Howard Lerman - Founder, CEO @ Roam: How to Build a Fast Growing Startup Without an Office

Hello, Startupr community. Welcome back to another edition of the Startupr Founder Series. I'm your host, Parker Costin. I had a chance to sit down with Howard Lerman today, the former founder and CEO of Yext and the current founder and CEO of Roam. We talked about what it takes to go from building a college startup to building a company that IPOs and now reimagining the future of work with virtual offices and AI. Howard shares powerful insights on risk, product-market fit, scaling globally, and how the old rules of building a startup are changing fast. This one is packed with wisdom with someone who's done it twice. So I hope you enjoy it. Thank you. Let's jump right in. Let's get us like from where you were to where you are consistently when doing research. Saw that you had built a startup in college, was on The Daily Show. Kind of take me through a little bit of that early, early start and then what that taught you and how we move forward.

You know, Parfer, I think I never really understood risk. And if there's one thing I've learned in my life, it's that the riskiest people, the most successful people tend to take risk, and they may have not a great understanding of risk at all. And I think for me at an early age, I was an opera singer, so I was thrown into learning how to perform on stage. So I was never embarrassed, and I learned to have thick skin. And be comfortable doing anything and frankly looking kind of stupid in front of people. So the luckiest day of my life was when I was admitted to Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, a STEM high school consistently ranked one of the top high schools in the world in Northern Virginia. It's a public school. You can't buy your way in. Not that I could have anyway, because we didn't really, we weren't, we didn't grow up well off. And got to go to be around other people like me that were really good at math and science and really were interested and curious at what this dawn of the internet was. This was in 1995, and we had a supercomputer in our high school. And so I met other people that were able to program the computer, and that was like the coolest thing ever. And then the internet really started to take off. And so it wasn't a huge leap for me to, and a couple of my high school classmates to say, hey, let's start a company while we were in college. And I remember going to Mailboxes, et cetera, and Kinko's and setting up an LLC using this third-party service. And we had a mailbox and we created an internet company and it was called justatip.com and it'll let you send your friends anonymous tips telling about their annoying problems. And it was kind of a big joke and it was sort of funny. It was like a little viral because I'd send you one and then you'd send 2 to your friends and so on and so forth. And that's how it took off through viral word of mouth. And it particularly got a big injection of force when Jon Stewart sent a tip on The Daily Show. And you can imagine being in your dorm room in college, like most college students watching The Daily Show, and all of a sudden, unexpectedly, Jon Stewart pulls up your site and sends, you know, logs on and sends what was at the time called a tip. It was Pretty exciting. So I haven't really looked back since then. I've been very lucky.

No, that is amazing. And what a start, right? I'm sure that since then, the entrepreneurial bug was just ingrained in you wanting to move forward with all those things.

I think it's good to be a fast beginner and have a little bit of luck early on because you get a taste of it. And then we sold our company for $150,000, which when you're 20, it feels like a lot of money, But then after you divide it up and pay taxes, all you need to know is that you need to do it again and do more. And all of a sudden, you know that that's what you want to do for the rest of your life is build companies and to try to do really cool stuff.

Yeah, no, most definitely. And then it seems kind of like from there, you strategically move towards building what was the culmination of Yext, right? Like a few different Listing firms and things of that nature. Take me through that journey.

Yeah, that's right. So after college, I started with the same couple of guys at a software consulting company. This was right after 9/11. So we got really good at a couple of new Microsoft technologies and started just to hedge things, sold services and sold that company. And then in 2006, started Yext. And, you know, it's funny, you see this green picture behind me, Club Insider. That's a magazine For a gym newsletter and it was published in 2006. And the guy in the picture with me is a guy by the name of Rick Caro who founded the Trade Association for Health Clubs. And so I was 25 and I was, I had this idea to start basically a hotels.com type site for gyms. This was again, 2005, this stuff didn't exist yet. And what we needed to do to build this marketplace was sign up all the gyms. So I'm like, how am I going to sign up all the gyms? Well, I actually tracked down the head of the trade association and was like, I called him up and he was 62 and I said, hey, how'd you like to be part of this company and found this company with me? And through, and he said yes. And in a year we signed up 3,000 gyms and then that business got to a few million of revenue, but it hit a wall and we realized that in order to grow revenue further, that instead of doing more for gyms, we could do the same thing in different verticals. And then we did veterinarians next and then we did TV repair shops and auto repair. And we basically went down the Yellow Pages categories and did every Yellow Pages categories. But it turned out that these different Yellow Pages categories, Parker didn't want leads, they wanted phone calls. And this was before transcription was good and telephony was like super, super awesome.

