S9E7: Christelle Rohaut is Matching Employers with Modern Office Spaces using Codi

Getting an office space can be outsourced very similarly to how companies outsource HR to Gusto and payments to Stripe and data centers to AWS. Why would you need to go through an archaic process in 2023 for your office?

Welcome back to season 9 of The Room podcast. Claudia, happy Tuesday.

Happy Tuesday, Madison. Thrilled to be back behind the mic with you. Since last season, you've had a few updates on your end. You're now at Harvard Business School. Congratulations.

Thank you so much, Claudia. It's been a dream of mine for some time to attend, and I'm thrilled to be back on the East Coast this fall. You'll have to keep me updated on what's going on in the Bay Area news and all things Pryve, where you're still co-CEO and co-founder.

I absolutely will. Well, if you're new here, we're two best friends building our careers around tech and entrepreneurship. Since August 2020, we've interviewed over 80 guests, including the likes of Michelle Zatlin of Cloudflare, Vlad Magdalen of Webflow, Ciara, the Grammy Award-winning R&B vocalist, Spencer Raskoff of Zillow, and many more. Through these conversations, we open the door to the room where it happens.

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Welcome back to another episode of The Room Podcast. Today, we are excited to share our conversation as we sit down with the visionary Christelle Ruhow, CEO and founder of Codi. In this conversation, we delve into the ever-evolving landscape of modern work and office spaces. Codi, the pioneering company, specializes in providing turnkey private offices tailored to the dynamic needs of contemporary businesses. Codi, which was founded in 2018, since has navigated the pandemic, adapted its business to the current working landscape, and has since raised $21 million in venture funding from investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, and NFX. Join us today as we explore the journey of Codi from its inception and flexibility during challenging times to its promising vision for the future of commercial real estate. Discover how innovation, adaptability, and a mission-driven approach have led to a remarkable transformation in the way we think about where and how we work. We hope you enjoy today's conversation. Let's open the door.

Chrystel, thank you so much for joining us today in The Room.

Thank you, Madison. I'm very excited to be here.

We're so excited for listeners. Actually, Chrystel and I met a few years back in this SF tech ecosystem, and so it's really a delight for Claudia and I to get to have her on The Room podcast today. And we love to start at the beginning with all of our guests. So if you could tell us a bit more about where you grew up and how that has shaped your view of the world.

I grew up in southern France. I would love to say a little village, but it's not the case. It's a city the size of Oakland, California. And I'm an only child and I think it definitely shaped my view of the world in the sense of, I love cities, I love neighborhoods that are very walkable and I love meeting people. And that drove me to urban planning and later on, uh, Codi.

In that vein of early identity, did you always think you were gonna become a founder like you are today?

Absolutely not. I wanted to work, work for the government and, and be a city planner for, for cities.

Okay, so we're excited to pull on that thread to ultimately be where you are today. But as a part of that journey, you had attended École Polytechnique in France for a master's in environmental engineering and then made your way out to the US at Berkeley where you did another master's in city planning. Really an interesting origin story. We've had a lot of founders who started in one lane and then switched completely completely. Tell us a little bit about how that education background shaped your interest in urban development. What was the curiosity about cities that got you on this track in the first place?

Every single day you walk down the street in your neighborhood and interact with people in your neighborhood and the local businesses, and then sometimes you have to commute to go to work, and then you come back and again interact with your neighborhood and go to bed. It's the life of every single human being. And I felt like if we can design better our neighborhoods and help that cycle that we do every day be just more enjoyable and more connected with the people around us and with the spaces around us, it can only make people happier. And so I became very obsessed with designing better cities, better neighborhoods, initially from a sustainability angle, because I was good in math and physics and it felt like the right path. But then I, I realized I really want to see the impact of what I'm doing on a daily base and not wait 50 years if I made an impact in climate change. And that drove me to urban planning and, and make the switch. Amazing.

What would you say is a key difference between cities in France and cities in the US that you've observed?

That's a big question. You know, I did 2 years of this in Berkeley. I think the number one thing is walkability. The most walkable city in the US is Portland, Oregon, because it has a grid of, uh, 1-minute walk. So you can go from every intersection within 1 minute, and that's walkability. The worst walkable city in the US is Irvine, California. The walks are 20-minute walks. It was more meant for cars, right? And so that really changed completely how you interact with your environment. And it's really based on history. France has been built over thousands of years where the US is a much younger country. The cities were more designed around roads and cars were already there for the, the most recent urban developments.

