E26: Howard Lerman, CEO ROAM: Remote Offices and More

Welcome to This Week in Local, a Locology podcast featuring lively conversations about the local digital ecosystem hosted by Locology analysts Mike Boland and Charles Laughlin. Hello everyone, and welcome to This Week in Local. I'm Charles Laughlin, and my guest today is Howard Lerman. Most of you know Howard as the co-founder and CEO of Yext. Now Howard's leading the way in a space that we like to call remote tech. Howard might prefer a different name as the founder and CEO of Roam, and that's Roam as in roam around the office. Not Rome, the capital of Italy. Howard, welcome to the show. It's an honor to have you.

I'm very glad to be here, Charles.

Okay, great. So why don't we start with what I just said? I will credit my co-host, Mike Bolen, who's not joining us today, with coming up with the term remote tech. It was sort of offhand during a conversation. We've sort of started calling this space that. It's not a patent-pending thing or anything like that. But how would you, you know, if you were invited to keynote Remote Tech 2024 in Miami. Would you accept without changing the name of the conference?

It depends who the host was. If it was you and Mike, absolutely.

Okay, cool. All right. So why don't we just start with—

You could call it anything and I would show up.

Okay. All right, fine. You're accepting our labeling of the space. Okay, fine. It's official now. Okay. So, Howard, let's start with the name Roam. Why did the name Roam? And then perhaps in answering that question, you can answer kind of the origin story of Roam.

I guess I like 4-letter names, 4-letter words even.

Okay.

And, look, we came up with the name Roam. I'll tell you some of the names we didn't choose. How about that?

That might be fun.

Name storms are always sort of a fun exercise. We toyed with the idea of, like, we were calling it Holloway, H-O-L-L-O-A-Y. W-A-Y, just like sort of a world that was out there. I think I was inspired, and this is not part of the official founding story, but this is part of the actual founding kind of inspiration. Have you ever read the book Ready Player One?

No, I have not.

It's a sci-fi book about a future world in which everyone exists in AR and the metaverse. And, the entire point of the book is that the world's action shifts to this thing. And so, everyone wears goggles all day and sensors and they all live their real life through this. And so, I don't know where— I think—

Freshens. Yeah.

Yeah. And, the founder was this guy Ray Holloway. So, I think we were calling it Holloway for a little while. And then, Roam was a professional name because it embodies the ability to move around, which you can move around in our software and move around in the office. So, Roam is actually also inspired by another one of my personal heroes, Walt Disney. I love— look, I've got a big picture of him here. I look at Walt Disney for inspiration when I'm trying to come up with ideas.

He—

one of my favorite— everyone watches the Apple keynotes and they think of Steve Jobs. I watch the Disney keynotes, and there's a famous one where he's unveiling the EPCOT Center.

Wow.

And EPCOT is— and by the way, it doesn't— it's not there yet. He's just— he's got schematics of it. He has a pointer. EPCOT is an acronym. It stands for Experimental Prototype of Tomorrow.

I had no idea.

And that is— we were sort of looking at that and kind of, you know, EPCOT's a big city, the city of the future. We were thinking about ROAM. And so ROAM is actually an acronym for Remote Office and More. And that's where that came from. And it's funny because you mentioned the word remote. I actually try not to use the word remote.

I know you don't. That's kind of why I thought you might push back on the term remote tech. But anyway, carry on.

And the reason we don't like to use the word remote is, first off, it implies you're disconnected. I mean, remote is definitionally a controversial— you don't— remote is not a word with a lot of positive inclinations. It implies you're just simply not there and not together.

But it has an unempathetic tone to it, doesn't it?

Very unempathetic, Charles.

Yeah.

