S3E7: The Future of Work with Frank Weishaupt of Owl Labs and Roy Hirshland of T3 Advisors

Welcome to The Room Podcast. My name is Madison McIlwain and I'm a partner for seed stage investments at DefyVC.

And I'm Claudia Laurie, a co-founder of Pryve. We're a founder and funder who are in the room where it happens. If you're a first-time founder or an emerging venture capitalist, we're glad you found us. We share inspiring, authentic, and insightful stories from founders, funders, and operators who have been in the room and provide tactical feedback on their early aha moments and learnings along the way. Before we dive into this week's episode, we have a short message from our partners.

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As the world begins to reopen and investors, founders, and operators are looking to what's next, Claudia and I wanted to provide an episode that directly addresses questions we're getting surrounding the future of work. On today's timely episode of The Room Podcast, Claudia and I sit down with two CEOs who are innovating on the new normal, Frank Weishaupt and Roy Hirschland. Frank is the CEO of Owl Labs, a video collaboration technology company that provides the inclusive meeting experience remote participants need and deserve. Roy is CEO and co-founder of T3 Advisors, a global real estate firm that inspires companies to think more strategically about real estate and their workplace. Roy shared not only about his perspective on the future of work, but also the future of his own company, which recently merged with Savilis out of London. Both of these CEOs shared perspectives as experts, given what their companies do, but also as leaders for their own employees. In today's episode, we explore insights and tactical advice surrounding the future of work, including the hardware and software tools needed to empower a hybrid work culture, leadership's vital role as reopening yet again brings transition, and multi-generational perspectives on navigating a crisis while empowering employees to thrive at work. Before we get started with our conversation with Roy and Frank, Claudia and I sat down with Yvonne McCaig, a managing director at Silicon Valley Bank, for a closer look at their recent future of work report, which informed our conversation in this episode. Yvonne, welcome to The Room Podcast. You are a managing director at Silicon Valley Bank with a focus on enterprise software, and you're also the author of a very relevant recent report, Silicon Valley Bank's Future of Work in Q1 of 2021. The report provided 4 different back-to-work models: back-to-office, hybrid, remote-first, and fully remote. Tell us more about these proposed models for the future of work. Thank you.

I'm thrilled to be here with you today.

You know, no organization has yet cracked the code on the future of work, and the experimentation that's been underway suggests that future-ready companies share certain key characteristics.

Okay, they know who they are and what they stand for.

So essentially, they're doubling down on culture and supporting employees. And investors are really drawn to this trait more than ever before, really in the belief that it drives enterprise value. So what success looks like, it's less about which model you adopt, but more about how the more successfully you do it.

What advice would you give founders in determining their remote or maybe not so remote working model?

One of the most important things in our research when we spoke with so many founders and CEOs and VCs was really about this concept of parity.

That's the primary concern for people.

How do you make employees who are working remotely feel equally as valued as those who may be in the office?

I would encourage people to take a read through the report and feel free to reach out directly anytime.

This report proved incredibly helpful for both Claudia and myself on how to think about the back-to-office strategies. We would echo Yvonne's sentiment to go check it out, and you can find that link in this episode's bio. Now let's open the door to the future of work. We're so excited to chat with two CEOs today, Roy Hershlin and Frank Wieshop, here in the room. Thank you both for joining us today.

Thanks for having us.

Pleasure to be here. Yeah, thank you.

Both your companies are helping founders and tech companies navigate the future of work. And before we dive into our discussion about how this is evolving rapidly in the workplace, especially as reopening is happening in real time. We'd love to share a bit more about both of your backgrounds, starting with Roy. You're CEO and co-founder of T3 Advisors. Tell us a bit more about who T3 is and what you do and the founding journey.