Yeah.

And Voice was good. But what we did was we created a technology that was able to listen to a phone call and transcribe it and then determine whether an appointment was booked. And that was really a, and we'd only charge for appointments. And so that got big. And then all of a sudden I realized that maps were gonna be the big thing and that's where listings came from. And that today is still Yext's flagship product, the Power Listings franchise. And that is an amazing business. You know, company like McDonald's can put all the location data for all their store, 14,000 stores across the world into Yext and bam, they update a fact and it's updated in Google and Apple Maps and Amazon and Facebook and all the meta properties that people always find the right information. And from one place the brand can control everything. So that was the core idea of Yext with our listings product.

Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it seems kind of like, Focusing on that pay-per-appointment, pay-per-call advertising, uh, was kind of a big—

First one was, right?

Okay. Okay. Hey everyone, just a quick heads up. Today's episode is sponsored by Startupper, also known as us. We're in the process of building something super special for startups at this moment, and to fund the mission, we're providing high-quality services like lead generation, design, and development. Please check out our website at startupper.xyz if you'd like more information, or drop a comment if you'd like to chat. Please like and subscribe to stay tuned to our channel for more information, more interviews like this. And as always, please enjoy the rest of the episode.

Got it.

Was that— where did you pivot from there? It became the business listings and everything of that nature?

You know, it's funny, it, um, it, it started with a, uh, it started with a— started with a pay-per-call advertising product. And then one day I realized, this is going to sound kind of funny, that you could hijack someone's Google listing. And I didn't do this intentionally. I started reading about locksmiths who were doing this. And, you know, the idea was if someone's searching for locksmith on Google, if I'm a locksmith and I steal your, you know, steal your, my competitor's Google listing, all of a sudden all the phone calls come to me. And there was all kinds of bad behavior that was happening here. And I kind of was like, well, the solution to this problem is to put the locksmith in control of their own information. And let someone put lockdown on the listing. And that was the, the fundamental idea behind Yefes is that the ultimate authority of information about, say, what time Burger King is open is Burger King because they decide that. And so they should be the publisher of the source of truth for that. And so what we ended up doing was I called Ben Horowitz up, who is the famous founder of Andreessen Horowitz, because I realized that he had, he had been faced with a bit of a similar situation when he founded Opsware. and spun it out into LoudCloud. And he was like, Howard, you should spin out one of the businesses and sell it and run the other one. And that's exactly what I did. So we spun out the pay-per-call business. We sold it to IAC, Barry Diller's company, and we took the remaining Power Listings franchise and grew that. And, you know, in 6, 7 years we grew it from zero into IPO. In 2017, we IPO'd. And so I thank Ben for the advice. It was a very unusual move, but I'm a cockroach.

So, well, I mean, it's good to take advice from people like that. That is amazing. To bring it kind of a little bit back, when you were building the MVP of that product, was it kind of run and gun or how did you really build it out? Like what was your process for doing so of what would be a minimum viable product in that category?

You know, it's interesting. I think times have changed. I think back in 2005, even 2015, the advice was, hey, build an MVP, throw it out there and good stuff will happen. I would say that today the standard is higher and you can't do that anymore. Customers today have a higher expectation because everything is just frankly better. It's also more crowded and there's more competitors.

Yeah.

So I actually, if we're looking for a nugget of advice for an entrepreneur, what may have been true 15 years ago, And I'm dating myself here, is no longer true. I think today, if you're going to make something, particularly if you're going to sell it to an enterprise, it better be really good because your competitors are well funded. They're building beautiful, gorgeous products. You have to have really something that is fundamentally 10 to 100 times better for them to switch to you. And if you try to give someone a piece of junk, or even something that's half baked, they're going to lose their patience because cycle times are being compressed. Companies are operating way faster. We're living in a completely new era. AI is changing everything right now.

Okay. Well, no, that is an amazing piece of information. If you were to do it differently now, like what would you have done versus your MVP then?