And, you know, the other part of this is that, like, I think there's this debate right now. Should companies be in the office? Should they be hybrid? Should they be remote? You know, my personal word would be distributed because every company that succeeds has people everywhere. I mean, you're where you are. Mike's where you are. He is. Yext had people from my direct staff. I had people from Berlin to Beijing. I had call centers in various places. We had engineering centers. So, the challenge companies need to solve is not whether or not people should be remote or not. It's should they be— how do you get the whole company working together in one office as if they were in one office from anywhere? And I do believe if everyone were theoretically able to co-locate, that would be the best. The problem is that there's just not, there's 2 things in work you need to solve. You need to give everyone their own solid workspace. And so for me, even though I'm sitting in my library right now, I also have an office. I go to that every day, even though I'm running a distributed tech company, because I just need private, quiet space to be productive. And ideally for that private, quiet space to be productive, you want it to be as close as possible to minimize your commute time. So it's like next to my gym. And so I have a minimal commute for that. The other reason people want to have people in the office is for collaboration. And collaboration happens when people are together and can be serendipitous and ideas come up and you can come up with that spark, that magic spark, and jump on it. The thing is about that though, it doesn't work in these hub offices where people might all work for the same company, but they're not working on the same thing. And so—

They just happen to be in the same city.

Yeah, it's like, oh, well, you know, since the auditor and the janitor and the accountant and an engineer and a marketer all live in Albuquerque, we have this office that everyone has to go to and they all sit there and they literally don't talk and they go into there and then they sit on Zooms all day long. And that co-location without collaboration is where there's a problem. And that's just, that's, that's what people hate because they go into the office and sit on Zoom all day.

Right, right, right. So, you said something sort of interesting, which is that, you know, Yext had offices all over the world, still does, of course, and many, many companies do, and that's not new. So, this notion of distributed work, therefore, is a very, in a sense, a very old concept, isn't it?

No doubt. It's a problem that folks have been trying to solve for a long time. And, you know, software products like Zoom have made it better and Slack have made it better. And of course, you know, we believe at Roam, we can take a quantum leap and not just keep people connected, but bring them together as if they were in the one institution.

So we've kind of got the acronym ROAM. Behind ROAM is interesting. I actually didn't know that. I hadn't heard that before. That's really cool. Talk about what were the flaws in Zoom, Slack, et cetera? And I don't even have to make it in terms of them. What were the missing links that you were missing, the gaps you're trying to fill Right. With Roam and how have you done it?

Yeah, you know, it's kind of funny because when you look at everyone's calendars today, it's packed with back-to-back-to-back Zoom meetings. And it didn't used to be like that. This is really a function of us today living in this video conference-first world where, you know, if we were co-located in the same office collaborating, we would have a 5-minute conversation about something And just solve a problem and move on. And it would be serendipitous and ad hoc. And unfortunately, in today's distributed world, increasingly what happens to companies is people basically schedule a meeting to discuss something for next week, and then they put 30 minutes on the calendar and invite 5 people. And so everyone's calendar is getting clogged up with meetings that are happening next week to discuss things with 5 people that could be done today with 5 minutes for, for 2 people. And, and so what Roam has really set out to do is remove all of these— this calendar clutter. I personally—

Right.

Go with this thing called Calendar Zero. I don't have any internal meetings on my calendar, uh, within our company. I have— that's, that's a little bit of an exaggeration, but we have— I have 2 weekly meetings. I have one all-hands and one for my staff. I have a staff meeting Sunday night and an all-hands meeting every Thursday. Outside of that, you don't— we don't schedule meetings. What we do is if we need to discuss something, we're all in the Roam Cloud headquarters together, and when we need to talk about something, we do it.

Yeah.

And the other part about that, not only does it free up people's calendars, you know, think about the last time you scheduled an 8-minute Zoom call. The average meeting time in Roam is just 8 minutes long. It also makes companies faster. So, we don't have to wait till next week to decide something. We don't queue up information. We just do it right now.

So, my— I'm not going to call it a theory. That's giving it too much credit. But my presumption is that you haven't reduced the number of meetings. You may have actually increased the number of meetings, but you've reduced the amount of time spent in meetings.

You are correct that there's probably on average slightly more meetings by raw count. But the time spent in meetings is, for a given employee, dramatically reduced when we analyze the pre- and post-calendars of a company. And we can see all the meeting times. This is one of the analytics we're able to get back on.

That is one of your key— that's a KPI I hear you use a lot. Has that 8 minutes fluctuated a lot?

I keep waiting for it to change.

Really? Okay. Because I think you said 8 minutes, 36 seconds on CNBC, if I'm not You are specifically right.

And I believe the last time I looked a week ago was 8 minutes and 32 seconds.