That makes sense. That's so interesting. I studied abroad in Lyon and definitely is a much smaller city, much more walkable. I walk to school every day versus here you don't walk to school. That's not a thing you do.

I try to bring my son to school, uh, walking.

You mentioned a little bit of the research that you were doing both in school and out of school. You went to be a project engineer on smart cities to work on community development and disaster rehabilitation in Chile. Fascinating again to see another country, another part of the world, and their orientation towards Citi. Could you tell us a little bit more about the combined experiences and how they ultimately did inform your founder journey?

I think, as you said, it's very connected to the country itself and their unique challenges. In France and Europe, the, the biggest challenges or conversations around city planning is really smart cities. Like, how can you track better everything that is happening in the city and optimize it for less carbon emissions and for more walkability and all these different challenges. So the smart cities, I liked it, but it felt like a nice-to-have problem instead of a really root cause problem that you can experience in the US or in Latin America. And so when I worked in Latin America, I actually did a little bit of smart cities for some point, but then the, the disasters with the earthquakes and things like that happening in Chile, that's like a really deep problem that truly destroys neighborhoods. And then there's a whole process around how do you rebuild it? Can we rebuild it in a sustainable manner? And I think that has a massive impact on that city for the next century, potentially. So I think that really got me fascinated, but then I did study in Berkeley, so I studied like the US urban planning and urban design, and I think I had a cultural shock. I realized how much room there is for improvement here, and I love the culture of innovation, and I felt like this is where I could have the biggest impact and truly make a difference.

We're gonna get to what Codi is and does in a minute here, but Can you orient our listeners around the timing? So you had been doing all this work sometimes at like a theoretical level around urban planning and design and what it could look like, and then had this urge to go into actually tactically being in the mix on the building side of things. What year was this?

It was actually 2017, 2018. It was my last year at Berkeley. I switched all my classes from the theories of urban planning to business classes. And how to make a change when you have an idea.

It's so interesting, right? Because today, I think Codi, I've heard it in the context of the conversation on the future of work and how we think about hybrid remote and where people are gonna be and where they work and have community. You were thinking about this well before the pandemic brought this conversation into the forefront of our minds. So maybe could you just tell us a little bit about the earliest inception of what you thought Codi could and should be?

So at the very root of this, I joined a fellowship with the Ellen MacArthur Foundation on circular economies. And, that's really how I started to study the root cause, problem of like what I was very passionate about, which is underutilized spaces. And the most amount of spaces that were underutilized at the time during the day was homes. It was residential homes were just sitting empty all day long. And people were commuting to commercial corridors and neighborhoods just for work, and then they would come back. And so you have this massive inefficiency of transportation and use of space. And during that fellowship, I was just going through the theoretical lens of what if we could repurpose the use of the space that is meant for residential at night into something useful during the day. What do people do during the day?

They work.

So why do they have to commute downtown if they can find a great workspace nearby? And so that was my thesis. And I met an entrepreneur at that fellowship who told me, you have another year at Berkeley. You're very lucky. You're still a student. You have nothing to lose. Just try it out. And so then I changed all my classes and my second year of Berkeley, I went through, um, Big Ideas, which was an innovation contest. Took me a whole year, got great mentorship and, and started to really bootstrap this concept of turning homes into a coworking space during the day.

We're going to dive into how Cody has scaled and what Cody is now, especially post this reset on how we think about spaces, especially workspaces post-pandemic. But you were really thinking through how could we change the framework around how spaces are used way before that. So I'd love to dig into what was the aha moment when you realized Okay, I've taken these business classes, I've done this Big Ideas Challenge, I've got amazing mentorship. Now I'm actually going to start a business and start scaling.

I think I never thought about scaling really. I was more like, there was no other way in my mind, honestly. I was obsessed. I was sleeping 4 hours a day. I could not help but think, why is nobody doing this? Why do we have all these homes sitting empty? It makes no sense. And I was just fired up by the belief that it had to exist. And if nobody else is doing it, then I'm gonna do it. Living in a different country, I think it also gives you that freedom of like, there's no expectation for me where I am. Nobody expected me to do urban planning either. So I was just like, I'm gonna do whatever I want. And that's what I wanna do because I feel that's where I can have really big impact. I always also looked up to Airbnb and I think that really inspired me. I was like, I think this is the next Airbnb. This can change things on a really big scale. So like I did have that ambition of making Codi a big thing, but like I thought it was a movement. It could start a movement of utilizing space in a different manner and working in a different way.