Sure. Again, it's great to be here. My founding journey started at Procter Gamble out of college, and what a wonderful place to learn about the power of brand and storytelling. I believe that at the heart of everything we do, we do, it is about telling a story, what's important to us. So I was very fortunate to learn from one of the best companies in the world selling wonderful products like Pringles potato chips, but it was a really great place. And then I ended up in, in real estate. I worked for 12 years for a big traditional company, and it was great. And I was running the group working with tech and life science companies towards the end of the 12 years, and I had my Jerry Maguire moment. For those who've seen the movie, I just felt that I was drifting from what was in my heart and what I thought was best for these companies and these customers. And so, myself and two other gentlemen just left and started T3, which we started it not because the world told us that there were just not enough real estate brokers out in the world, but that entrepreneurs were just starting to think about placemaking and the power of workplace in hiring and attracting and retaining people. And wouldn't it be cool to start a company focused totally on innovators and helping them think about where in the world they should locate and how to design and how to think about all that goes into that. So that's, we launched T3 6 weeks before 9/11. So it was already a rough time in the economy and then 9/11 hit. And I, I gotta tell you, as an entrepreneur's journey, while it was very scary and difficult, I think T3's success lends itself a lot to working through challenging times. And we had 3 huge customers. RSA Security got sold to EMC and Macromedia and a big biotech company, Immunogen. And they were very loyal. And from there, off we went. And we just celebrated our 20th anniversary. We've done thousands of projects all over the world. It's been an honor to be a founder and a CEO and attract incredible people. And I was honored a few years ago by Ernst Young as an Entrepreneur of the Year. And last night, T3 merged with a big public company out of London. So, this is an incredible podcast to tell you that our journey now is taking an incredible twist that I'm pleased to announce. It was completely happenstance that happened, but we had been approached a couple of years ago about why don't we take the magic that's T3 and bring it to the world? You're in 4 cities and you got 40, 50 people. What if we can find a way to do that? And I'm reluctant like most entrepreneurs, but off we went for 2 years having this conversation with a wonderful company out of London called Savills. They're publicly traded. And the goal is to— T3 will be an operating business within Savills to keep the magic and the dream and what we do helping entrepreneurs alive. So as of 12 hours ago, our journey continues just in a little different way. And I've got some cool new customers, but I— it's been just amazing to be an entrepreneur and to meet incredible leaders around the world. And I'm so excited to just do it more places.

So first of all, congratulations. That is very exciting. And we really should have Google Alerts turned on for this podcast because I missed that in my morning brief this morning.

I got my phone, the, you know, LinkedIn's kind of blowing up, but I'm just so proud of my team. I'm so grateful for literally thousands of just loyal CEOs and customers of ours and our continued passion for what is the world of work going to look like? And that's why we exist. That's what we do. That's what we think deeply about, about the human experience in spaces and remote work now.

It's really fitting given as this year has shown the future of work is global. And so we'll be excited to dive into what this merger means for your company going forward, as well as really how this shifts your strategy in thinking about the future of work as a global experience. Frank, let's switch over to you for a second. You're the CEO of Owl Labs. Tell us a little bit more about what Owl Labs does and what your journey to joining Owl was like.

Yeah, first of all, I wasn't aware that I was supposed to come with any corporate news that was gonna be a big breaking story here. I have no mergers or funding to discuss, but I thought it'd be valuable to tell you a little bit about Owl because it leads into the founder story. I like to think about Owl and call Owl Labs an experience company. We make meetings more productive through hardware and software, and our flagship product, the Meeting Owl, is a smart 360-degree camera, speaker, microphone that makes meetings far more inclusive for remote participants. In fact, the company was founded in 2014, really on the premise of supporting hybrid meetings, which, as you can imagine, that trend existed for a long time and was growing but has been dramatically accelerated by the pandemic. So the Meeting Owl sits at the center of the table and it really acts as the director of the meeting. So it has a panoramic strip for the remote participant. It has a panoramic strip up top, which gives full perspective of what's going on in the room. So you aren't surprised by any new participants that may be joining. And it gives a full view of the room that way. And then on the bottom part, it essentially gives you a direct view of the speaker. So we use audio and visual cues to determine who's speaking. It splits the screen as many as 3 times if there are simultaneous conversations going on. So it's incredibly easy to use. It works with all the major video conferencing platforms and it's Wi-Fi connected. So it gets smarter through new software that we're able to deliver via over-the-air updates. How the company was founded, the co-founder and CTO, Mark Schnittman, uh, who's still here at Owl Labs, he actually managed a remote team. And during standups, he basically was coming in through a video conferencing software on somebody's laptop. And so what he would say is it was difficult to manage a remote team because he didn't feel like he was in the room participating. And then one day somebody took the laptop, they put it in the center of the room on a swivel stool. And as different people were talking, they were physically, manually moving the stool around so that Mark could follow along and really feel like he was participating. And then he took that idea and has created an amazing product. I came to the company in 2018. I have sales and marketing background across advertising technology, across Yahoo. I'm an engineer by education. And so the reason why I came in as CEO of this company was because you would read the customer reviews and you would hear about the experiences from customers. You can't replace an amazing product and you can't replace an amazing community of users. And so that's why I chose to join.