Okay. So it's dropped a little. Okay. All right. You know, so it's still, it's still roughly the same thing. So I guess my big question is, are you trying to build a kick-ass software product or are you trying to change work? And don't give me both, please.

I think we are— the first thing we were trying to do is that as a means to the end of changing work. And I really do believe that companies waste 50% of their time and employees hate, hate being in these back-to-back meetings all day and having their calendars, you know, people want to be inclusive. So they add, oh, I should add this person or that person, you know, to the meeting. And so, but just to talk about where I do believe this can go, I mean, my God, the opportunity to help companies collaborate with better meeting technology. Look at Apple Vision Pro last week. I think, you know, you should expect to see a Roam app early on there. You should expect to see what we call meeting intelligence. Our messaging feature is gonna be able to summarize every meeting that happened in Roam And offer folks, you know, quick summaries of— so anybody can see the summary of a meeting using GPT. Another thing we're adding— this, by the way, this is all— the Vision Pro stuff is obviously not, but everything I'm saying is like this year kind of roadmap.

Right.

You'll be able to get trending topics across your organization based on what people are saying. So like, you know, imagine you have 1,000 people in your company. You can see where everyone, whatever, where everyone is, what they're doing, what they're talking. Everyone can see it's a shared view. But then people can get kind of like in Twitter, there's trending topics. You'll be able to see that mined from the things that people are saying. I, you know, automatic task list. This is just the opportunity for the data here is just extraordinary. And when we have, like we did, 5.8 million meeting minutes last month across our 200 paying customers, the opportunity to actually have a robust ML model is clear.

Well, I mean, it's kind of a notion that's been out there for a little while that the content of meetings is a rich set of data to mine for running a business more efficiently, for understanding employee sentiment, all these things. I mean, is that essentially what you're talking about here, right?

That is not just essentially, it's exactly what I'm talking about. And by the way, it is imminently going to be in our product, like within the next quarter, using the latest and greatest stuff where you'll be able to search for a topic and see every single mention in meetings, not chat, chat and meetings from one UX of that topic. And you can begin to think about, and by the way, this will be part of Roam too, Third-party companies will be able to make bots that will be able to scan this stuff and be able to, you know, offer suggestions to companies based on what the bot is seeing. And these bots can be uniquely trained by that company for what their business objectives are.

So what levers can a company, or dials can a company move more precisely with this kind of data going forward? And what kind of problems can they either avoid or head off or whatever? You know what I'm getting at? What decisions will be made better? What problems will be solved or avoided based on having this level of data and understanding, getting the insights from it that you're suggesting?

You know, 100 years ago or before, even 50 years ago, before we had really good electronic communications, there was a lot of layers within a company. And the point of the middle layer is basically to route information and to, you know, the decisions were made up top and then people would, the middle managers would route things all the way down to the end. And one of the things that has really happened with email and obviously before that phone, the ability to communicate instantly is the, you don't need to have this router. You don't need to have these routers. And the old game, like playing telephone where something is lost in translation, Doesn't happen as much as it did 50 years ago, and as you had to rely on humans who are, by the way, very error-prone to make decisions. And so, I think what you're going to see is, frankly, the ability for a few people within a company, product managers, leaders, the leaders of an organization, the leader of a team, to have a far better way to be directive To ensure that what they want to be having done is being done, and also to make sure teams understand what the priorities are. But more concretely, what you're going to see are people saving time, saving huge amounts of meeting time. You know, AI will be able to suggest that this person shouldn't be in this meeting. AI will be able to say this, you got, you know, imagine you're in a meeting right now and you start meandering in a brainstorm. And it's about a topic that there's a subject matter expert for, AI can suggest we should grab this person and grab them if they're available.

Pause the meeting, bring them into the meeting. Maybe other 2 other people who are in the meeting aren't really adding anything. They can go and do something else.

Cut them. That's right. Get them out of there and they'll be glad to go. And that's really— there's nobody that wants to be in a meeting. So meetings generally are— the more we can cut them, the more I think it's a win-win.

Well, haven't meetings been sort of a proxy for job validation or reason for existing. I mean, is there a piece of that that you're maybe underselling or understating that people see meetings as their job justification and sort of driving that out will create another set of issues? Maybe it solves a problem that needs to be solved. Talk about that a little.