Well, you know, it's funny. One thing I do want to say before we get onto the MVP part of things is that I'll leave you with like one quick lesson that I learned in building a company. And this has nothing to do with MVPs, but it's actually what I call a Jedi trick. And here it is. I told you I called up Rick Caro to help me found the gym company because he was the head of the trade association for gyms. Turns out something else that was really lucky for me was that I was born next to this guy by the name of Dan Daniello, who ended up founding the Carlyle Group, and he was my next-door neighbor growing up. Now, I just want to be clear, this is a very modest neighborhood, so it was totally lucky and random that we were, he, you know, he's 35 years older than me, but my parents were good friends with him. And so I watched him found this global private equity group. quite frankly, with awe. I mean, he was incredible what they did. And one of the things that they did was, you know, one day I noticed that he brought on James Baker, the former Secretary of State, to join the Carlyle Group. And I'm like, well, wait a minute. Like, why? I called Mr. Daniello, I called him Mr. D. I'm like, Mr. D, like, you know, why do you need a Secretary of State, you know, as an advisor to the Carlyle Group? And he said, well, This, I was 19 at the time when I called him and he said, you know, Howard, he's a phone call away from anyone in the world. And I think that that's stuck with me because I didn't think twice about calling somebody like a Rick to get to all the gyms. And then when we went to the veterinarians, I did the same thing except I found the past president of the American Veterinary Medical Association. And then I found the past president of the American Optima— Optometry Association and so on and so forth, times 50. And so I guess my advice is, I think that for a lot of startups, they're thinking about sales possibly upside down. And they invest heavily in BDRs and AI BDRs and SDRs to do outbound cold calling. And a better approach is to get a warm introduction from somebody with authority and conviction. And I think founders can go a bit more top-down. Now you have to have something good. Rick Caro is not going to sling shit, but if you have something that is half good and compelling to the industry in which these folks operate, there's no reason why you can't successfully operate with, you know, investing in what I call advisor-led growth, top-down growth, as opposed to bottom-up growth through cold email. You got to learn how to cold email too, but this is a better approach.

Well, that's amazing. So, I mean, to continue off of that, what are you currently doing? Because you're working within SaaS and, you know, live streaming and things like that.

It's so funny to talk about all the sales tactics. I mean, everyone's talking about it all the time. One of my favorite people is Jason Lemkin, obviously from SaaStr, and he has a lot to say about this. And he famously says, what, you know, as soon as something works, it doesn't anymore because everyone copies you. And I think that's basically be true. I really think Elon said it best, and we're not Elon. Nobody's Elon. You're not Elon. I'm not Elon. None of us are.

Yeah.

And none of us are Steve either. But Elon did say, if you make a great product, you know, focus your energy on that. Word of mouth is just the most effective thing, and it can take a while. But over time, word of mouth will crush anything else. So I don't mean to say you shouldn't have a sales strategy, but I think you should have a marketing strategy and have a great product because over time nothing beats word of mouth when people talk about it.

Okay.

Yeah.

So focusing product-led.

The other thing I want to throw in there too is that my advice with regard to the MVP, Applies to enterprise, but not consumer. If you're making a consumer app, I think you should throw it out there as soon as possible. Because frankly, you have no idea if it's going to work or not.

Yeah.

Consumers have a way higher tolerance for shit not working all the time. I mean, Zoom was down all day today, for example.

Yeah. Yeah, no, exactly. Uh, well, okay. So then within consumers, putting it out there, customer feedback, always talking to customers would be the other move then?

I think you always talk to customers. I talk to customers all day long. You know, Roam is obviously a viral product because we have, we built this incredible virtual HQ filled with AI coworkers and people have meetings in Roam. I mean, you know how the product works. They book their meetings in Roam. They talk about it all the time. They bring people in, they can send out guest badges. It's a collaboration product which inherently has viral loops in it. So I think my advice for founders is to build viral loops into your product. And it's hard to exactly say what that should be without looking at the product, but I would do that. I also think events are always good. Showing up to places where people that, where clusters of potential prospects and customers are, is just generally a good strategy. But talking to customers, customers are the best source of referrals.

Yeah, most definitely. So what would you say would be kind of a more recent viral loop that you've built in or that you've discovered? Like an aha moment?