So tell us more about what Codi's MVP was and really how the core product has evolved over time.

So the MVP was me calling friends to open their homes for coworking, and they would let me in the morning. I would bring bagels and then I would wait for random students that I didn't know at Berkeley to come cowork with me. And that was our first coworking sessions at Berkeley. I was still a student at the time.

That's incredible. So after you are bringing bagels and starting to cowork with folks that you've run into. What was the first version of Codi where you started not even knowing who your customers were? Tell us a little bit more about what the product platform looked like at that juncture.

I initially thought Codi was for freelancers, so we went into Oakland, we gave a lot of flyers throughout coffee shops, and we signed up, I think, 200 people in a matter of weeks. And then we split them between hosts and members, and we started to do those coworking sessions. Freelancers, it's a very difficult target customer. I'm not a freelancer myself, so we learned pretty quickly that was not the right target. And then we had a second persona use Codi at some point, and that changed things. So the second one was a startup. At some point we had a startup book the entire space, because initially we were doing coworking sessions, and then we had a group of founders who were like, hey Christelle, I would like to just get the space Monday, Tuesday and have my whole company work from here. Can we just privatize it? And so we started to do that and build more features so that people can come as a group and then book the whole thing and then come on a regular base. And that was the beginning of hybrid work. You just work a couple of days a week somewhere else and the other days in your home.

You guys were doing hybrid work before hybrid work was mainstream. And so let's chat a little bit more about how work has changed. Since COVID and seeing COVID really prompted a revolution in remote and hybrid work. Tell us about how Cody's roadmap changed and how the company grew in light of these global changes.

The pandemic changed two things, one on the supply side and one on the demand side. So on the demand side, workplace flexibility has become mainstream. That's just the way it is now. There's no more new normal. There's no going back to like 2019. It's, it has stabilized. There's a lot of surveys and studies that show that now employees go on average twice a week in the office. And I think it's 80 or 90% of companies who have an in-person component. That was a couple of years where it was unbest. Nobody knew what was the new normal. Like, is it you work from home every single day? So you had really extreme work from home groups that were like, this is it. Everyone should be at home forever. But then after 2 years, there's a lot of mental health issues and is it really a life to be at home every single day? I'm not in that camp. I'm more for a compromise and a balance and just let people go somewhere else if they want to. And I think a lot of businesses settle on that. They understand like, okay, they need a space to offer that as an option. And then, and then employees come just a couple of days a week and not full-time. And I think that's not going anywhere. COVID really changed that behavior because before people thought we were crazy. That's why we started with freelancers as well, because they were the most extreme with work flexibility, but they were almost the only one. And then you had some big companies that allowed remote work and those employees were using Cody. We had people from Cisco using us and a few Silicon Valley companies who were allowing remote work, but it was 10%. Of all employees, where now it's like every single employee is remote a couple of days a week.

I like that you've called out 2 years after being full remote for a period of time. There's just a lot of not only health benefits, but efficiency benefits, community benefits to having some sort of in-person touchpoint. So now that we've come out on the other side of the pandemic, What's your take on the current commercial real estate climate in cities like San Francisco, as an example?

When we hit the pandemic, things shut down, right? There was shelter in place. Then we started to open up again the homes that we had. People were very concerned with the virus. You were not even allowing your own family to see you, so what would you allow a stranger in your home and work with them? It was a really hard business model to have at the time. A big change also was that in 2019, homes were sitting empty all day long. 2021, everyone works from home at least a couple of days a week. So the utilization has actually peaked and it's no longer an issue. But the issue now is commercial real estate is sitting empty. And so it just moved— this utilization problem moved from residential to commercial. And that was crazy to see. I think it doesn't change much in my opinion, what we do in the sense of like, it's always about leveraging underutilized spaces and helping create a, a healthy, productive, community-driven place to work. But it's been quite a ride, I must say. And so in 2021, late 2021, we pivoted towards just taking on commercial real estate and turning them into a flexible turnkey space to work in.