That's such an incredible story. And it's interesting because we've been working remotely for the past year and a half for the first time for many, but it seems like Mark's been doing this for a while and faced the problems and challenges that remote work presents a lot earlier than I think the majority of the population. Owl Labs has been following the remote landscape since, you know, 2014. I'm sure the landscape has changed quite a bit. You've released a report over the past 2 years on the future of remote work. What has been most surprising to you from those reports and from those learnings?

We are a distributed company, not fully distributed. We are headquartered in Boston, but we always thought of the hiring pool as wherever someone lives, if they're talented and fit in, then we will hire them. So we've always been about 40% remote, even prior to the pandemic. We actually, we've been in business since 2014. We shipped our first product in 2017. We've actually done the State of Remote Work annually for 5 years now. And I think it's interesting because when you look at what employees are thinking about remote work, now they've gotten a taste for it. We used to do the State of Remote Work and we used to talk to people about what their thoughts were on hybrid and working from home, and it was such a different environment. But now that everybody's gotten a taste for it, it's really changed their perspective. And if you look at the State of Remote Work, there's some really interesting stuff in there. Which is 80% expect to work from home at least 3 times per week. And almost half, or 46%, said if they were unable to work remotely at all after COVID, they'll look for another job. So that was, it is a clear indication that not only have we gotten a taste for it, but for those of us that, and for those companies that are still thriving and productive, you actually might be able to have it all. So it's really exciting time. And the adoption rate of remote work has increased steadily. And I think we're just at the early stages of it. And now all those trends are heading in the direction that this is here to stay.

You mentioned an interesting point around being able to hire top talent wherever they were in the world. And I think that was a theme that Madison McIlwain and I have heard through the past few seasons of our podcast, where many founders like the Brex founder Enrique Dubucross was telling us about how he was desperate to hire all of these people in Brazil and around the world because they were incredible engineers, but it was really difficult to get them to San Francisco. And so now they're becoming a kind of hybrid and remote-first company moving forward. To your point, there's probably a lot of interesting challenges with having it all, such as having people in the office and having people through video conferencing. And so excited to dig in a little bit later around how to manage that hybrid model.

Yeah, that's an important part of the equation, and I think we're talking about about these different modes of back to work, and I think it would be helpful for both us and for our listeners to level set on what are the options available to companies today and how are we thinking through what those look like. So Silicon Valley Bank's Back to Work Future of Work report talks about 4 different modes of how this work style will go forward. And perhaps for our conversation today, we can dive in and use this framework. And actually, we'd be curious to know if there's a 5th mode that you guys have been thinking about. But as I understand them, there's back to office, business as usual, what it was prior to the pandemic, hybrid, so some in-person, some in the office, remote first, so the notion is you will be remote, however, there might be opportunities to be in a central shared space, and then fully remote, i.e., distributed work, likely not very much in-person activity. Do those sound all-encompassing to you in terms of the different conversations you're having across your companies and with your customers?