Well, I think one of the problems with meetings is that you have the smartest person in the room syndrome. I mean, one of the ways that people try to be in meetings is they just try to look the smartest. Frankly, I think that's one of the dumbest things you can possibly do because my goal has always been to be the dumbest person in the meeting because I want to surround myself with people that are smarter than me. You want to learn.

Yeah, yeah.

100%.

Okay, so I want to shift gears to something that's kind of in the news right now. And I'll get back to a few more things about Roam before we close. You know, we've been going through these waves of CEOs saying they want everyone back in the office. I think we're going through one of those waves now, particularly with the Google story out there now. How do you think bosses are handling this issue and how does it impact how you're building?

When you say building, you mean Roam building specifically?

Yes, exactly.

Roam has always been focused on the hybrid or distributed use case. And yeah, right, you know, of our customers, and for example, even we ourselves, many of us have our own workspace. So we are, we are not work from home or remote. We are linking together offices and people that need to be linked together.

People could be using your product while sitting in an office building. Absolutely. And they are, right?

In fact, in fact, half of the people do. And we have some incredible features for that. For example, on our Roam map, it reveals and shows automatically who's in the office right now. We have an agency, for example, that has people in London and New York and people who are remote. And everyone on the map can see who's in the New York office right now and who's in the London office right now because it puts a little office code on their profile when they're there. And this just happens automatically based on the IP address. And then we automatically form chat groups so that everyone in the London office who's there right now can have a chat, have a conversation. These are the sorts of— and by the way, people look at that in the morning and they see that their boss is in the office and they're like, I should probably go today. Or they see their boss isn't in the office and so they might not even go.

Why bother, right? Yeah.

That's right. So these are the subtle cues that you can build into the thing. The other part of this, and I'll just go back to the World's Fair in 1970 where AT&T invented the original videophone.

Mm-hmm.

Video conferencing and Zoom rooms are spectacular when there's only 2 parties involved and they're both equal and it's a conference room calling a conference room. And if everyone's sitting in a semicircle around a conference room looking at a TV, that really works well. Where things get more challenged is when there are 8 different parties calling in, they all get like a square on a TV, and then there's this conference room where there's people looking at each other to have a conversation and then also kind of awkwardly looking at a TV. It's a bad experience for all parties. The people on the TV see little heads around the conference room. The people in the conference room talk to the TV instead of the person next to them and see tiny little heads on a TV. The solution to this problem, we believe, is what we call Bring Your Own Device, BYOD, to get back to acronyms. You all sit around in a room and bring your own laptop or computer, and it's much more natural to just have one camera on everybody so everyone gets their own face. Everyone has equal footing on the billing, if you will, on in the meeting. And then you have to solve the audio to not cause audio feedback, but it's a lot more natural if everyone can just sit in a circle.

Right.

And look at each other and talk, as opposed to, you know, I'm talking to you but I'm looking at this TV over on my left. It's a It's a very strange dynamic, and this, I believe, will be solved. And Roam is building these features, including a breakthrough hybrid microphone, which solves the audio echo feedback problem.

Right. So you mentioned something earlier on where people are going into the office and sitting on Zooms all day. What popped into my head from that is this notion of— and I want you to talk about how Roam is avoiding this. This notion of being in the office together but not really talking to other humans, just talking to devices.

Well, that's called no collaboration.

Right.

In that case, that's colocation without collaboration.

Right. Even if they're in the same team, right?

Right.

Yeah. So how does Roam solve that?

Well, I would argue that Roam would suggest in our philosophy would be that We wouldn't expect people to be co-located in that you wouldn't want to have people, you know, like I explained before, I don't think it makes sense for a marketer and an engineer, right, and a janitor to be in the same office without collaboration. Yeah, right, right, right.

Okay, fair enough, fair enough. Okay, all right, so slight shift of gears. I think one thing you mentioned, or you and Mike when we were at our conference back in April, talked about Roam as a platform. Could you talk about what your ambition is for Roam in that respect?

