[AustinGoesVertical]

Tito’s Vodka is already estimated to be worth $4.4 Billion and Mr. Beveridge owns it 100% outright. Only way it could go corporate is with massive capital infusion to boost scale, but it’s actually still growing. Even so, it has under 50 corporate employees right now. I agree, that would be awesome to see but I don’t think it would fit with the culture nor would they ever have the business ops to support significant office space DT sans conglomerate investment.

Best bet is Amazon as an existing company, but I’d love for one of a myriad of existing Austin eco-system start-ups to make it big and support such a space. There’s this one company recently funded called Coder that feels like it could be on the verge of something far bigger.

Hey, maybe Jump (Uber), Spin, Skip, Scoot, Bird, Lime, and Lyft all want to use that insane venture money and consolidate ops into one large HQ tower to house “The Scooter Group, Inc.”

Imagine a “Scooter-Shaped” design with the “deck” being about four stories of “dockless” parking on a full-plate slab divisible by brand. Then 10-floors of corporate apartments (about 250 micro-units) with an outdoor amenity space and a real pool deck. It would also have exclusively stationary e-scooter treadmills and docked e-bikes in the workout room.

The first two floors of the “Bar” structure could feature “The Handle Bar” — a millennial tech-centric bar with some authentic Texas design elements, which would be at the base of the vertical portion — a sleek and thin 80-floor tower of creative office space for each brand’s individual hub.

The crown you ask? The initial spokes of the handle bars with a spotlight-style lighting element. Finally, the mechanical penthouse is masked by a lucite-facade with a QR-Code design etched into the glass. It of course would be lit up and have a wide spectrum of colors.

Funding: Scooter Group Inc. — SPV Real Estate Fund

Developer: World Class Capital Group (Nate Paul finally did it guys!)

Architect: Undisclosed

From Press Release: “Austin is already the de-facto Scooter Capital of the World and we realized there’s a lot of cannibalism between our different brands — which are really just white label infrastructure made from Segway-Chinese manufacturer
Ninebot. With the same exact business models, margins, marketing, pain points, and operations, VCs started to suggest taking the Match [Group] approach — owner of almost every dating site in North America — and consolidating. So that’s what we did with Scooter Group. Austin’s the perfect place to build our HQ, although San Francisco made a competitive play. We say we solve the “last mile” problem, so we envisioned a mile high building, which would have included office and multi-family well beyond our needs under The We Company brand, who was actually workshopping the subsidiary “We Scoot, LLC“ before it’s demise. Not that some of our funding doesn’t come from SoftBank, so it’s a little touchy subject, but anyway, this is going to be a World Class Tower, which shouldn’t surprise the local real estate community given our developer. This new holding company is on the verge of a record-setting 250B IPO, so the timing couldn’t be better. It’s simply going to be iconic and we couldn’t be more excited to get on the road, or should I say sidewalk, with construction.” — Scooter Haven (CEO of Scooter Group, Inc.)