was the San Francisco WORKTECH. And at the WORKTECH experience, the Meta folks were talking about some of the tools that they use and then what they do.

You've been talking about the employee experience and all of the advantages that it hands over to the individual. And you've also talked about the data that the client or the end user, the corporation or the government or the um get, and how that's managed. What are the tools that are offered back to the customer managing either spaces, people, talent, experiences?

Elena Beloshapkova: I think there should be a very important distinction between end users and buyers. We do sell to enterprises, and we do sell to basically corporations. At the same time, we serve their end users, which are their employees. For us, the way we can provide our buyers with the best quality of data, with the best results, with the best insights, is by providing the best employee experience to the end users. And that's kind of the key to Inspace's success because we were so obsessed with end users.

There are a lot workplace platforms that, you know, they build platforms for admins, for workplace leaders. It's absolutely crucial to make sure that their experience is, you know, it's crucial, it's important, but they would not be able to get the right results if the product is not used by end users. Only end users can really make or break the success of the implementation. And it's not enough, again, to have the great product. You have to have the product that employees are happy to use, they're using this on day-to-day basis because it does bring value to them on their individual level. So this is kind of the key.

CCB: Okay. I'm going to take a little moment here to remind our listeners that there's a webpage on the One Workplace website that will have all the links to Elena and to Inspace and to some of the things that we're talking about. So, you can always go back and reference again. And then I'm going to go back and ask about...

You're watching all of these things that happen and you must be obsessed about not only the customer experience, but about where work is going, what future challenges in space might be able to manage and or have to manage. So what do you, what are you thinking about the flexibility of the platform, but also the hurdles that it may face coming?

Elena Beloshapkova: Yeah, we actually look at this as in a different way. We try not to think too much about the future challenges because, again, the pandemic showed all of us that a lot of things can happen and we don't know exactly what's going to happen in the future. We can have our assumptions or, again, we can plan for something, but we none of us, we don't know.

What I can tell you that we see our workplace leaders, our customers as basically Jedis. Sometimes it can be extremely difficult to navigate all of these changes that are happening. And we're just like Yodas guiding them on their journeys. We are there to support and make sure that they have whatever they need from the workplace platform and we will change and basically serve them with whatever needs they will have in the future without us trying to be the ones who's going to tell them how to do their job, So we're not telling them like how to do hybrid, we are not telling them if they should bring employees back to their offices or if they should keep it full remote or if they should keep hybrid or should be hybrid like, you know, three days in depth. We don't tell them none of that.

Elena Beloshapkova: We will support them with whatever they see as the best fit for their companies because they know best fit for their companies because they know best. We can only provide them with the best data insights. They can also use InSpace AI to just type, for example, “what is my hybrid attendance rate” and get instant insights with the highest quality of the data, instant charts, instant results. So not just like the standard dashboards, but basically they can ask AI to give any workplace related question and get the insight that they need. That's kind of like, that's our role. we love working with the most talented workplace leaders.

And sometimes our best features, they come as a result of our conversations with them. We talk to them on daily basis. I have customers that you know we meet with them weekly. We have customers that have been with us for many, many, many years. still have our first ever customer. We like talking to them and whatever they see fit for them, whatever challenges they have, we will come to our technical team and build it for them so they can do their job and get the results that their management is asking them to do. Whatever employee engagement initiative that they're trying to accomplish, whatever they're trying to do with their like entire real estate portfolio, whether it's right-sizing it 70% or if they need to scale it by 10x, whatever their problem they're trying to accomplish, we will be there with the tools to help them get there quicker and faster and just more efficient with the best workplace experience, making sure that their employees are not going to turn and their employees will be happy and will be as productive as possible and their spaces will be as effective as possible.

CCB: Okay. So we were, when we first met in that group gathering, there was that conversation around not only scaling technology, but supporting culture or building culture. And I'm curious, within InSpace, you as a founder, what does culture look like? I mean, I've already heard you drop breadcrumbs, but just tell us the culture of Inspace as an organization.

Elena Beloshapkova: Yeah we started with culture and then we found the right people. In many cases you first like have a company and then you have like 40-50 employees and then you're like "what is our culture exactly?" so we kind of, we did the opposite. We started over with the culture, we found the right people who matched that culture. Obviously you know it comes with like a lot of um it doesn't happen immediately you have to like you know talk to a lot of people you have to hire the right people you have to give them the right tools to help them, you know, thrive. But right now I can tell you that we have the best team ever.

So, and I'm like, honestly, I'm just proud of them every single day. As you can see again, like I just told you, I recently moved from Boston to the San Francisco Bay Area to the Menlo Park Area. And I wasn't the most, you know, i I just couldn't attend a lot of calls and they had to do all the heavy lifting. And they are just very impressive. When I was traveling, they would take care of issues. They would take care of bugs. They would come up with new product suggestions. They would talk to customers, make sure everyone is happy. They would bring new customers. They would bring new leads. They would like schedule meetings with companies that are like, they have like hundreds of thousands of employees. And I'm like, how did you do that? So yeah. And not just like, it's not just like they would schedule, they would run meetings with, again, companies that have like hundreds of thousands of employees on like the highest level. I'm like, damn.