Well, I, I really appreciate that question, Charles, because I like— we have a very grand ambition here for Roam, and I believe that there is an opportunity to build almost a next-generation office that in a way almost like Salesforce became the cloud company. I think Roam can become the office, the next generation office company. And, you know, these cloud companies disrupted on-prem software. I think we can in a lot of ways change on-prem office work with better technology. And we don't want to just be kind of a productivity tool that folks occasionally use from time to time. The average user in Roam— it's very early and we have a long road ahead. We're in the very early innings here. But the average user in Roam is already, and this is average, in our platform for 6 hours a day. And I'm not aware of a lot of other software products that people use for 6 hours per day on average. That means, by the way, we have people in it for 18 hours a day because sometimes people are in there for a long time.

They're not using it every moment they're working, but—

That's right.

Yeah, yeah.

That's right. So, you know, when you think about what this could be, I almost envision— we all know Bloomberg is the sort of financial terminal that folks work at every day. We want to be that but for the office worker and provide them with this, this cloud headquarters that is almost a display that you can fire up and you go into it and you can see all the people you're working with and all of the the different meetings and collaborations that are happening and topics and chats and be able to engage with your team, be present, project your presence from anywhere, and do this with different experience types. You know, you saw the Apple Vision Pro come out. I think we can have an incredible theater experience in that thing for our all-hands presentations. And the big idea behind Roam is that we have different kinds of rooms. So, you know, 67% of calls in Roam are audio only, but we have conference rooms, we have a theater experience. I want to build this thing called— we were going to call it Magicast— that will allow companies to— it's almost like PowerPoint except for live presentations where you can sequence people on a stage and media and other things all in like a slide-type format and cast it to your audience. We want to build recruiting rooms and HR rooms and sales floors and the candidate experience. The entire employee experience should take place in Roam and across Roams too, where just like in the Bloomberg terminal, you can chat with different traders from different firms. You can already do that in Roam and people love it.

One thought just popped into my head. In your Yext days, Onward was a big deal. Still, still there. In the future, is Roam where that employee company event should take place? Talk about, have you thought about that one?

You know, I think for a company, offsites are really an important thing. And for you, I mean, you guys are in the events space. Yeah, of course. And what better way to bring people together than an event? Okay.

So you don't have that ambition for Roam, or at least not in that sense.

I don't think virtual events are very good.

Okay. I'm not disagreeing with you, by the way.

Let me just say, I mean, I might eat my words on this, but I think I once, and you called me out on saying remote work sucks.

Yeah, I did. Yeah.

I do think virtual work sucks. Virtual meetings.

Sorry.

Virtual meetings suck.

Okay. You're on the record, man. Okay. All right. One last question, and that is give me a couple of signals that you're looking for in the market, internally, whatever, that says Roam has crossed the threshold? It's going to scale, it's going to succeed.

You know, the number one job of any founder is to find product-market fit, and it is an elusive, non-binary type of measure. And you know it when you see it. And I think the best definition I know of product-market fit is that you can't handle the demand that's coming to you. And right now we can't. We have now 2,000 companies in the waitlist. There are 250 companies that signed up on Monday for the Roam waitlist. We are struggling technically to handle meetings over 49 people. So we literally stopped onboarding new companies about 60 days ago that have more than 49 people.

Yeah.

I also have slowed just new companies as our technical team works to implement an architecture that's gonna enable us to handle meetings that are up to 1,000 people at scale with incredible reliability that we all have come to expect from Zoom. And we are, we are very close, but it is a super hard technical problem. And I underestimated the risk. But I think in a company that has strong product-market fit, all the metrics look like better than everything else without any effort. And as an example, 75% of companies that go on the Roam 30-day free trial end up converting to becoming a paid customer. That's like way higher than most of them.

Did you have an expectation for that number?

20%.

Okay.

Okay.

Okay, Howard, we're about at time, actually a little over it, but that's fine. It was fun. So thanks everyone for listening. This has been This Week in Local. Stay tuned every week for more episodes. You can find this show on all major podcast networks, and you can find out more at locology.com. Please subscribe, like, and comment. I'm Charles Laughlin. My co-host Mike Boland is off this week. Thanks again to Howard Lerman. Howard, much appreciated. Our producer is Dara Sweat. Thanks for listening and see you next week. Thank you for tuning in to this week's episode of Locology's This Week in Local with Mike Boland and Charles Laughlin. Be sure to subscribe for more.