Breather A Breather office space in Manhattan.

LOS ANGELES—Office space is certainly changing. From creative and open office plans to co-working space, offices don’t look anything like they did even a few years ago. Julien Smith, the CEO of Breather, gave his take on the evolving office market and what tenants need yesterday during the keynote speech at NAIOP’s O.CON event in Downtown Los Angeles. For the unfamiliar, Breather is a flexible office service that is available on demand through an app, meaning the user can log on, find an available space and have an office for the day instantly. They have space available for as little as two people up to large groups, and the space can be booked for hours or weeks.

“People need the same amount of space; they just only need it sometimes,” he said on the panel. As a result, huge corporations have become regular users of the office brand—which nearly has many Manhattan locations has Starbucks and plenty more around the globe, from London to Los Angeles. They are currently opening an average of one to one-and-a-half units each day, and, thanks to the technology, each unit becomes available on the app the same day that it the build-out is complete.

Smith says that Breather is solving the problem of what type of space people need, and accommodates the “spill over” affect into public spaces, cafés and coffee shops. “This is really a transformation about how people book and use space,” he says. While there are many iterations of office space today, and Smith says he can’t entirely be sure what the future of office space is, he says that Breather is filling a demand in one corner of the market for people who need an office one day, for a few days or even an afternoon without committing to needing an office space all the time.

The service is also great for travelers that need to stop and work and then continue on with their day. The app, which assigns a temporary “code” as the key, has the same aesthetic in every market, meaning that someone can be in a new city and still find a workspace where they feel comfortable and productive. “People need things to adapt to them. They need buildings to adapt to them and they need whole cities to adapt to them,” says Smith. “We believe space should be adaptable to people.”

Right now, Breather is in 10 global markets with 250 locations, but it is growing. He estimates that the company will double its workforce in the next 24 months and imagines that this is a public company one day.