On Wednesday afternoon in Mindspace, a coworking office on Market Street, everyone at Rho was desperate to find a free meeting room. Seemingly every marketer, manager, and salesperson poured out of the banking startup’s corner suite with a customer on the phone, only to find every conference room and phone booth occupied by their own colleagues.
Failing to secure a more private space, one sales associate plopped into a chair in the common area — which happens to be where several members of Gazetteer SF’s editorial team work, eat lunch, or stare into space for a minute during our busy workdays — to take a business call. Exchanging pleasantries with his interlocutor, he summed up the state of the company, saying, “So many people are joining, I don’t even know the person who sits across from me.”
Yes, Rho, whose “LOCK IN” slogan adorns buses, trucks, and pickleball courts across the city, has outgrown Mindspace, where Gazetteer SF also has an office. Today, the always affable, sometimes boisterous 50-odd-person satellite team will decamp for a new office near Jackson Square.
According to one of Rho’s senior account executives, the new West Coast headquarters will have three floors, one of which can comfortably accommodate the current team. He said the other two floors are still empty, leaving room for increased headcount as the company grows or to be used for other things. (They’re hoping for a gym.)
Founded in 2018, Rho is a New York-based banking platform that provides cash management and corporate debit cards to early- and mid-stage startups. In 2021, the company raised a $75 million Series B, bringing its total investment to $205 million, according to reporting from TechCrunch.
Working with Rho seems to have its benefits. The account executive said that Rho throws exclusive founder dinners and keeps a house in Ashbury Heights where they throw networking parties, the kind of perk more often seen from a lifestyle brand than a tech company. While less trendy than AI and less visible than autonomous vehicle startups, fintech is a hot industry at the moment, as last week’s news of Capital One’s acquisition of Brex for $5.15 billion confirms.
The Brex deal was touted as the largest-ever fintech acquisition, setting the pace for the remaining free agents hoping to land their own, exceptionally lucrative exits. To distinguish itself from other companies offering similar services, Rho seems to be selling itself as a fintech-as-a-lifestyle brand, hence its endless riffable and repeatable slogan.
“LOCK IN” (the echo of “Just Do It” more or less implied) offers zero product information but tells you all you need to know about how this company does business — with the grindset on their minds and the frat house in their hearts. This isn’t just a company to help enterprise clients streamline their banking, it’s a way of life, bro. (I’m using bro here as genderless shorthand; bro is a state of mind.) Lock in!
As their neighbor in the coworking office, this reporter has heard the Rho bros say to each other, “Time to LOCK IN!” “It’s always better when you’re LOCKED IN,” and other branded rah-rah on countless occasions. One of them frequently wears sunglasses inside. On a sales call in the common room of Mindspace, one account executive teased a sign-on bonus that could, if the customer was so inclined, include custom belt buckles.
As the Rho team ballooned over the last few months, its energetic vibe has overpowered the whole floor, bringing a swaggering posture often absent from generic plug-and-play coworking offices like this one. But like the fraternity its Greek-lettered name suggests, the Rho team has proven outwardly quite friendly but ultimately insular: They’re happy to chat on the fly but have dodged Gazetteer’s every attempt to get someone to LOCK IN to an on-record interview.
While we’ll be glad to have use of the phone booths and conference rooms again, we’ll miss their energy around the office. We wish them well as the bros LOCK IN to their new office, and hope they remember to LOCK UP when they leave.