I mean, the Rome lobby is phenomenal. I don't know if you've seen it. It is great.

Yeah, it's amazing.

Yeah. Like one of the cool features about, here's the basic story. I mean, if you go, if you walk in to buy a pair of shoes, a shoe salesman at a Nike store like fawns over you. It's a $100 pair of sneakers and you have people like serving you sneakers and putting the shoes on your feet. But if you want to buy a $50,000 piece of software, you fill out a form on a website and you hope that some BDR calls you back in 48 hours. It's a totally backwards thing.

Yeah.

So my belief is that at Roam, we said it doesn't have to be like that. Why can't you have a lobby that customers can just, if they want, they can book a time. But if you're available, why not just drop in right now? And so we have a, this drop-in feature on our site, not our site, but that we allow customers to add to their site on their booking links so that, hey, just come on in if you're available and we can detect if you're available because we know if you're in a meeting or not.

Right.

And yeah, that, that's been really effective for us. So I'm trying to, you know, really That's a viral loop. We're adding a, you know, guest badges are a viral loop for us. We look at external visitor meetings when people set up meetings and they come in, like people outside. That's a viral loop for us. We're adding a Loom-type feature to Roam so you can send video recordings. That'll be one.

Yeah.

But none of those, those things are all, you know, ways of engaging some people on the edges, but nothing is better than a guy like you saying, Gosh, I was in this virtual HQ today and this AI coworker figured out my action items automatically and knew them all and got them right. And instead of assigning them to people, they assigned them to another AI and it got done. It was unbelievable. And now I have less meetings and, you know, that type of review from a customer always wins.

Yeah, no, I mean, just all of those features that you just mentioned, we use it at Startupper every day. It is an incredible product, I must say. And just, you know, the realism and the professionalism of the lobby. Being able to customize it in that way, I think they're just amazing aspects to it.

Thanks.

Yeah, of course. Okay, well then let's shift back a little bit. When we were talking about Yext, when you were expanding globally, so what kind of like key operational or maybe strategic challenges were there when you were just like full on with it, with growth, like building infrastructure and teams across different regions and things of that nature?

Well, I, you know, boy, I can't even begin to tell you when, you know, the number of challenges that we've gone through while scaling. I think the most important thing for any founder is to realize that each stage of the company requires a different you. So when you're just a couple of people in a room, what requires out of you is holding onto product market fit. You have to have incredible conviction around an unconventional contrarian idea. You have to be able to build that idea and then get people using it and create momentum and create momentum from nothing. After that, you need to then be able to, you know, replace yourself and scale a bit. And this is where I would look back and say there are things that I did that I would do differently, that I will do differently this time around as I build my second company. And all the smart people around the table, venture capitalists, advisors, executives, they all tell you to delegate. And I think delegating is really a bad idea. I think delegating is, I think a founder should hold onto as much as they possibly can. And surround themselves with incredible people. And I think, by the way, that this is changing, that it used to be that delegation was necessary in sort of organizations of the past where they were hierarchical and you had management layers and you needed to even route information through managers. But I think with AI and with the internet, organizations have become and will become way more flat. And what you're going to see are A new type of company evolved. Companies with 30, 50, 80 people doing $100+ million of revenue and hyper-efficient, hyper-productive, not having meetings, globally distributed people around the world, like teleporting in, hopefully in a Roam virtual office, by the way, using AIs, having 8-minute meetings, collaborating together in and out. And like, At that point, this new kind of company that doesn't require as much management infrastructure, founders are going to be able to have direct reports that, you know, it used to be the conventional wisdom is don't have more than 8 direct reports. And everyone says, oh, well, okay, you're, you know, congratulations, you're a manager. Here's what you do. Set up a one-on-one recurring meeting with each person in your team. And let me tell you, I'm very anti one-on-one meetings. I think they're awful.

Yeah.

Awful. I think they're a death knell. They turn, they clog up your calendars, they slow down information, they turn into therapy sessions. Meetings are like a gas. They'll expand in exactly how much time you give them. And people that are fresh and happy and ready to work coming in can be sort of bent out of shape coming out like a bad session or something. And if you have 12 direct reports, all of a sudden 12 hours a week is lost to stupid one-on-one sessions. So I basically tell people, and by the way, these are things I did the first time.

