On this week’s episode of Fortune‘s Leadership Next podcast, co-host Michal Lev-Ram talks with Roam cofounder and CEO Howard Lerman about: the pain point that sparked his “cloud headquarters” software company; what employees need to really be productive; and why short meetings are the way to go. Co-host Alan Murray, who was not part of the interview this week, joins Lev-Ram for the pre-interview chat.
Listen to the episode or read the full transcript below.
Transcript
Alan Murray: Leadership Next is powered by the folks at Deloitte, who, like me, are exploring the changing rules of business leadership and how CEOs are navigating this change.
Welcome to Leadership Next, the podcast about the changing rules of business leadership. I’m Alan Murray.
Michal Lev-Ram: And I’m Michal Lev-Ram. Alan, we are more than three years into the pandemic. It’s altered our way of working in some very profound ways. Many companies have decided to stay fully remote or to offer their employees hybrid work options, which means that workers across the world are becoming very familiar with ever-present apps like Zoom and Slack.
Murray: So familiar, you know. Applications like the two you just mentioned and others like Google Meet, Teams, etc.—they’ve all become shorthand verbiage for everyday office activities. Phrases like “I’ll Slack you,” “we’ll Zoom about this later,” they’re so ubiquitous in our work week that they’re like a language unto themselves. But today’s Leadership Next guest sees the shortcoming of these apps. And he has started a company that he thinks can make remote and hybrid work smoother and more connected.
Lev-Ram: Today’s guest is Howard Lerman, who is the founder and CEO of Roam. It’s a cloud HQ—headquarters in the cloud—for distributed teams. This is a popular term now. Howard is also the cofounder and former CEO of Yext, and he launched Roam in November 2022 with $30 million in Series A funding and 40 corporate customers, which is impressive for a start. Howard’s got a lot of super interesting opinions on the workplace, on entrepreneurship and we were eager to talk to him about all the above.
Murray: Yeah, it was interesting which remote work realities that Roam has identified as issues it is trying to solve. Roam software claims to cut down meeting times to an average of eight minutes from the typical 30- or 60-minute Zoom meeting. That’s significant. It also includes a digital floorplan so you can see who is in the office, who is working remotely. And something else I found interesting was that Roam has a usage-based pricing model, so companies are only paying for active users. “You only pay for what you use,” as the commercial says.
Lev-Ram: Yeah, yeah, it’s an interesting model. It’s also, you know, we at the start of the pandemic, we were using existing tools, like we said, Zoom and Slack and others. Those were incredibly helpful, but they weren’t necessarily tools that were really built for that particular purpose. And now that we’re in this whole other reality with hybrid and all sorts of different flavors of how people work, you know, I think that the goal of Roam is to kind of step in and provide something else. Beyond just the launch of Roam, I was also really interested talk to Howard about his thoughts on return to work as a whole. And obviously the cultural implications there and the culture at Roam that he’s created.
Murray: Yeah, I was really bummed. I wasn’t able to join you for your conversation with Howard, because, as you know, return-to-work is one of my obsessions. I mean, it amazes me that we’re a couple of years into this, and no one has really figured out the secret formula yet. So if Howard can help, we should let him.
Lev-Ram: Absolutely I am also bummed you weren’t able to join. We missed you, Alan. But I think Howard and I were able to have a pretty holistic conversation about where work is happening today. I also had a chance to chat with him about relocating to Miami. Apparently, work is taking place in Miami, believe it or not. And his take on tech hubs in general, just more broadly outside of Silicon Valley, which as we know, is a hot topic in the industry?
Murray: Emphasis on the hot, this July. Look, I’m excited to hear the interview. I’m sure our listeners are too. Here is Michal’s conversation with Howard Lerman of Roam.
Lev-Ram: Howard, thank you for joining us. I want to just start out by asking you to describe to us, what is Roam, and why did you start it?
