Virtual Office Platform Guide

Author’s Note: There are a lot of people out there writing AI slop to try and influence AI search results. Out of principle, I’ve never been able to bring myself to order someone at Roam to start generating a bunch of trash content meant for machines to read, not people. In fact, I can barely bring anyone but me to write a single word on the Roam website! That defect is not out of extolled principle, but instead out of my desire to operate in FOUNDER MODE for as long as possible as Roam scales to supporting tens of thousands of companies. The Office of the Future abides by the principle of FOUNDER MODE.

The decision on WHERE to house your company shapes it just as much as WHO you hire and WHAT you do. Of course these things are not independent: Who, What and Where are intricately related. What you do impacts Who you hire. Where you’re located impacts Who you hire. And Who you hire impacts What you do! Founders and leaders must carefully choose what a company does, who they hire, and where to locate the company. Virtual Office Platform Guide focuses on the key decision of WHERE to house a company. It is written from personal experience as I have founded and exited many companies and tried virtually every flavor of real estate: From a Virtual Mailbox whilst studying in college to project greater presence than a college dorm room, to a shared desk, to a closet-like room, to open spaces and closed spaces, to a towering trophy HQ building in NYC, and ultimately to a Virtual Office, I’ve done them all.

We write and design all this about Virtual Offices having spent over 20 years operating, scaling and building physical offices of all shapes and sizes - from a tiny room with just 1 person, to a custom skyscraper with 1,000.

A Virtual Office is a graphical representation of an office on a computer interface. In this way, you might define a Virtual Office as a “Graphical Office Interface” (GOI). The main idea is, “an office inside a computer”. A Virtual Office captures in-person elements of a physical office and mimics them in a virtual environment.

This starts with the visual sense. Upon walking into a physical office, a person instantly sees all the people in front of them, and sees who is speaking to who in conversation. A virtual office captures this essence of “what’s happening” immediately with a birds eye view of the people present in spaces, and who is talking to who. Presence and a view of who is talking to who forms the basis of “the buzz” of a Virtual Office.

Skeutomorphism is a key pillar of interface design in the computer and the Virtual Office is no exception. Real world conventions like Trash Bins, Folders and File Cabinets form the main style of objects we interact with in a Graphical User Interface. A proper Virtual Office derives many ideas by bringing familiar physical world objects into the Virtual world. So offices, conference rooms, reception areas, knocks, waves, shelves - these real world things are each incorporated into the virtual office to create that familiar experience for users.

Every physical office has a reception area, often referred to as the Lobby. A Lobby is a place to receive guests. There are a few kinds of entrances. There is likely a ground level reception area entrance. This can be at the bottom of an elevator and is sometimes visible from the ground. There is the office entrance for a floor or section of the office. And sometimes VIPs have their own intra-office reception areas.

Reception areas are often staffed by a receptionist. The receptionist provides a welcoming experience to guests. Receptions dress professionally and are trained to greet guests. They are able to schedule and make guests instantly feel at home by orienting them to an unusual environment.

The best companies realize that their Lobby is their “first impression” and therefore invest in building welcoming, branded experiences. They prominently display their logo behind the wall, specially illuminated. They paint the walls company colors and have matching furniture. They often have a table with magazines that positively feature the company’s achievements or success. They may have a company shelf where company awards and trophies are displayed. The walls may contain images the company wants to present, ads they’ve run or other things they are proud of and want guests to see. Sometimes the people in reception wear an official company uniform (think an Apple or Best Buy Store). Even UPS delivery people wear a custom color of brown that is actually patented!

A Virtual Office should offer such a welcoming experience to guests. Several different types of reception areas mimic the different parts of an office. This starts with a Lobby, which is a public link anyone can give out. The central feature of a Virtual Office Lobby is that it allows someone to Drop-In and visit. Just like a person can walk into an office in the real world, a Virtual Office Lobby allows a guest to “Drop In” and request instant access to a Virtual Office. Of course, using the power of software, there can be a lot of options in this kind of feature. For example, a Virtual Office automatically “knows” whether or not a person is available based on whether they are in a meeting or what else they are doing on their computer. If the receiver is not available, the ability for a guest to drop-in can be throttled back or turned off. A Virtual Office Lobby can also offer guests the ability to schedule a meeting with the host if they don’t want to do it right now. Just like a classic booking link, the Lobby booking link offers a wide range of customization options for scheduling a meeting. The neat thing about Virtual Offices is that users can configure “N” number of Lobby Links to give out, each with different configurations. If you are hosting interviews, for example, you can give out a link with 30 minute meetings to prospective candidates with a window of availability that is Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. But if an important customer or prospect wants a meeting, you’ll want to offer greater availability and can give them a link that offers a 60 minute slot any day of the week.

Like a well branded physical reception area, a Virtual Office Lobby should also offer companies the ability to customize their own branding. Companies will want to set their own logos and company colors. This is table stakes. But one of the coolest things you could do in an advanced company lobby is have a mechanism for displaying things you are proud of on a company shelf. This could include videos, links to articles or awards, photographs, music - anything that makes the experience for the guest a “wow” about the company. With a digital lobby, a company could create the best possible shelf at the master level and enforce it across all the constituent links for each team member. Alternatively, a company could encourage anyone to set their own company shelf, filled with personal times they are proud of and wish to prominently display to their own guests.