Yeah, absolutely. First of all, I actually don't think this is a new thing. I think it's— what's new is companies being forced to think about it in a new way. I can tell you that T3, as a real estate company, 6 years ago went to a completely untethered activity-based work mode. So in other words, no one had an assigned seat, let alone office. As CEO, I would come in to one of our offices and do my work, and if I needed a private space for the day, I'd book a private space. But if I wanted to be out working with the teams, I'd be out in the open space. I honestly didn't care whether Claudia was in the office or working from home. Just get your stuff done. We've been that way for 6 years, and I, I can tell you it's been fantastic. We will always have a physical presence, whether it's myself or my— now my new colleagues at Savills, because we believe there's a lot that gets done in person that can only get done in certain manners in person. That doesn't mean remote employees who don't have an assigned office can't still interact. But I think for a lot of companies, having that opportunity for physical presence is really important. I would just say we think the biggest issue is going to be the management of these new modalities of work. Super easy to say, we're going to go hybrid and Frank can come in Tuesdays and Thursdays and I'll come in Monday and Wednesday. Trying to manage that is really hard. What if everyone shows up on the same day? What if all the executives come in on a Wednesday and half the team's out? Well, the people who went in are clearly on the fast track. So, it's really complicated to try to figure out how to manage this, let alone, as you mentioned, equity. Like, how does someone calling in on a Zoom call, the people sitting in the office going to feel with their colleagues? I actually, we're pretty hopeful. We think coming out of this, work is going to be a healthier experience. I think companies are going to be able to engage with their employees better.

Sounds like every listener will be getting an Owl device gift with purchase for listening to this episode to enable what Roy is discussing. We can talk about that offline, Frank.

I want a commission, Frank. I want a commission.

Every, everybody can have one for $999 per year.

Small fee, small fee. Yeah, no, it's interesting, Roy, hearing you say that. Total plug here, but we actually have a company we invested in during the pandemic who is called OfficeTogether, and they're really trying to manage and be that HR software behind what you discussed, which is who's here what day, have they filled out their health questionnaire, are they gonna have a seat, are they not gonna have a seat? And that's in the early days cuz these companies didn't really need to exist in the way that they would today. But that feels like a definite area of opportunity that we're watching on the early stage investment side. I'd be really curious to see what you guys find that's out there to help you manage it that's not human. How can we automate this experience?

I'm getting a ton of due diligence calls from VCs about the, the prop tech facility management space, right? This pandemic has created a lot of opportunities and for new tools for sure. And Frank obviously is with a company that's got a great tool. I've spent all this year counseling a lot of founders around calm is contagious. It's a great phrase that there are a lot of reactions and conclusions people jump to early in the pandemic. And I think this thing still has time to play out as to the future of work and how companies think about it. So, just gather data, survey your employees, think about your customers, think about it in a strategic objective way as opposed to emotional. And it's easy to get emotional in this kind of an— or particularly the environment we were just in.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I was talking to, as a founder myself, and I was talking to a few founder friends of mine. We all started our businesses in a fully remote environment during the pandemic. We don't know what it's like to work in an office full-time. And as it feels like things are opening up, people are going back to the office. Our friends who are working at larger tech companies are already hybrid back in the office. There's a lot of sort of confusion or trying to like wait it out to see what other startups do when thinking about actually going back into the office, if at all. What advice would you give founders who have never been in the office when thinking about the back-to-work strategy?

I would go visit a company that's in the office, talk to a fellow founder, understand how it's working. I am thrilled that chief people officers are now at the center of real estate and workplace conversations. 15 years ago, it was pretty much a CFO-led conversation. So it's cost. Yeah, it's a driver of human behavior, office space and real estate. And so having chief people officers, I think, at the center of the conversation is critical. So I would seek out really talented CPOs from good companies and ask them how does the office fit into their construct as building their company, like a bigger company that's maybe past the startup phase and understand how it's impacted them. And I would say more of the chief people officers of the 500 and larger employee tech companies that I know are passionate about having an office in the fabric of their workplace strategy than the small startups where they're like, I can go full remote. I think that's interesting. They all know the power of place yet are clearly embracing these other new modalities you mentioned around hybrid.

