After 18 months of preparation, TrackVia was ready in early March to move into its new office in downtown Denver. The company wired the old U.S. Bank Tower to have video conferencing capabilities, something TrackVia’s old office lacked. Its furniture was designed with the low-code startup in mind. The space stretched to nearly three times the size of the Denver company’s old office, giving the 75-person startup room to grow to eventually 200 people.
But then, a pipe burst. A pandemic hit. And with little warning, the company's ambitious plans for growth seemed, at least for a moment, dashed.
“We had 20,000 square feet, and there’s two inches of standing water,” Todd Benge, chief technology officer at TrackVia, told Built In. “Everything was brand new. I kept thinking, ‘How much is this going to set us back?’”
TrackVia was founded in 2006, with the aim of providing companies a low- or no-code platform on which to build their applications. More than 3,000 companies have since relied on the platform to support their products, including AT&T, NBC Universal and Kaplan.
The business was founded on the idea that workers would — and should — come into the office to collaborate. But, over the past two years, the company increasingly employed a distributed workforce, particularly after TrackVia announced a move to a new office on 17th Street. Still, when a burst pipe flooded the 20th floor a week before the company’s employees were set to move in, the team was caught off guard.
The new office’s walls bulged with water. Its new floor peeled beneath the flooding, which also destroyed TrackVia’s furniture. Contractors drilled through the freshly painted baseboards, and pumped air through the walls, but Benge said that left the facade swollen.
Insurance reps estimated that it would take about a month before the office could be repaired and ready for employees to move into. Then, the next week, Colorado Governor Jared Polis issued a stay-at-home order, requiring all non-essential employees to work from home over COVID-19 concerns.
“All the schedules went out the door, you couldn’t get anything coordinated,” Benge said. “I would get a schedule put together, then somebody would cancel and that would have a rolling impact across everything.”
Repairs of damages from the broken pipe stretched three months, but TrackVia employees finally returned to the office on a voluntary basis in late June, Benge said.
Due to the pandemic, the company has taken many safety precautions. Only a percentage of the staff are allowed to work in-person on certain days. And when employees do come in, they are required to check their temperature before entering the space, wear a mask and can pick up disposable gloves at the front desk.
Everyone is adjusting to the new normal as they go. Benge said company reps have had to gently remind employees not to sit too close to one another during meetings. But, for the most part, he said employees are adapting to the new use of the new space.
“Now there’ll be a meeting where everybody is in the office, and they’re filling three different conference rooms in order to meet the social distancing guidelines,” Benge said.
Despite all the setbacks, the company is still hiring for its customer support team, though the pandemic has slowed its hiring plans.
“With the growth model we had, we anticipated we would have needed more space again in probably two to three years,” Benge said. “Now we’re less likely to require space again for awhile.”
But after everything the company has already gone through in 2020, the space is bringing Benge a lot of excitement as he looks to the future.
The office’s kitchen, for example, has turned into a hotspot for meetings, since its open plan layout allows people to easily socially distance. A single person will sit at each table and have a conversation with their coworker at the next seat, Benge said, comparing it to a casual cafe. Eventually, he said he plans to install video conferencing in the kitchen and may even allow the company’s growing workforce to live outside Denver.