Howard Lerman: Well, Roam is a cloud headquarters for distributed teams. And what Roam does is it makes companies more productive. It makes them more connected, and it lets people work together as if they’re in one headquarters from anywhere. Why I started it is kind of a funny story. I mean, during the pandemic, I was running Yext, a company I founded in 2006 and ran for 15-and-a-half years. We had 1,500 people at the time during the pandemic, when it first struck, and I was setting up a Zoom one day, and I forgot to add someone to the Zoom. And if you forget to add someone to a Zoom calendar invite, that person does not exist. They’re a nonperson. It’s like, you know, 1984. And I had this like flash of insight which was, what if there was a bird’s-eye view of all the people in a company? And whether they’re remote or hybrid kind of doesn’t matter. What if you could get almost a Marauders Map—if you’ve ever read Harry Potter—that showed who was talking to who and who was meeting right now, and where people were, who’s in the office. And so we made it. And I made this, this kind of for myself. You know, fast forward to today, it’s been a ton of fun going from zero to one again. But I made Roam and we founded Roam with a great team in order to help every company work together in one HQ from anywhere.
Lev-Ram: I think, you know, when we think of the tools that kind of helped us all get through the pandemic workwise, you tend to think of Slack, Zoom, you know, a handful of others. Obviously, those tools were not created during the pandemic—they existed well before. Talk about just, you know, the fact that you were able to create this product and the team to build it from the ground up knowing this kind of new reality. How did that change what you were able to do and the features you were able to add?
Lerman: It’s really important to think about this problem. And if you take a step back here, we live today in an era of video conferencing. And right now we’re on a video conference, you know, we’re recording this. I can see you, you can see me, and Zoom did an incredible job solving the video conferencing technology problem. Now I am old enough to remember when video conferencing didn’t work. And we would try to be on a call and I would be trying to—forgive me—download, you know, a Cisco app, Webex, and struggling. And it wouldn’t work. And we’d be in and out. And Zoom was the first company that just made it work all the time. And they did that around 2014 and 2015, and the reason is because they rewrote the video code.
Lev-Ram: And they all came from the original Cisco team, right from the Webex team. So they knew the issues. Not to dig on Cisco here, but yes.
Lerman: And they’ve caught up now, too. Now video conferencing generally works. And you have a number of options, but Zoom was the first. And what happened is, as a consequence of the video conferencing technology finally working, we all became what I call overscheduled. And so today, we live in this era of overscheduled videos. And so if you look at your calendar, I’m guessing it’s back to back to back, you know, meetings and video conferencing all day long. And so this technology, which for the first time worked, made us all, we’ve all rearranged our, our workflow around the technology. And so, you know, that wasn’t how it used to be. And you know, I’m old enough to remember being in an office when I would walk around and talk to everybody continuously with short, fast, serendipitous conversations all the time. You know, when Yext was first getting started, we wouldn’t even consider hiring someone outside of New York. And that took that it took us until, you know, probably 2010, 2011 where we began to hire people that weren’t in our office that were in our office building all day. In 2010, 2011, when we had 100 people in a room, it wasn’t like I was on video calls with them all day. We would just all meet and we’d meet ad hoc and have short, you know, conversations as necessary. And so when Zoom made it possible to have the ability to have video calls with anybody right away, pretty much what happened was everyone just scheduled meetings, and then during the pandemic that just accelerated and went off the map. And so we sit today in this era where everyone’s calendars are just totally packed up back to back to back. And so when we founded Roam, we made Roam and invented Roam so that we could chop out all these unnecessary overscheduled meetings, help people get to the point and, by the way, it’s not obvious that a meeting should be 30 or 60 minutes. When I was running Yext, I used to run around and look at through admin tools and G Cal, who is scheduling the most meetings, and who is spending the most time in meetings. And so the average meeting time in Roam is eight minutes long, and that mirrors more what happens when you walk around in the real world and you talk to people. You have a quick conversation as necessary.
Lev-Ram: So I think probably anybody listening to this would agree that, you know, you would prefer an eight-minute meeting over an hourlong or half-hour-long meeting any day. But like you said, we’ve kind of gotten into this habit now where it’s those back-to-back Zoom, or whatever your video conference tool of choice is, and and just constantly. It’s one thing to offer the tools to do it a different way. But it’s another thing to actually adopt doing it a different way, when like the culture, it’s become in a short amount of time pretty ingrained in the culture of how we do things. What have you found with customers? And we’ll get to who your customers are in a second, but what have you found to be the biggest hurdles to actually getting teams to adopt this? How do they make that happen?