CCB: You have done a good job. Good for you.

Elena Beloshapkova: So yeah. The way we, you know, the way we were able to accomplish that, we hire the right people. Yeah. You can, you can do a lot of things. You know, you can, sometimes try to, like retrain folks, but sometimes you just have to have like the right people and you want to make sure that again, people enjoy what they do. They understand what we are trying to accomplish here.

What is the future? You have to set the right goals, the right expectations. Everything has to have very tangible results. So they should know, there should be full transparency about what we are trying to accomplish, exactly how we are trying to accomplish that. We like to hire people who are very independent, who are problem solvers, who are problem finders, people who, if their CEO is traveling and is not very responsive for a few days, they will do the heavy lifting. And honestly I love the results. Like we scale three times in this past two quarters, we grew 7x last year. We will probably grow something close to like 5x this year. We're scaling really fast. Our annual contract value is growing we are getting bigger and bigger customers with more and more offices. So our “land and expand” model is working really well.

CCB: I'm going to stop you for a minute and turn you in one little direction that we were really curious about, that as a woman leading a hardware plus software company, what are the unique challenges, opportunities, but I'm and also going to say the benefits that come from that, because it's obviously not as common.

Elena Beloshapkova: I don't remember the last time when I was in the industry that was not male dominated. Like, again, just think of it like laser physics, how many women are doing that? Then like commercial real estate, office furniture. I became businesswoman of the year in manufacturing. you know how many women are leading manufacturing facilities? So then obviously, software and now AI.

Recently, a friend of mine told me that they wanted to have an event for female founders who raised more than 10 million in AI. And they just couldn't find enough. So they had to kind of invite the ones who, you know, raised more than five. So it's definitely, there there aren't too many of female founders. There aren't too many in any of the industries that I’m in. I don't think it ever stopped me or I personally had to deal with a lot of challenges.

Obviously, there were a lot of just weird people that, you know, you can find in any industry. So, but it's not very like specific to this one. The benefits are the ones that you have a lot of strength, you have a lot of courage, you can dream big you also are very detailed um detail-oriented. You know I'm a very very ambitious person. I wouldn't say this is because i'm a female founder, it just you know happen to be. So knowing your customers, being obsessed with customers, being obsessed with employees, being obsessed with like the way they work. I've spent 20 years of my career just working on this and I don't see me stopping anytime soon. So again, I can't tell you if that comes from me being a female founder or just me being...

CCB: You being you, because you're pretty amazing. I'm wondering, I have one more question, and then I'm going to let you just wrap up however you'd like to. But is there a daily habit that you have, or is there some kind of mindset that keeps you grounded in this amazing startup environment?

Elena Beloshapkova: An awesome dog. She's a dachshund. She's 12, so she's an older and calmer dog. And I remember I always wanted to have a dog and I always wanted to have a company. And I actually started a company and got a dog the same week, 12 years and like 10 months ago or something like that. Yeah, you know, having an awesome dog. and she’s always gonna remind you, like you know she needs to go for walk. And all that that definitely helps, but also having an amazing support system. And I'm not talking about my own place, I'm talking about my wonderful friends and family and loved ones, and people who supported me through this very challenging journey. Obviously you know when you, I'm gonna see you on wonderful 12 plus years, like it comes with a lot of challenges. Especially if you are running pretty big companies that grow really fast. So growth always comes with a lot of challenges.

I love what I do, I love my customers, I love the industry. I've never been more excited for the industry than this year. The things that I could only dream about are, like five, six, seven years ago, now become reality. So that future that I see for not just for InSpace, but for, you know, workplaces all around the world, being able to provide the same experience that we have here in Silicon Valley or New York or in Boston. Being able to see the same experience that we can provide to our customers in Colorado or in LA. So that's something that, again, keeps me going. And i couldn't be more excited for the industry for all this beautiful innovation that has to come.

CCB: Elena, you are over-the-top amazing and the energy is admirable, I'm going to say. And that's, I think, one of the things that made you be so magnetic when you came into that conversation that we were having, because the confidence that you have in your ability, which is not about pride, it's more about the drive to success for the end goal that you have, which is a better work experience for most people. And that's, you certainly stand out in a crowd, I'm going to say that.

Elena Beloshapkova: Thank you so much. Thank so much for invitation. It's such a pleasure.

CCB: Thank you.

Elena Beloshapkova: I'm so excited to be here and hope to see you again and again.

CCB: We certainly will. And I'm going to say thank you very much for sharing the InSpace story, Elena. And to all of our listeners, reminder that the ONEder Podcast is available on all streaming services. And we will look forward to coming back to you again in the near future. Gosh. This has sparked so many ideas for other conversations that we might have. So I'm going to say, Elena, thank you. And we will sign off here.

Elena Beloshapkova: Thank you so much.