November 2, 2022

8 minutes and 34 seconds

Let’s End Endless Meetings. It’s About Time.

By Howard Lerman

I love company HQs.

Each time Yext grew into a bigger office in New York City, I moved next door to it.

I wanted our HQ to be like our dojo - “a place of the way” and I wanted the whole company in it. If you ever worked in or saw the Yext NYC office, you were immersed the minute you stepped inside. Instantly, you saw what was happening. You could see who was present and who was talking to whom. You could easily just talk to anyone. Wayfinding and randomness were paramount, with creativity flourishing on impromptu walks. Energy spread in a chain reaction from person to person, multiplying along the way.

Today there’s a lot of debate about the future of work. While we don’t know for certain what the future holds, we do know it’s been changed forever. We also know that companies have solved video conferencing technology which has been an enabler of what I call the “distributed” workforce. The problem is that it doesn’t actually help companies be more productive and it doesn’t help people be better at what they do.

So while this technology has been a major step forward, the way we are engaging with each other has taken a major step backward. People can’t just talk to someone ad hoc. They can’t see what’s going on. People schedule meetings as a replacement for being together in the office. There are way, way too many meetings. The meetings are too long and too large.

Things that could be done with two people in 5 minutes right now are scheduled with six people for 30 minutes next week. Calendars are scheduled back-to-back with mind-numbing 30 and 60 minute video calls. It’s unnatural. No visibility and no ad hoc means companies lose huge amounts of time, creativity, and energy since they are not together in a single HQ.

Distributed engagement is broken. We need to be able to work together in a much more natural way where the technology supports the workflow, not the reverse.

One day I had an idea. I was setting up a Zoom meeting for about 50 people. I forgot to add someone. I realized that if you forget to add someone to a Zoom they’re supposed to be on, it’s as if they don’t exist. They have no way of knowing the meeting happened. It was at that moment I thought - What if everyone had a bird’s eye view of all the meetings going on at a company? And what if they could roam freely between those different rooms, just like you used to be able to in the real office.

So I assembled a world class team of engineers and entrepreneurs to found Roam. Roam is your all-in-one headquarters in the cloud, designed to bring everyone in a company together. Roam is your whole company in one HQ. Some people think an HQ is a place for a bunch of text. We think an HQ is a place for a bunch of people.

The foundation of Roam is a breakthrough “Graphical Office Interface” - a map that shows a birds-eye view of all the people present and where they are. You can see who is meeting, who is in the physical office, who is remote, or who is in the field. You can roam freely throughout your HQ, talk to anyone ad-hoc, or enter a room. There are different types of rooms. In a cloud HQ, the whole company can be together without being in a meeting.

We’ve been piloting Roam with dozens of companies for months. The most important thing we’ve seen is that with Roam, companies spend way less time in meetings. Since switching my internal meetings from Zoom to Roam, my daily time in meetings went from 4.5 hours per day to less than 2.6 hours per day, a decline of 42%. Furthermore, more than half of my meetings are now audio only, so my video meetings went down 75%. Sometimes I feel like I’m operating on fast-forward. It’s not just me. Across Roam - the average meeting time is just 8 minutes and 34 seconds. Think about the last time you scheduled an 8 minute Zoom. Roam turns hours into minutes.

The usage metrics looked so strong that we decided to raise outside capital. Jules Maltz at IVP, whom I partnered with for almost a decade at Yext, shared our vision for Roam and led our $30 million Series A. We are looking forward to partnering with Jules and IVP, for the second time. In addition to IVP, we had over 50 world class entrepreneurs, founders, and investors participate in the round. Add that to our $10.6 million seed that I invested, and this puts our total funding at $40.6 million.

When your whole company is one HQ, it’s faster, more creative, and meeting times are cut. I could use more words to try and describe it, but I think Roam is best experienced first hand, in an unguided demo. In fact we feel so strongly about this that we aren’t releasing any screenshots and our website will be devoid of any marketing copy.

Today we are releasing Roam Beta. The product is mature enough to release but we want to scale slowly to ensure everyone who tries it has a quality experience. Roam will be limited to Invite Only during our Beta period. If you’d like to have your whole company in one HQ: You can request an invite now.

As we reimagine the future of work, there are certain human tendencies and powers of spontaneity that we must find a way to preserve. We made Roam so we could all be in one HQ from anywhere. We love using it. We think you will too.

Onward!
Howard Lerman