Yeah.

And I guess you could say it worked, but this time around, I think there's a better way. And I think, you know, today, now that a lot of these things that I had an intuition about are being validated, if you look at, you know, Brian Chesky's founder mode, right? Brian Chesky said like, you know, he doesn't delegate anything. He's in the details. That's how I'm running Roam. And The most important thing for any founder, basically, as you scale, you're going to delegate different parts of the company. You ultimately have to give things up. So there's a stack order in which you should give those things up. And the first thing you should give up is all the administration, finance, legal, HR, but you hold recruiting. And then you can keep giving things up depending on your exact skillset, IT, that kind of stuff. The very last thing that you never give up over your dead body is product market fit. Product market fit is the ultimate forever job of the founder to make sure that you are at the bleeding edge of the strength of your offering and how well it fits into the marketplace for your customers. And you never delegate that. The minute you delegate that, the minute you are not running the show anymore. And nobody is. And that's the most important thing for a founder to hold onto.

I think that makes a lot of sense. I also think it's very refreshing that you're talking about the bore of meetings or how they drag you down and you are building a virtual HQ. I would think that like most people would think that would be almost the opposite. You're trying to streamline things and make it as efficient as possible. And I think that's refreshing.

I built a virtual HQ to eliminate meetings. I mean, You know, my, when I started the X, we were just, we were 5 people in a room and then we were 30 people in a room. We didn't schedule meetings with each other. We just like would walk over and have conversations ad hoc.

Yeah.

It wasn't like, you know, it wasn't like, oh, you know, Parker, can I get 30 minutes of your time next Tuesday? And let's bring in Jan and Jill and have a discussion. It was, we're doing this now. What do you think about this? And the level of speed at which we operated. explode when calendars became clogged with back-to-back-to-back 30 and 60-minute Zoom meetings. And we, they also became huge. We'd have 18 people in these things. And so the point of Roam was to collapse that, to bring it back to where you have in a room people, except they're from anywhere in the world and it includes AIs.

Yeah, no, I mean, I've seen it move my company much quicker as well, so I completely agree. For within, so bringing it back to challenges a little bit, when you were going through the IPO process, you know, it's a very expansive process. Not many people have done it in this way. Just like, what was some of the challenges? How did you prepare for that? And how did it go? What would you do differently? All those things.

Well, gosh, I mean, going through an IPO is kind of like winning a championship and it is the ultimate objective for any entrepreneur. And if you do it, no one can ever take it away from you. And frankly, you know, one of the reasons that I started Roam was because I fundamentally believe that the office of the future is going to be virtual and that there, it'll be filled with AIs and people collaborating as if they were, you know, in one room from anywhere. And like, and so going through the IPO process was just, it was the culmination of the treadmill upon which you step when you accept venture capital funding. So there's different kinds of businesses and not all of them should IPO and not all should take VC. But when you take VC, what you're doing is you're committing yourself to creating a venture-sized outcome. And these are just choices entrepreneurs have. There's no wrong choices. There's certainly wrong choices for certain kinds of businesses. But when you go down the path of raising VC money, you are signing up to ultimately try to get to an exit or IPO. And, you know, for us doing that was succeeding. And along the way, the IPO is simply a financing event. It's just the way that the capital markets decide the real-time valuation of the company as opposed to certain private institutional investors.

Yeah.

But it fundamentally changes everything. You know, you're all of a sudden, you are out there and you are like, you know, reporting publicly every quarter. I think it can cause short-term thinking. Frankly, I think you can be clouded by decision-making that otherwise should be long-term, but you end up short-term. I, you know, I do believe that the, but I think it is the best outcome for any company. Figma today filed to go public, as you saw, and that's what everybody wants to get to. And I'm going to do it again. So Roam someday will be a public company and it's going to be a lot bigger than the first one. And just like people today don't think of Elon as the PayPal guy, I hope that in the future people don't refer to me as the Yext guy.

Yep. No, that's fair. I mean, good goal to have as well. What would you say, or I guess like how did you find out when the right time was and when do you think you'll find out is the right time for you now?