Lerman: You know, every company is a little different. And every company has its own unique culture. And every company has its own unique ways that they interact and sort of codes that are official, and then codes that are not official. And people learn how to operate within the company based off of these set of codes. And some of the companies are heavily async. And async is a huge work trend that, really, a lot of companies that were pre-pandemic that were remote were all async. And then since the pandemic, you’ve seen this this rise of asynchronous companies, I think enabled by async types of communication tools like Slack. You also have a set of companies that are not async, that are hugely synchronous, and these are companies that may have been in an office before. For example, let’s take the Wall Street banks: There’s definitely async work that goes on. But when you’re when you’re on a trading floor, that’s a hugely synchronous type of activity. And it’s no surprise that the Wall Street bank CEOs, Jamie Dimon and James Gorman, from Morgan Stanley, are getting people, you know, they want people in the office all the time—well they want them there 24/7. They want them there nine to five, Monday through Friday, because that’s a synchronous type of activity. And so in order to adopt a new platform, you don’t try to get in the way and change behavior, you try to almost fit with how that company is operating. And so you can schedule a Roam meeting in Google Calendar, but you can also just have an ad hoc Roam meeting. And one of the interesting things we see is when a company first signs up for Roam, they may have—and I’m making up a number here—call it 100 meetings in a week that are scheduled. And then over time, within the first few weeks, you see the number of scheduled meetings go down and the number of serendipitous meetings go up. And the overall meeting time goes down, but the overall meeting count stays about the same. So it’s fascinating to watch, in a way, companies adopt technology to support their workflow, instead of what they’ve done with Zoom, which is to reverse their workflow in support of the technology.
[Music starts]
Murray: Jason Girzadas, the CEO-elect of Deloitte US, is the sponsor of this podcast and joins me today. Welcome, Jason.
Jason Girzadas: Thank you, Alan. It’s great to be here.
Murray: Jason, we live in an era of disruption, technology disruption, geopolitical disruption, workplace disruption, and it makes accurate predictions about what’s going to happen in the future more difficult than it has ever been. Yet the polls that we do together with you show that most business leaders largely remain optimistic. Why do you think that is?
Girzadas: I think optimism is a result of the fact that we’ve been through an incredibly tumultuous three years. And so I think business leaders realize that they’ve built resiliency into their organizations. The prospect of even more disruption isn’t as foreign of a concept, and I think there’s more confidence in their ability to adapt and to be agile. Secondarily, there’s been tremendous investment in technology, and new capabilities that client organizations and executives broadly are optimistic about those creating more value and more opportunities. So, it’s a function of what we’ve been through, as well as the investments that have been made that give a sense of optimism despite some of the headwinds.
Murray: And what’s your advice to companies that are struggling with the potential disruption in the future?
Girzadas: Well, disruption is the new normal. I don’t think there’s any placid water on the horizon or calmness that we can predict. So it’s a function of getting accustomed to the discontinuities that are ahead of us. Whether it’s around technology, or geopolitical change, or workplace changes associated with the future of work, or the demands of the talent workforce, change is the new normal, and as a result, it is requiring executive teams to actually look holistically at those challenges, be [inaudible] with doing scenario planning, and being on the lookout for where and how to capitalize on disruption—versus being concerned by it or seen as a barrier to their success.
Murray: Jason, thanks for your perspective. And thanks for sponsoring Leadership Next.
Girzadas: Thank you.
[Music ends]
Lev-Ram: Another interesting stat that I saw about Roam and usage is that so many of these ad hoc meetings are audio only, not video. So can you share a little bit about what the numbers show and why you think this is the trend?