Frank, we're talking a lot about the people behind what empowers the hybrid and future of work models that we've discussed, But what you're building with Owl Labs is the infrastructure behind that empowers any space, whether it be in Austin, Boston, Silicon Valley, or London, to become a friendly environment for all employees to engage, whether it be in person and virtually. How has this black swan event really catalyzed what you were already working towards and building and, and changed, if at all, your go-to-market strategy?

Yeah, it actually hasn't changed our go-to-market strategy. We've been pretty consistent because we were following the idea of supporting hybrid work all along. And I think the difference now is before there were multiple offices being connected and there were video calls being done, but now you can pretty much assume that almost all of your meetings will have at least one remote participant. So think about that. So we went from a world where I came from a company prior to Owl Labs where we didn't do video at all. Even when we were working with our remote offices. But now companies like that, all they're doing is video because everybody's so used to it. It's so much more effective. And that's where our technology certainly comes in because it's— if you're a fly on the wall in a video conference because you're at home and you're not as productive as you would have been in the office, that's where this all breaks down. So we need to make sure that we have the proper tools, we have the proper technology so that it doesn't matter whether you're sitting at your home in Texas and the majority of the people have clustered in Boston, you need to be as much a part of that conversation as anybody else. So having that technology so that it is seamless for employees to be able to include remote folks is really key to this whole thing.

Frank, you reminded me of a story of a New York-based tech company. This is probably 10 years ago. So the headquarters is in New York and they had a new office in California. Smaller office. And every Friday, they would get everybody together for an all-team video call. So, it'll be lunchtime in New York, excuse me, and they would have pizza brought in and they'd be having pizza. And the California office, who already felt a little disconnected from the headquarters, would sit there watching the headquarters team enjoying their pizza and they're all talking. And the CEO thought he was doing a great thing. He was bringing everyone together for this weekly call and it actually was destructive to the culture. And so, The new head of this San Francisco field office called him and said, "We can't take this anymore, watching you all enjoying your pizza lunch while we're sitting here in this drab conference room." So, the headquarters crew in New York started to send bagels and breakfast to their friends in San Francisco. So, like a $75 bagel breakfast connected these two separate groups, these two separate teams. Together. So even the simplest little things like $50 worth of bagels and coffee can actually make people feel better about the experience of being separated.

One of my old coworkers who is now a founder is solving or trying to make that a little bit easier by creating a company that is solely focused around hybrid office event planning and making sure that there are cohesive events for offices in different cities. Whether it's through a meetup or through bagel days, as Roy has discussed. And so it definitely seems that not only collaboration and efficiency at work and productivity is incredibly important, but equity is also really important in building that sense of community. Frank, what tips would you give founders in structurally trying to make sure that their model and their workplace is as effective and collaborative as possible, but also as inclusive as possible.

Yeah, I think this all comes down to listening to the employees, right? And this is going to be a really complicated time for people, right? Not everybody had the same experience during COVID Some, it didn't come close to them at all, and some it was, it hit really close to home. So this return to work is going to be an incredibly complex time and The thing that founders and CEOs and others need to take into consideration is how the employee base is feeling and what's comfortable for them. So first and foremost, communication is the most important thing you can do there. Make sure you're communicating, make sure you have empathy for your employee base. And then of course, make sure that you have the tools, the technology, and the office setup that are really structured for this new world. Because there's a setup that we had before where everybody was in their bench-style seats and elbow to elbow. And that may not necessarily be where everybody wants to be going forward. You're going to have a lot of employees that don't even necessarily want to ever go in the office again. So, you need to take all those different personas of the employees that you have and really determine how to best set your company up for success by trying to take all those different folks into consideration.

Madison McIlwain: You guys have such a good and fresh perspective on what the future of work looks like. And obviously, that's indicative of where your careers have gone, but you guys have been around the block a few times and it feels like a lot of companies who've been around for a while are not taking that approach. Goldman Sachs is back in the office 5 days a week, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Curious about your perspectives on why companies are choosing that path. If you think there's a, a strong reason to go that route and what that's gonna look like for those employees who might now start looking at other companies and say really honestly, Goldman, it's not worth it. [Speaker:Cullen Roche] Yeah.