Well, that's kind of up to the banks. The banks decide when you go public and they do that kind of based off of their testing of the waters with regard to the capital markets and the appetite of Yes. Certain major institutional investors and the size of company. And so when Yext went public, kind of the standard was you needed to be around $150 million of ARR to get out there. And that's where we were. And today that number's a bit bigger. It's just the standard has gone up a little bit, but it ebbs and flows. Like it was higher for a while, then it came down. You know, it can come down again. It can go back up again. You know, Rome's got a little while till we're going to be big enough to get there. So, but the best way to think about the IPO is it's an efficient capital raise.

Okay, got it. And so in terms of funding in general, like beyond the IPO, what would you say is kind of the best nuggets of information or what someone can do to prepare for and become as attractive as possible to potential financiers?

Well, raise money from customers in the form of revenue. Okay.

Yeah, of course.

There's nothing that, yeah, I mean, the, there's nothing that is more attractive than having product market fit. And so, you know, there's different stages of investment. There's seed, which is like, hey, you have an idea. Then there's kind of like, okay, we made this thing and we have some customers and we need to scale sales and marketing. And those are 2 fundamentally different things. And, you know, I'm not a good investor, so I'm smart enough to know what I'm not good at and picking which products are going to— I, people call me all the time. They're like, is this product going to work? I have no idea. Like, you just have to try it. You have to make something and put it into the world and see what happens. And, you know, I believe that we, I'm a very first principles thinker and believe that we exist in a world composed of, you know, atoms and the choices that we make have caused outcomes to happen. And you can speculate all you want and try to like think about what could happen, but there's nothing that's going to give you that real signal unless you jump in the arena and begin to, you know, absorb the punches, if you will. So I think for any entrepreneur, my advice to you is to make something people want and get people to use it and to get people to pay. Don't, if you're in the Business, B2B, again, consumer, I don't know a lot about, but on the B2B side, don't give stuff away for free because it attracts a whole bunch of non-serious people.

No, I've heard that from multiple founders now, so I definitely agree. Reflecting on your personal journey throughout entrepreneurship, just what have you changed from your values or maybe your leadership? I'm sure a bunch has changed, but does that ring home or ring true with any core values that you have?

You know, I am very disciplined. I don't wait for motivation. I just do things even when I don't want to do it.

Yeah.

Whether that means working out, reading a book, completing something. I love what Jeff Bezos says about stress, which is that it comes from things that you know you should be doing, but you're not. And the antidote to that then would be to just do those things. So when I sense discomfort, I know that growth is happening. And so I try to lean in and do things that are a little uncomfortable, even still to this very day. And for me, you know, I'm not building Roam because I want to make more money. I mean, we do intend to make a lot of money and we do intend to build a big company because we're capitalists, but we're doing this because we believe in this vision of the office of the future and that it is going to be filled with people and AIs collaborating as if they're in one room from anywhere. And that single vision is so exciting to us because we know that we can provide a platform not just for us to help build the future, but upon which the future, others are going to build the future. And that fires us up unbelievably so every day. You know, I think I've learned though, maybe to not chase people as hard. Back when I was 25, I used to just like, I was such a bull that I would like push everyone into doing everything. And now I'm a little bit more, If they love you, they'll come to you. If it's meant to be, they'll come to you. And maybe we have the luxury of doing that a little bit more now. I'm a little bit less in a rush. I do believe that sometimes the best tikka masala sauce can come if you put it in the refrigerator overnight and let it marinate. I'm a little bit more focused on my own personal health. In my 20s, I did not really know what a vacation was. And here, you know, I spend, I don't have a lot of space in my life for things that aren't either my family or my company. That's all I care about. All my friends work at the company. So I think what you just have to, you have to, you know, and the other thing I would just say is this, I love what Charlie Munger said about getting You can get smarter at getting smarter. And the best people are learning machines. And not only are they learning machines, but they're machines that are self-improving. I just think that's the wonderful, wonderful piece of advice. And so each and every day I endeavor to read something that's hard, a book about quantum entanglement or cognitive theory, something that stretches my mind. And, you know, in your, when you're in your 20s, you want to, you know, build something great. You're ambitious and you get married and all that stuff, or find your partner or whatever. And then you're in your 40s, maybe you're raising your family and you want to focus on your health and growth while you also pursue your legacy and your life's journey. So for me, you know, part of that is also taking good care of your mind and taking good care of your body, knowing that, you know, we exist at this incredible point in time in humanity In which like we may be at the dawn of an infinity type of era and being able to be around for that is going to be pretty exciting.

