The Best View of “What’s San Francisco Like Right Now?” Is Understanding This Simple Framework

I love talking to folks with expertise in areas where I’m more basic. Years ago when Philz Coffee started expanding from a single shop into a multi-storefront, multi-city business I found myself in a chat with their CEO Jacob Jaber. Fortunately he was game to answer a bunch of my questions about the coffee biz (I’m a bit of a fan) with depth and patience. One of them really stuck with me as a framework to understand urban development.

Philz was opening a handful of new stores in quick succession around SF and I asked Jacob a version of the following: I know site selection is a science unto itself but explain it to me in a simple way. His answer was super interesting, and I’ll paraphrase it here. Neighborhoods have three use cases — Live, Play, Work — and so long as two of them exist, it can support a Philz. So for example, if it’s just a Live neighborhood (maybe a suburban town without a big commercial district and residents commute out of the town to work), isn’t an A+ option. Same thing if it’s *just* work — no Live or Play — probably great during early morning commute but can that location support afternoons/evenings/weekends? We then ran through a bunch of Philz locations and he shared his POV on their Live, Play, Work characteristics. Made perfect sense!