And you know what? And you're going to lose those employees, right? I think we've seen even some tech companies come out with a really strong stance and they've said, "We're an in-office culture." And then their employees are like, "Hold on a second. That may not be what I want going forward." And that's talent that companies can't— It's so expensive to recruit. And it's so expensive to get tenured folks to be able to contribute at the levels that they do. Honestly, I think it's foolish for companies to just make assumptions that the way they did it before the pandemic was the way that it needs to be done. Maybe because they're a company that's 100 years old and that's the way they've always done it. They need to reevaluate those models now. Otherwise, they risk losing their really important talent, which is what the key is for all these companies to be successful.

To be a little provocative, I would say, though, two things. One is I think that was just a communications issue. In other words, Jamie Dimon or the CEO of Goldman, there are a There's a lot of reasons why a company may choose to have an office-led environment. What do I have to add to that? I don't know the company, but there's a communications issue in how you communicate that. My personal opinion is I think it is as risky to go full remote as it is to say, "Okay, everyone back 100% of the time." That's my opinion that I think most companies, not all, but most companies will require a fabric of workplace experiences so that if the next great engineer doesn't live in my headquarters city, I should still be able to hire them and have them have a wonderful experience. Or a working parent wants to be able to just be in the office 3 days a week. We've done that. I think that's critical. So, my opinion is this whole remote first or fully in office, I think are going to be 2 years from now more of the outliers and most will be more of this hybrid mixed experience. That's my gut. So, I think the mistakes have been around communication more than actual strategies.

And yeah, I think you're right. You said it right earlier on, Roy, which is I think you're going to give this a little bit of time to find its way because I don't think that you can put a stake in the ground right now and say, this is how we are going to operate for the next X period of time. I think you have to be a little bit flexible. I think we have to see how things go. I'll tell you right now, locally in Boston, I have more employees than I have seats. But I'm not racing out to get more space because I'm not sure exactly what the employee base is going to wind up doing over time here. All I know is that we've set up a culture of accountability. I mean, we hire people to do jobs. We don't hire them so we can watch them work. However, there will be times when collaboration is better and more effective in person, just like it is— there are times where it's better when I don't spend 20 hours a week in the car commuting. And can get more time because I need more physical time that week. Whether it be Goldman or Chase or others, they're going to have to see how things evolve and protect that employee base for sure.

Hey, Madison, you said, I think referring to Frank and I, people who've been around the block. I just wanted to make a comment on that. I was on a webinar the other day and the person referred to later stage workers. You can't say that. So I will just say I've done real estate for technology and life science companies through 3 recessions. It's my first pandemic. Super interesting. But I would say I actually view that as maybe my knees hurt a little bit because I'm older, but having seen ups and downs, again, I think that sense of like, to Frank's point, gathering data, staying calm, maybe this is the time to sign a 2-year lease instead of a 5-year lease, maybe buy some nice furniture, but not spend a lot of money on construction, all these different things. It's a time to, to learn and survey and get information, not overreact. We're going to be okay. I think working through some really tough times, starting a company right before 9/11, has given me that perspective of getting through it.

Absolutely. And you both don't look a day over 30, but I will say The Jerry Maguire reference gave you away, Roy.

So Madison, I've been throwing that out and people are like, what is Jerry Maguire? So I've got, I gotta move on to a new super cool character who started a company.

Show me the money, Roy. Show me the money.

It's so funny cuz Madison and I joke that even us in our mid-20s no longer understand any of these Gen Z TikTok references and lingo. And I'm starting to feel like we're starting to head around the block as well.

Welcome to later stage, uh, work, Claudia.

Work.