Yeah, no, I completely agree. Wow. All right. That was a lot of great information boiled down really quickly. I love it. You kind of stepped into it a little bit there as well. Just what would you give for advice for someone that's starting their startup right now in this space? Maybe someone that is within that 20-year-old doesn't know what a vacation life is.

Well, I talk to a lot. I, you know, it's funny, one of the other piece of advice I have for people is to try to make friends with people that are in different age ranges because you learn so much from people in their 20s and people, for me, in their 60s or 70s. I I do. I have tried to make a lot of friends that are younger, that are just building now, and I'm so impressed. I'm so optimistic with what I see with the people that are 18, 19, 20. I have 21-year-olds calling me. They're juniors in college starting companies. They've already done this and that. It is so unbelievably awesome how incredible and amazing the achievements of these people are. They're just, they're so smart. Everything I just said and told you all the quote wisdom that I gave, they already know it. They're already like talking about seed rounds and A rounds and all the tricks for cap tables and they know how to build models and get to good product market fit. I mean, a lot of the things that were kind of intuitive to me as a founder have been institutionalized in a way where people talk about them now and it's just knowledge. And that's awesome because this knowledge, these memes that we all spread as human thinking machines are capable of implanted into each other's brains. And when they're chunkable, like things like, you know, product market fit, which is a term I think Andreessen coined, like we now know what that means. We have a common framework for discussing that. And so I think the whole ecosystem has gotten way better described in the past 20 years. And so that gives us the foundation to just do so many more things. And these young people that are building these companies just blow, absolutely blow my mind. I am so optimistic. I don't know what I can offer. Like, I watch them and I see them and like, I don't know what I can offer you. You're like too good. It's like, I feel like, you know, like an old NBA player or something like watching like the new one who's just better and more talented than I ever dreamed to be.

That's a great analogy. Yeah, I think the NBA is a perfect example of that as of right now. Um, then I guess similarly, what would you say, uh, looking at Roam and beyond, kind of what emerging trends are you trying to follow, stay on top of? Obviously AI, chatbots, you talked about a lot. Just, uh, what would it be?

Yeah, you know, you have 2 different trends that have driven Roam. The first is globalization and basically people being able to access talent from anywhere. And, you know, It is definitely true that there's huge amounts of talent in San Francisco, but there's incredible talent in Denver and in the Czech Republic and in Huntington Beach and in Miami Beach and in Brazil and in Punjab and in the Philippines and in, you know, all, you know, in Greece, all around the world you have talent. And so what we endeavor to do is to take this, the intersection of these 2 trends of globalization and outsourcing, and talent everywhere and marry that with AI and automation and provide this wonderful virtual HQ where people and AIs can collaborate as if they're in the same virtual HQ from anywhere. And that's our vision for the future. It's a really simple vision, the office of the future, but it's one that I think really could be the foundation for building a lot upon it. And I couldn't be more fired up every day to see where this thing Well, amazing.

No, I am too. I think that you guys are going to have some incredible growth just using it. I think everyone should try it. I'm sure hopefully a lot of people will get in on our lobby and other things like that, so they'll be able to see it in some way along the way. And naturally, we always end this with our finale question. Just what is one small way that you'd be open to helping out other founders within our startup or community?

Well, any, if you want to put my link out there, I'm ro.am/howard. That's my lobby. And there are, because the average meeting time in Rome is just 8 minutes long. Think about that, 8-minute meetings. So what I did was I, in Rome, made it so that you can actually schedule 8-minute meetings by default in our lobby booking links. So any founder that wants to book an 8-minute meeting with me, Go for it.

Wow. Okay. Amazing. I love that. 8-minute meetings also for the future forever. I love that idea as well. Can't thank you enough for being with us here today on the Startup or Founder Series. Felt like we got a lot of great nuggets within there. I hope that a lot of people reach out to you. I hope a lot of people check out Roam and super excited to see what's going to happen with Roam in the future and yourself. But thank you. Really appreciate it.

Thank you, Parker. Good luck. We'll talk soon.

Enjoy it. Thank you. And thanks everyone for watching. Talk soon.