This year, we’ve more than doubled the size of the Upflex team and welcomed new leadership, including Michael Casolo as Chief Revenue Officer.
It’s no secret that in the modern world, work needs to be flexible. When people are given the opportunity to work flexibly, recent data shows us that 87 percent of them take it.
But as as Upflex’s new Chief Revenue Officer Michael Casolo has written and spoken about, the shared experience of day-in and day-out work-from-home life — isolation, monotony, connectivity woes, Zoom burnout — has shown us that the office isn’t obsolete. In fact, it has never played a more vital role in the workplace.
“Humans have an innate need for interaction,” as he puts it. In the work world, that manifests as collaboration.
Last week, CoStar broke the news of our new CRO appointment: Casolo has joined Upflex as our new Chief Revenue Officer, overseeing Upflex’s revenue planning, scaling and reporting.
A leader in workplace experience with about three decades in the space, Michael has led global teams at JLL, at Cushman & Wakefield, and most recently, at Unispace, and especially in these tumultuous past few years, he’s been at the forefront of the office’s evolution, becoming an expert in what the workforce wants, and what helps companies thrive when it comes to workspace.
As I got to know Michael, I saw that he shares with the rest of our team the absolute certainty that, while a full-on return to the traditional office is not an option, neither is a complete reliance on virtual connectivity and the home office. He has also seen up close how, more than ever, companies are in need of better tools to manage the distributed physical spaces in which work now happens. This is what drew him into the conversation about what we’re doing here at Upflex.
Our team has seen tremendous growth this year — our client base, our global flex space network, our funding, and, perhaps the most exciting part to me, our team. As we closed our $30M Series A round this spring, the size of Upflex’s truly diverse staff had doubled since January. Closing out July, we’ll have grown by 170%. Thirty-five employees and dozens of contractors are working together across close to a dozen countries — the U.S. to Brazil, Portugal to Sri Lanka — providing solutions to support a new way of working, and using those solutions themselves every day for greater collaboration, productivity, and work-life balance — working to make work better for people and the planet. With that growth comes a thoughtful expansion of our leadership.
I couldn’t be more excited to have Michael in this group, working with us to foster what he refers to as an industry revolution — and to have his guidance as we continue to grow our company and pursue our mission to make distributed work better for people and for the planet.