Well, as you were talking, both of you, I got this vision of the Boston Tea Party, like American patriots throwing tea into the harbor or the French Revolution with the Bastille storming. Like the employees want a voice is what I can say I'm hearing you say. And I'm intrigued to understand how both of you in the CEO position are thinking about empowering your employees. To have a voice in these back-to-office strategies?

Well, I would just say it starts before your back-to-office strategy. It's— I think it's leadership. I think incredibly hierarchical organizations are not going to be as successful as ones that are collaborative and empowering to even the newest, youngest member of the team. And some of the greatest ideas are coming from your new employees. So I would say for me, thankfully, this started 20 years ago as to why did we start T3, what were our values, Who did we want to hire? How do we want to treat them? How do we think about diversity? So that when we hit a pandemic and shit hit the fan and this wonderful— We were in Scottsdale, Arizona at our annual offsite, which by the way is an incredible thing, our offsite. And 2 weeks later, the pandemic hit. It was like otherworldly to go from celebrating under the stars to all the success we had created to being in our basement separated. So for me, I think, again, culture and workplace strategy actually it's got to be the fabric of like how you build your company so that when you have things like return to work or pandemic, you're trying to live through those values and not just a specific event that might happen to you.

So, yeah, the way that we've always— the way I've always approached it is that it's not the founder's company, it's not my company, it's our company. Right. And actually, I think we've done better. I think our communication through the pandemic has improved because you focus so much on it. Whereas before you probably took it for granted because you saw people in the hallway every day. But I think when we approach it from the point of view of every employee that starts here, every full-time employee is a shareholder in the company, right? And therefore, they're owners in the company and they get to drive the culture. They get to drive a lot of the decisions that we make. Of course, not everybody's always going to agree with every decision that is made. And ultimately, I'm the arbitrator a lot of times, but they know that they have a voice.

In the old days, predate myself, Frank will remember this, but if you walked into an office building in the lobby, there was a directory on the wall and it would have not just the company's names, but it would have like key executives of the company on the directory on the wall. Every day you'd walk in, it would just remind people, well, those are the people that matter here at this company and the rest are workers that don't really matter. And I think the last 25 years has brought a whole new way of thinking about teamwork, collaboration, and, and just really listening to your team. Now, not every company is good at that, but I would say if you look at the companies that succeed, that's core to their values, is thinking about their team, listening, and creating a great workplace strategy that people want to come to work every day, whether that's over a Zoom or in the office.

It's been so interesting, at least in my lifetime, to hear trends around The importance of getting a corner office. And then all of a sudden it was all about open floor plans and collaborative working in the office and offices and campuses, Googleplex and, and the Apple offices. And now it's definitely remote and hybrid. And it seems like that's going to play a role in how we work from home and just work generally moving forward. Do you think that the shift away from being on a campus being in Silicon Valley, being in San Francisco or other tech hubs is a permanent dynamic shift in the tech world?

San Francisco is far from dead. It is the heart of a huge part of our innovation economy. So there's New York and Boston and Austin and Denver. I think new cities are going to come up and be super interesting. So Nashville is no longer considered like a second-tier city, right, in the tech world. Columbus has got a lot of activity, Cleveland. So I think San Francisco, New York, and Boston are like here to stay for a long time, but we are going to see growth in other new cities around the country. I would also say one thing we're pretty excited about, and we actually started to think about a few years ago, which is, again, back to activity-based work, but think of the office in many ways like a hospitality experience where I'm drawn to come there because I want to be with people and I want to be able to collaborate, but it may not be where I do my heads-down work. I may be doing heads-down work at home or in a coffee shop, but I want to be there to socialize and to collaborate. So, we may see a shift in some of the design of office space to take on more of a hospitality feel. I was talking to a big tech company in Silicon Valley who was talking about remaking part of their headquarters campus into a retreat center. So, when teams were previously thinking of going offsite and renting a hotel for an event and meeting, they would actually come to the headquarters campus to use it more for a retreat center.

