After his wife, Rachel Lozano, passed away in 2020, Gabe Lozano went “city shopping.”
“Not because I didn’t love St. Louis, but because I needed a change of scenery to create memories,” said Lozano, CEO of St. Louis-based adtech startup Decide (formerly LockerDome).
During a five-and-half month period, Lozano drove more than 15,000 miles to find his future home. He eventually settled on his permanent destination: Austin.
“There was just this incredible energy. It was this palatable energy of a small city that had found its heyday and that it was surging,” Lozano said.
Now, Lozano's company is expanding to his new hometown. Decide, which provides technology to help advertisers and publishers monetize digital advertisements, recently opened a new office in Austin. The company, a mainstay of St. Louis' technology and startup sectors, also has an office in Downtown West.
The Austin office gives Decide a presence in a rapidly growing city that has emerged a major technology hub. But it also comes as the adtech company has adopted a “work from anywhere” model that allows employees to work fully remote. However, Lozano still sees value in its Austin office, which he says will be utilized by its seven Austin-based employees and serves as a hub that employees across the country can visit.
Lozano said decisions by his company and others to allow employees to choose where they want to live has changed how talent is attracted to cities.
“I would say at this point, cities need to cater to people over businesses,” he said.
The Business Journal caught up with Lozano to chat about Decide’s new Austin office and how it ties into the company’s talent recruitment strategy. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Given Decide's "work-from-anywhere" approach, what’s the thought process behind opening a physical office in a city? People still love to build community. When you opt in to being in an office environment, you can create some really fun energetic moments. Even in St. Louis, we have a physical office that was built in a different era but people physically show up all the time even though they don’t have to. When I’ve been through St. Louis and I’m there, you see that people are there sometimes just because they want to see another friendly face. It’s not always about being productive. Sometimes you just want to create a new memory, create a new friend or create some sort of community with the people you work with.
How does your Austin office fit into that strategy? In Austin, you have an enormous amount of foot traffic. Our office is actually located in their entertainment district in East Austin. When you walk out of there, you immediately just feel energy on the street. We looked at it in two flavors. It’s a standalone two-story building — 4,000 square feet — and the first floor it’s really just the socializing floor. We’ll be hosting community events there periodically. We want people to be able to just use it for fun, as an escape to show up and hangout with each other. The second floor is productivity. What you do notice is people still go into co-working spaces and people still go into our office. Sometimes you just want a change of pace to concentrate and not sit at your “at home” desk.
Is the decision to open an office in Austin because you can't find enough talent in St. Louis? It’s not a talent question. Talent access changed for everybody the minute you went to an employee-first culture because you went to permanent work-from-anywhere. Of our 80 employees, only 47 right now live in our hub cities. The rest of them live all over the place in the U.S. For us, it’s not about access to talent. It’s access to excitable energy where people want to be. We want people to want to visit.
Decide has had success finding employees from local and regional universities. Has that focus stayed the same? If you look at the growth of our business last year, headcount grew 58%, revenue grew from $23.3 million to $32.2 million. We were highly profitable. It was a really strong financial year. What it enabled us was to do was hire more people. We’re always going to have a commitment to schools like WashU if they produce high-grade talent. We have a history where they just seem to enjoy the work environment, be incredibly successful and that commitment is not going to change whether it’s WashU or any of the other schools. There’s still going to be a commitment to the community because we love St. Louis. But as a business, we have a commitment to continue to grow. To me, it’s not one or the other. When it is in your backyard, it’s a no brainer. Building your business to be a strong, thriving business allows you to continue to pay more people coming out of those schools.
