Strava, the company behind the popular exercise-tracking app that incorporates social networking, has benefitted twice from the pandemic.
First, as people were forced to distance and exercise outdoors, its user base exploded from 50 million at the start of 2020 to more than 150 million today.
Now, the company is taking advantage of San Francisco’s wide-open office market and upgrading its workspace on the cheap.
In November, Strava finalized a sublease at 181 Fremont St., the barely 7-year-old, 55-story skyscraper neighboring Salesforce Tower and the Transbay Transit Center. Meta leased all 34 floors of office space when the building opened in 2018 but vacated the entirety during the pandemic.
“Everyone’s commute improved as a result of this move,” Strava CEO Michael Martin said during a tour of the company’s new offices. “That’s never happened anywhere I’ve worked before.”
Prior to making the move, Strava had been based in a century-old brick-and-timber building at 208 Utah St. — tucked between the Mission and Potrero Hill — for nearly a decade.
Like many tech companies, Strava embraced a remote working model at the height of the pandemic. But when Martin took charge in 2024, he said the scattered workforce had become “somewhat of an impediment” to accommodating the company’s rapid transition from startup to global business.
So he and his executive team set about finding an office that Strava’s workers would actually want to return to.
The company’s chief people officer, Michele Bousquet, said the search for a new headquarters started in earnest last spring. After touring more than 20 properties, she said, the company narrowed down the list to five but circled back to 181 Fremont because of its location, safety, and access to amenities like Salesforce Park, which is connected to the building.
“We knew we were going to get good value,” Bousquet said, adding that after three months of touring, Strava was able to quickly negotiate a sublease deal with Meta and move in four months later.
Since 2019, the company’s headcount has grown from 175 to 430, she said. Strava employees are still allowed to work from home but are asked to come in at least two or three days a week. Lunch is catered on Tuesdays and Wednesdays, and the employees have organized a weekly team workout since moving into the building.
“This move was about reorienting our culture to more in-person without being heavy-handed,” Bousquet said. “Forcing people to come in can sometimes work against you.”
Strava subleased floors 25 through 28 from Meta, which signed a long-term lease with the property’s owner in 2017, prior to the building’s completion. Meta’s Instagram division briefly occupied a handful of floors, but real estate sources say most of the office space at 181 Fremont was left unused since the social media giant also leases nearly 800,000 square feet at 250 Howard St.
When Jay Paul Co. opened 181 Fremont, Chief Investment Officer Matt Lituchy said the asking rent was around $80 per square foot.
Matt Hart, a broker at Cushman & Wakefield who represented Strava in the sublease, declined to disclose the deal’s terms. But rents for commercial real estate in the city are generally far lower than pre-pandemic prices.
“It’s been rewarding helping [Strava] establish their new normal and energize their employee base,” Hart said. “Especially since these are the sorts of environments they wouldn’t have even considered five years ago.”
The four floors leased by Strava, totaling around 50,000 square feet, are connected by a contiguous staircase. The 25th floor houses the company’s kitchen and all-hands meeting space, while the 27th is for meeting rooms, which are named after routes Stava users have popularized around the world.
Martin charged Strava’s internal design team with bringing to life the minimalist space that Meta had left behind. They answered the call by building a giant interactive map of San Francisco at the entrance that spotlights all Strava user activity that day. The hallways are decorated with employees’ marathon bibs and framed prints of user-generated Strava art.
The building with the pointed corner was a culmination of the Transbay Center District Plan, which passed in 2012 and allowed developers to build skyscrapers around the transit hub. SKS Partners purchased the property in 2007 and shepherded the project through entitlement before selling it to the Jay Paul Co. in 2013.
Meta and Jay Paul’s relationship predated the 181 Fremont development, as the firm had worked on the social giant’s campus in Sunnyvale.
According to CoStar, roughly 62% of the office space at 181 Fremont is still available for sublease. The upper 16 floors of the building are dedicated to condominiums.
“More than half of the available sublease space [in San Francisco] is being marketed by large-block users, primarily in tech, with much of that space having been on the market since early to mid-pandemic,” said Derek Daniels, regional director of research at Colliers. “While those spaces are in abundance, the pace of new large block sublease availability has slowed.”
Other companies that have joined Strava in the new building include Zendesk and Navan (previously known as TripActions).
Mayor Daniel Lurie, who has made revitalizing downtown one of his top priorities, addressed Strava employees Wednesday in an all-hands meeting.
“We appreciate you betting on San Francisco,” Lurie said. “Downtown is where we need you.”