I've been reading a lot about Miami. I would love a Miami winter headquarters and a Boston summer headquarters. That sounds like the perfect scenario for me. But yeah, I do not at all think that the— Listen, the talents, there's still a lot of talent out there in the Bay Area. And I think that will tend to flock to where the talent lives. Probably our biggest aggregation of talent outside of Boston is in the Bay Area. And we have a really strong pipeline of software engineers and leadership. That we've been talking to out in that area. And I, for me personally, for Owl Labs, there will be a, a second office, and that office will be out in the Bay Area. So I, I haven't changed my perspective on that at all.

Frank, I had to tell you that we had, when our office was open, one of the little owls turning around in our conference room looking at us. So I did want to give a shout out to your product. That's good.

Make sure that you have the most recent software updates so that you get the best features. And we have a whole new assortment of products coming in July that I'm expecting a podcast friend discount.

We'll talk after. That sounds good.

That sounds good.

That was the perfect segue into my next question, which was, Frank, tell us a little bit about what's next for Owl Labs and how reopening is energizing what you guys have on the horizon.

Yeah, it has been an incredible time for Owl because even during the pandemic, there were businesses that were essential businesses and the Owl was a really good way for them to be able to connect remote folks to people that were in offices, in hospitals, in schools, you name it, Owlz have been there. And that is the core of what we do is, you know, we provide that unique experience so that the remote participant really feels like they're in the conversation. I think for us, it's like I said earlier, it's hardware and software that make meetings better, make meetings more productive. And we think about it in 3 phases. We think about the pre-meeting component, the in-meeting component, which is what we're doing right now, and then the post meeting, follow-up, right? As you have more people remote, you'll need more tools, you'll need more technology to complete that cycle and make it extremely effective. And so we'll be rolling out a lot of software products. In addition, our hardware flagship line will continue to evolve as we create networks of Owl so that we expand that experience and then bring other physical elements into the room like whiteboard content, and other things like that.

Congratulations on all of the progress that you've made, and I'm really excited to hopefully getting to experience an OWL hybrid meeting soon. Sounds like Roy has already had the pleasure, which is great. And thank you, Roy, for sharing this really exciting next step for T3 Advisors and all that's to come for you. We're really thrilled to continue watching how you empower the future of workplaces for the years to come. We have a hero question we like to ask every guest on our podcast, and we ask that this question not be your mom or your wives, although those are, I'm sure, no doubt wonderful women, but we ask for it more to be in the professional context. I'll let you both answer, but Frank, we can start with you. Who is a woman in your professional life that has had a profound impact on you?

Yeah. So I had a former superior at Yahoo. Her name was Hillary Schneider and she was EVP of North America at Yahoo and we worked closely together. I was a direct report and there were some instances where she really gave a lot of belief and confidence in me and that really helped drive me to a different level, both at Yahoo as well as my career beyond that. And she was just an incredible mentor and friend and I really valued that relationship a lot.

There are a lot of very proud that T3 is ourselves over 50% women and have an incredible daughter in graduate school. But I would say one in particular comes to mind is that really amazing friend and client and mentor, Christina Laconi, who's the Chief People Officer at Rapid7. And she has built an incredible culture with Corey Thomas at Rapid7. It's a place a lot of people want to go to work. We have had incredible conversations about how important culture is to building a company. And I've been honored to just listen and learn from her about really how talent drives great companies forward and how she and I can work together, our teams, to improve it in the work we do. But Christina is a really incredible person.

Thank you so much, Roy and Frank, for sitting down with us today. It's been incredible to hear about your journeys and what's to come, and also what's to come with the future of work. It's been a really insightful conversation, and I'm sure Madison McIlwain and I have both taken a lot of your advice and wisdom and will be noodling on on what the future of working looks for us. So, thank you so much for joining us on The Room today.

Thank you both.

Nice to be here.

Thank you for listening to this episode of The Room Podcast. If you're new here, please subscribe, follow, write us a review, or DM us on social. We'd love to say hi. We've had some pretty incredible guests over the past few seasons, so go check them out. We'll be back next week with our season 3 finale. Tuesday, June 22nd, 10 AM Eastern, 7 AM Pacific. See you in the room.

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