Lerman: Well, you know, when you are working hard, let’s say, late at night. And a lot of folks today in our knowledge economy are working during the day, they may pick up their kids or do something from 4 to 6 p.m., that kind of thing, and then they get back on their computer, and then they crank all night. And for those type of people, you don’t necessarily need to have the camera on to communicate with your team at 10 p.m. That said, you may want to have a quick, fast conversation. And we all used to use the telephone to do that. I did. But somehow, when Zoom became the standard, it’s like, well, let’s do a video call, and then everyone turns their camera off. And so you have this sort of awkward dynamic and potentially pressure to turn your camera on. We have a unique format in our cloud headquarters in our private offices, which is audio only. And it turned out that that is the number-one most—and this was something that surprised even us—we didn’t anticipate that audio meetings would be the most used format. I think 76%, last time I looked, of calls of meetings in Roam, are audio only. And so what people are doing is they’re having these short, fast, quick, three-minute, eight-minute, six-minute audio conversations, grabbing other people to bring them in. If I see, you know, two people are talking, I know who they are, I can guess what they’re talking about, I might jump in for a minute. We might grab someone else to get an opinion on something. By the way, the phone won’t cut it, because we might want to share the screen and look at something real quick and then get back back to where we were before. And then, oh, I remember this, I pop back over. Audio-only meetings are hugely popular, particularly first thing in the morning and particularly late at night.
Lev-Ram: I want to ask you also about how employees take to Roam and like, specifically, it seems like one of the strengths of the platform and what enables some of these features is that you can see, you know who’s in person, who’s where and when, right, so that you can have those ad hoc interactions. And that’s at the same time, there’s a lot of scrutiny and questions about, you know, some of the tools that are out there now that are tracking employees. How do people feel about that? I mean, is it for your customers, the customers who use it? Does everybody have to opt in to roam? You know, do some employees feel uncomfortable with it? Or do they all see the upside? Like I’m just wondering how they’re feeling about it and if there’s any apprehension of like, well I don’t want my boss to know where I am at all times, kind of thing?
Lerman: You know, Roam was absolutely not designed to be a surveillance tool. In fact, I might suggest that, if anything, you know, a junior-level employee is the ultimate beneficiary of this more than a senior employee. Because if you’re a junior employee and you just started at a company, and you’re in an office environment or you’re not, the only way that you’re going to absorb knowledge is by having an idea of what’s going on. And so by giving everyone a shared view of what all the people are up to, it really benefits the junior people so they can see, you know, is the executive around, or is my boss around? And who are they talking to? And can I jump in and have a conversation with them? So in terms of the onboarding and learning and orientation for someone junior, it really does help them a ton. But it’s very important to remember and this goes for all platforms, that companies are in total control. And everything that you type into, for example, Slack or Zoom chat or a Microsoft product, is a click away from HR. And people don’t understand that, and they forget that. HR can see everything that you type into a company product or company computer. And so these tools that sort of take this, Hey, we’re going to give you privacy, they may not actually be as private as people think. And so it’s important for people to remember what they’re actually dealing with.
Lev-Ram: Okay, well, that’s Howard Lerman’s PSA. Thank you. So and I want to talk just kind of bigger picture. So much conversation about return to work, return to office, hybrid, virtual headquarters. I’m guessing your take is out there is not one size fits all. It depends on the industry, depends on the culture that existed pre-pandemic. But for you personally, for Roam, I mean, do you guys do you have an office? Do you believe in having a physical office? Do you get together in person? What works for Roam?
Lerman: Well, let me walk you through my philosophy on this. You’re correct in your assessment that I believe that there is not one size fits all, and that you have different work styles that work for everyone, as you always have and you always will. What we’ve seen though, are a few trends, and you know, the first trend—and maybe, maybe I’ll say this in a way that is a little punchy, which is no colocation without collaboration. One of the things that companies tried to do that has not worked is to create these kind of satellite offices and hubs where, you know, it’s like, okay, we’re going to have eight or 10 different places we’re going to hire from, we’re going to put an office, and we’re going to require people to go three days a week in an office in Nebraska. I’m making this up. And so then what they do is they have and they put, you know, an IT manager and a lawyer and they have a marketing person and a reporter and all these different jobs, and they all show up to this office. And those people don’t work together and they just sit there silently and they’re not collaborating. I happen to know that you work for the same company, but there’s no direct working together. And so that model has generally not worked. So let me then juxtapose this with another really important point, which is, we do believe, and I believe, that everybody needs a great workspace. You need to be able to have a place where you can go, that’s quiet, that you can do and focus for deep work, and kind of be able to just separate whatever you’re doing from from your actual work. And whether that’s an office, or whether it’s a WeWork, or whether it’s a coffee shop, I don’t really have a strong opinion on that, except to say, then there’s another kind of work where you do want to collaborate, and you do want to collaborate in person. What we do at Roam is we have we give everyone the ability to have their own workspace, then we—and so I have a, I have an office, for example, that I go to every day, and I host customers there. I’m by myself, like I, you know, they’re you know, and if there’s people around, they may come but it’s just me. And then we, and this is very important, we get everyone together every couple of months. We get the whole company together, and whether we do in New York or somewhere on the West Coast or the East Coast, we always kind of pick and try to rotate it, but we get everyone together once, once every couple months in person for a week to do actual work. And then everyone goes about their business normally.