I just wanna jump in there because it's actually a fascinating experience from a marketplace perspective to have your supply change entirely. Like the thesis underpinning not changing, but the tactical supply going from the opposite of what you set out to do. How as a founder did you mentally get around this shift and even like change your storytelling with investors because of this huge out-of-your-control shift in the market?

Mentally, it was not easy because I was in love with homes. I wanted to work in homes, not my home, but like other people's homes. But I think that at some point you need to face the reality, right? And the reality is that we didn't have product-market fit with that product and people wanted something different from their home. They were tired of working from home all the time. So it's not to go to somebody else's home. And we started to onboard some commercial spaces that no one's sleeping there at night and people really liked it. And they were like, yeah, this is great. This is different. This is like, I can focus. And also it's more aligned with B2B, right? You need to have something very professional and controlled when it's for your company. And so we just went with it. And, you know, investors, if it works, they happy. They know I'm a mission-driven founder. So I think they had a bit of worry around that, but I think the whole team went behind this mission because commercial real estate sitting empty is not a good thing for cities. It creates crimes around, it's frightening. There has always been an issue of vacancy with those spaces across neighborhoods. It would be taken by small shops who would go bankrupt every 2 or 3 years, and then you have the full lease signed for at least a year, and then maybe another small shop will come. What if those neighborhood small shops become like a hub where Company A can come Monday, Tuesday, Company B can come Wednesday, Friday, then it does boost local economy, does help that neighborhood get people to go get a coffee and eat in the community during the day. And so I think it changed, but it stayed on the mission for us about helping cities.

I'm currently working in downtown San Francisco and walk to work every day, and I'm just struck by how many vacancies there are. And when we were renewing our lease this month, For our office space, the conversation went very differently than I think probably it would've 10 years ago, not even. Tell us a little bit more about the current commercial real estate landscape in cities like San Francisco and how startups are plugging into that ecosystem.

San Francisco right now has 45% vacancy rates. In some neighborhoods, it's even worse, like SoMa. New York City has, I think, a lot less, around 19%, if I'm not mistaken. but still a lot higher than prior to the pandemic. To me, it's pretty clear that the demand needs something different than what the supply is offering. Commercial real estate is extremely archaic. It hasn't changed in a century. It's still the same thing. You talk to a broker, it takes 6 months, you tour spaces, there's nothing online. They don't even show the price. And then you go into negotiation, You read this 45-page lease that is completely not tenant-friendly. You commit, you take the risk. For a startup, it's crazy. How can you know what is your headcount in 3 years from now? Even a year is like a big commitment. And that's like at every single stage of company's growth. Look at what happened with Pinterest, public company, but like they still lost, like, I think they paid $90 million or something to get out of the lease. Because it was too much space. And I think it's been disregarded for too long. The commercial real estate is not aligned with the needs of fast-growing companies. You need to readjust your space every year, basically. You also need it to be a lot more easy. It's a very long and painful process to lease a space. And then when you lease it, you still need to set it up and manage. And maybe hire somebody to buy the coffee. And it's just, you don't want to think about this. You want to run your business. And I think when we got into commercial real estate, the pain points were so high that it was just night and day with what we were doing before. We are all about just streamlining that experience and making it as plug and play as possible so that getting an office space can be outsourced very similarly to how companies outsource HR to Gusto and payments to Stripe and data centers to AWS, why would you need to go through an archaic process in 2023 for your office?

You definitely don't and shouldn't need to. And it's really interesting to see how this industry of commercial real estate is breaking under the pressures of a shifting workforce and shifting expectations of what work looks like. And I'm just curious from your perspective with your company, how you think the commercial real estate business will continue to innovate based on the underlying economic principles of commercial real estate. And what's coming to mind as we're chatting is how much money they've had to put into loans to be able to build out and establish those buildings such that they do need the kind of security that has typically required a 3-year lease or 10-year leases even, such that they can actually pay off those loans. How do you envision, or where could we continue to be creative around a business model that's breaking in front of our eyes?

