Discovering creative ideas in San Francisco - CapitalOne 360 Cafe
This is the 4th time I come to San Francisco this year, I just love this city and the weather (yes I love Summer in San Francisco!). I was lucky enough to get invited to Y Combinator’s Startup School this year, it was great and I had the opportunity to learn insights from founders from many companies, you can learn more about that here. However, the part that I really like about traveling is to discover cool places in cities I visit. This time a quick search in Yelp brought me to Capital One 360 San Francisco Cafe (it used to be ING Direct Cafe), it is a very interesting concept that Capital One has launched in about 8 cities including San Francisco – and yes I asked one of the Capital One employees why not in Austin and he told me that they are actually working on it at the moment, so brace yourselves as we might get one of these electronic-only transaction bank/Cafe/Coworking space in Austin, this will rock big time!
This creative concept for a bank branch is awesome, there are no lines, no counter, no “numbers” to talk to a representative, etc.. and instead they have created a very cool open space filled with desks, power outlets, beanbags and an excellent WiFi and coffee drinks – oh, there is also good background music like nothing you have ever experience in your local bank. Also, if you have a CapitalOne card and you pay your coffee with it, they only charge you half of the price so in other words you can get a regular size latte (and very good!) for about $1.50 – this is pure genius.
I have never thought that a bank such as Capital One would do something this creative and out of the norm, but they are and apparently I am not the only one who loves the concept of a bank branch that also serves as a coffee shop and free co-working space as the place was filled with people working with their laptops and drinking coffee and I am sure someone was also doing some electronic banking as well… It might be hard to rate the success of such a concept but if what they want is to bring people to the place and raise awareness about their brand, this is a great idea that probably costs much less than other not so creative marketing efforts.
So there it is, this last trip to San Francisco allowed me to discover and actually work from this place called CapitalOne 360 Cafe which is on 101 Post St. San Francisco, CA 94108 (Post St and Kearny St) and it is the place from where I wrote this post and did some work for BedandBreakfast.com. At some point I would love to have places like this pop in every city branded as The TechMap work spaces, it would be awesome, perhaps in the future. Until next time.