Lev-Ram: I should point out, and this is something I wanted to ask you about also, that you relocated to Miami. I know you travel around quite a bit. But give us your take on, first of all, why Miami? And and I know there’s a blooming tech scene in the area. Does it matter today where you, as the CEO and founder of a company, are located?
Lerman: I think it doesn’t matter where you set up shop, but pre-product market fit, you would like to be with as many people as possible as you can every day. And so in my case, in our case, being a repeat founder, one of my cheat codes, if you will, is that I was able to call in 20 amazing people that I had already worked with for more than, you know, 15 years and put the same team, if you will, the band back together. And so we already knew each other. I’d already spent 20 years in the trenches with my cofounder Tom Dixon, who I went to high school and middle school with, so for me to sit next to him every day, he’s sick of me. He can do what he’s doing, and I can do what I’m doing without, and we collaborate as necessary. Same with Shawn MacIsaac, my other co-founder who I also went to high school with, and same with John Brod.
Lev-Ram: Man, you really keep your relationships. It’s amazing.
Lerman: You know, I was very lucky. This is a sidebar, but I will say one thing, I went to this math and science high school called Thomas Jefferson. And Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, Northern Virginia is a STEM high school. And from this high school, you’ve seen, for example, the founder of Robinhood went there. There’s been an incredible cohort of entrepreneurs that have come out of here. And we at Roam have 21 employees, including nine graduates of TJ. At Yext, we recruited half of our engineering team from TJ. So very lucky to be able to work with people that are way smarter than me. And they just kind of tell me what to do, and then I try to do it.
Lev-Ram: One last quick question for you. What is next for Roam that you can share? I mean, I assume there are so many different areas and additional features that you could be working on. But you have to focus. Where do you see the company and the capabilities going next?
Lerman: You know, we are in an invite-only period right now. And we’ve been inundated with inbound demand. We have 2,000 companies on our waitlist. We have 250 live companies. We’ve seen 70+% convert to paid and, you know, the biggest thing that we’re working on is continuing to improve the quality of the service. But one thing I will share with you is our use of generative A.I. to do a thing called, we’re going to call this “magic minutes.” And magic minutes you know, when you take a meeting and there’s a board meeting and they’re like, Okay, who’s going to take the minutes of the meeting? Okay, so magic minutes will not record the video. It just records the audio of a meeting and then transcribes it. So you get a kind of a record of the meeting. And then it summarizes the meeting. And the coolest part of magic minutes is that you can prompt it. And so you can say, Hey, you know what happened in the meeting? Give me the action items. You can ask technical details. One of the coolest things is, you can add people to it in our own UX, so that you can add people if necessary, and part of the vision here is to begin to use some intelligence to figure out who should be in a meeting and who doesn’t need to be there. People need to be mindful of the cost when they’re setting these meetings up. In fact, Shopify added, you may have seen a meeting cost calculator to a G cal. So it’s like a plug in when you set up a meeting, it tells you the cost of the meeting. So these are the kinds of opportunities we want to help companies solve.
Lev-Ram: Amazing. Thank you so much, Howard. Appreciate you coming and telling us all about Roam, and I am looking forward to eight-minute meetings and magic minutes. So thank you again.
Lerman: Thank you.
Leadership Next is edited and produced by Alexis Haut. Our theme is by Jason Snell. Our executive producer is Megan Arnold. Leadership Next is a product of Fortune Media.
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