I think it's clear what the demand wants, what companies want. They want ease, speed, and flexibility. To offer ease, you offer a furnished service space. That was the main value prop of coworking spaces. That's why coworking was a breakthrough in commercial real estate. It was probably the first wave of innovation in real estate. So can they offer something as plug and play as a coworking space, but it, it can be fully private. It can be your private office space, right? Speed, I think there needs to be innovation in the leasing agreement itself. That's way too long. Can they get on board with technology? Can they streamline that process? Can they be more transparent with the space? And the only platform out there is LoopNet to see the information on commercial real estate. And the third one is flexibility. So that goes into the lease issue that you were discussing. If they have a loan with the bank, I honestly don't really know what would be the solution for them besides get the demand you can get and don't make it difficult to get. We work with landlords and brokers every single day and we're seeing the change. We're seeing them adapt. We definitely are working like a managed marketplace. We are not doing long-term leases like a WeWork and co were doing. And so we do not offer the traditional route. We offer a very modern route. That is a win, and we do not take any risk on their behalf. That's a change of narrative, but there's no other way. It's a demand-driven market. It's no longer a supply-driven market. The power is in the hands of the tenants now, not in the landlord's hands. So I think all they can do is adapt, and, and it's a good thing.

There are plenty of investors that agree with your POV on where this market is going to help service the need of this shift in demand-driven marketplaces for commercial spaces. And office space. Last year you announced your Series A, which is led by a16, which brings your company into this age of growth and scale for expanding beyond just the SF market and Oakland market that you've been in. So first of all, congratulations on that incredible milestone. It's no small feat. And we're curious, who was the first person to say yes to investing in you and Cody?

That's a great question. The very first person I think was Geoff Doniker, who was the CEO of Yelp for 11 years. He saw me pitch at Berkeley back in 2018.

Amazing.

I know Claudia and I each had our own moments of people who've said yes to us in various ways in our careers and how empowering that can be in those moments. And it's hard to forget who's the first person who does. So that's wonderful. And we're curious to take a step outside of your own fundraising journey and perhaps just looking at the landscape as you're seeing it, having hit this milestone of a Series A, which so many founders are aspiring to hit. What advice would you give to someone who is going out into the market today, whether it be in prop tech or just the industry writ large, on advice from your experience?

It's a lot of building on momentum, and that can mean different things. If you see a company doing the hockey stick, don't wait too long, just go for it. Go for an additional round, even if you don't really need it, because I think it's just a very strong narrative and you always need some funding to like get to the next stage. Also momentum from a, a story standpoint. If the market has a big thing happening going for you, I think we experienced that with hybrid work suddenly becoming the norm. What we did made a ton of sense suddenly and seems to be the only way you can go moving forward is that flexibility in that managed space. If there's a shift in the behavior of the consumers or the clients that go in that direction, I think that's also a strong pull to consider raising. And then for the process itself, I like to do a list and rank investors based on like your ideal and then maybe a bit less ideal. And so you can keep your eyes on the prize of who would you love to work with, because ultimately this is a long-term relationship. Especially at the Series A stage, the person can be working with you for like decades. So, I would recommend to be diligent about who you're talking to and who you are agreeing to work with.

That advice certainly resonates, especially in this economy. So, thank you for sharing that. So, fundraising went well, amazing. The founder's journey is never a straight line, and I think navigating COVID is probably one example of a prop tech startup being faced with something unforeseen. Could you share a moment in Codi's life cycle where things didn't go quite as planned?

Many times. COVID was the biggest one, I think. We could not operate. What do you do when you can't operate? And I think ironically, it was our best time because we hired our, the best talent we could for the company. And the team became very strong because we hired people who were very ambitious, really bold, and saw the long-term pull of COVID for the companies, seeing just that shift for hybrid work and willing to just be in a company that was not operating at the time. It's, it's crazy to me, but it can be a great thing in disguise when you look at things a bit differently. COVID was the biggest roadblock, but on the other side, on the other hand, we did hire our employees at that moment. Another one was pivoting is not easy. And I think a lot of startups die at that point because of stubbornness. I actually had a baby at that time. And I think it helped me because I, I was so emotionally attached to everything we were doing. And then having a child like makes you realize there's more to this world and just you can take some distance and be a bit more neutral. And I think it allowed me to make the pivot. It allowed me to just see things with a more neutral fashion, like, okay, yeah, this is what's best for the business and not just because I want this, you know.

That is an iconic take on lessons from motherhood applied to startup life. So thank you for sharing that. And not, I'm not yet in the kid phase of life, but just thinking through how much is out of your control when you have a kid. It's a good lesson for how out of control things can sometimes be in a startup context.

It's very important because as a lot of women, especially founders, I was very scared. We were a seed stage company. I was like, what am I doing? And you feel guilt. You feel, okay, this is because your baby was the company for so long. But I would encourage any women who want to be a mother to just do it regardless of where you are in your company's life, because it does give you a lot of perspective, and I think you can actually become a better CEO when it happens.

We love to hear that encouragement. And as you think about the founder journey, seeing how it can take many different paths and not necessarily always come from the same life experience, but actually in your case, having this differentiated life experience, whether it be through immigrating to the States, understanding urban planning from the inside out, has birthed this amazing company and insight as well. And I think we've talked a lot about how the commercial real estate model has been shifting under our feet and what that's meant to the Cody business model. So I don't know if we need to talk about that more at length, but I am curious, now that you've established your presence in the Bay Area but have started to expand beyond that, how do you think about the marketplace growth from a city-to-city basis, especially when, as you alluded to, every city is different, whether it be international or just in the States and what that looks like for Codi's growth?

Great question. We are a localized marketplace, a little bit like Yelp. You need the local shops and you need the local tourists or local residents to go eat at those local shops. Demand and supply are very much in the same neighborhood geographically, and it's the same for us. We do have operations on the ground because we set up and manage the space. We tour the clients in person. It's like buying a house. You can't really buy a house without seeing it in person. So we always have that in-person moments with our clients, which makes it necessary, I think, to have kind of a city manager type of role for each city, what we expand. And then a little bit of ops, real estate, and sales component for each city. And then the marketplace can maximize the matches. Between the supply and the demand. And also I think the marketplace is necessary to scale the supply side because we want more and more landlords and brokers to just list their space by themselves so that the supply can just keep growing without handholding.

5 years from now, I'm hoping we'll be doing these recordings in a Codi. But as we look towards the future of coworking, it is interesting too to think through your investor Andreessen, who's made a big bet again on Adam Neumann's new thing, who was the original founder of WeWork, which I feel like we do think of as being one of the fathers of coworking in this modern context. Where do you think physical space for startups and businesses is gonna be in the next 5 years as you look forward?

Physical space, I don't think we're gonna build a lot more. I think we have what we need already, so I'm excited to just maximize the use of what we have. Building more offices is very bad for the environment and it's not necessary. When you look at the vacancy and availability, what is necessary is a new way to lease so that it's more aligned with hybrid work. So you have multiple companies using a space instead of barely one. So I think the future of physical space is a way to do a hybrid leasing structure where you can share the, the space with different companies on different days. That's what we opened up a year ago. In San Francisco, and we rolling it out in New York City. And then I think people will keep working from home 2, 3 days a week, and making sure that employers think about that and give them the right tools to be successful at home as well, I think is important.

Thank you for sharing your point of view on just what spaces are going to be looking like in the future. That makes a lot of sense. As we come up on time today, Let's shift gears a little bit. We chatted a lot about Cody and the future of real estate and the future of work. But Christelle, what are you personally excited for this year?

2023, personally? Well, I got married this year.

Oh, congrats.

That's awesome. Big life milestone. Company baby, marriage, all the big moments. That's incredible. Congratulations. We also want to ask you, our hero question, which is a question that we ask every guest on the podcast. Who is a woman in your life that has had a profound impact on you and your career?

I think it would be my history teacher in high school. She was just the smartest, bold woman. She was this very, um, petite, small person, but she had such a strong presence. Everyone would stop talking the minute she would come in the room. She would just fascinate all of us with her knowledge and how passionate she was about history. I had massive respect for her, and I think it was my first time being so blown away by like how strong women can be, and I was very inspired by her.

That's incredible. And hopefully everyone has had a strong teacher form their early careers or early life, as that often leads to a lot of downstream decisions around career. So thank you for that. Well, Crystal, thank you so much for being on the podcast today. We've loved hearing your story and we really appreciate you sharing your wisdom and what you're excited for next.

Thank you so much for having me. I had a blast.

Thank you so much for joining us at The Room Podcast. If you want more from The Room every week, subscribe to our newsletter at theroompodcast.com/newsletter. We'll be back next week with a new episode Tuesday. 10:00 AM Eastern, 7:00 AM Pacific. See you in the room.

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