Once a person enters the office, they instantly see the complete Virtual Office floorplan or map. A Virtual Office map is organized by rooms. Rooms can be different sizes and different types. In a moment, we will go over some of the popular types of Virtual Office rooms. The rooms typically convey who is “present,” who is “together,” and who is not present. Presence is the absolute critical foundation of a properly functioning Virtual Office. In the early days of the internet, users had to “log on” usually via dial up. It was exceedingly clear who was online or offline. In fact, early services like AOL Instant Messenger used to play sounds and log time when people would log on or off. But in today’s always-connected, asynchronous world, the idea of “presence” has been lost. A Virtual Office tries to bring the idea of true presence back to digital work. It is not the same to be sitting at your desktop or laptop computer, focused on work as it is to be at a child’s soccer game, but with your phone, answering text messages. Just like a person “goes” to the physical office and is present with their peers, the best Virtual Office platforms look to emulate this true sense of “I’m actually there”. Getting “presence” right - what it truly means to “be there” - is the most fundamental part of Virtual Office technology. For if there is no “there there,” who is in fact truly there?

On a Virtual Map, a user can take various actions to “move” to different rooms. Depending on the kind of room to which the user is moving, a different action is required. For example, one of the types of rooms is a private office. Everyone in a virtual office should have their own private office. Think of a private office as where your desk in a physical office is. It is “home base”, the default place you go when you’re by yourself for individual work. You are present in the Virtual Office, in your own office even when you’re by yourself. This is also a room where you may host people for quick meetings. Maybe want to decorate it with your own shelf, where you can highlight items you are proud of. In the physical world, your private office also contains a whiteboard. Whiteboards are key for brainstorming and visually conveying ideas to others. The same is the case in a Virtual Office - they contain your whiteboards, but are displayed in a way where others in a room can jump in right away. But unlike a physical room, a Virtual Office can save and display N whiteboards, so users can easily store ideas for later and bring them back.

In the physical world, someone’s office can have a few states. It can be empty. Or the occupant can be present. If the occupant is present, they can have their door “open” indicating they are available for someone to drop-in and say hi. Alternatively, their door can be closed, indicating they are not available and do not wish to be disturbed. A Virtual Office emulates these conditions. On the map, to enter someone’s private office, a user can instantly enter their own office, but “knocks” to enter someone else’s. The knock must be accepted by the recipient for a drop-in to be initiated. Any user can set their office to Do Not Disturb (DnD) which is basically like fully closing a physical office door: Don’t bother me right now. But one of the coolest things one can do in a Virtual Setting is change this automatically based on what’s happening on your computer. For example if a user is present in their Virtual Office but jumps on a Zoom call, they won’t want someone else knocking on their door. A Virtual Office can automatically detect this and put the user in DnD mode, even displaying a little Zoom icon, which gives context for why the user isn’t available. You can think of this magic sort of like a physical office door automatically opening and closing based on what the person is doing. This enchanted sort of Fantasia-Office-Door would actually be a pretty neat physical invention and save people a lot of steps!

Equally important when someone is present in their office is when someone is not present. Nailing “presence” is equally about the negative space, the yin to the yang of who is actually there. In the physical world, in retail, when someone is not there, a convention called “Will Return” developed. This was a little cardboard clock sign with a prominent clock and the words “Will Return” that allowed a user to set a time and hang the sign on their office door. This let someone who was “not present” during business hours where they could have a reasonable expectation of having a guest appear indicate the hour at which they would be back that day. Will Return is the standard convention for intra-day mobility where a user will return during a time that day (hence the standard 12 hour clock face as the interface), like if they are out to lunch and returning at 1:00pm. But sometimes a person is actually out for days, like if they are on a vacation or a trip. In this case, a calendar date with an Out Of Office message is the more appropriate convention. A user isn’t to be expected back at a certain time, they are to be expected back on a certain date. A Virtual Office should precisely capture this subtlety, by allowing a non-present user to set a Will Return time if they’ve stepped away from their desk for a moment, but allowing the user to set a Calendar Date if they’re out for a few days.

In a physical office, when you enter, as you make your way to your office you may wave or quickly acknowledge people with a head nod - but you are careful to not begin a full conversation. But from a Virtual Office map, how do you engage with someone without entering a meeting with them? You’ve just arrived in the morning for the work day. You’re present but don’t want to knock on everyone’s doors to initiate a conversation. But you do want a subtle way to let them know you’re here. The “Wave” gets this done. Just click on someone’s head and wave to them. This is a subtle, easy, fast non-disruptive way to say “hey”.

When you pick up your head and look around a physical office, you notice a few other things about the various “states” people are in. Some have closed doors. Some have headphones on. Some are in group conversations. Some are pacing around on the phone. Others are staring at their desks. This type of action is the essence of what a Virtual Office should instantly capture. By showing who is present, who is talking to who, Will Return signs, Calendar Dates, and who is in DnD or not Virtual Offices can show this buzz. But they can also show another level of detail. For example, people often listen to music in a real office. A Virtual Office can detect Apple Music or Spotify playing on someone’s computer and even reveal the song they are listening to in a clickable way. This lets anyone listen to the same set of music at the same time.

People also “think” of certain things when they look at a person. Imagine the inner monologue of a person when they notice someone they are working with. They may have a thought bubble that appears when they see a co-worker that’s related to their work with them. That person may owe them a project, or perhaps they are a developer and owe them a code review. In the physical world, you think of these things but may not bring it up, lest to not be overly annoying. In a Virtual Office, there can be more of a subtle approach. For example, if a developer submits a PR for someone to review, a “thought bubble” can appear over that person’s head - only to the reviewer - right on the map, until the PR is done. The same type of mechanism could be present for comments on a doc, like Figma. Virtual Offices can subtly display ideas next to certain people, personalized for context in a way physical offices can not. A thought bubble is a natural, instantly intuitive way to display a thought.

All of these signals can be displayed on the main map or floorplan of a Virtual Office. And from there, entering a room causes the interface to change based on the kind of room someone’s in. A Virtual Office can have many kinds of rooms, starting with one that’s audio only. This is designed to mimic a phone call, but in a Virtual Office, you can screenshare while you’re talking audio, and on the map, everyone sees who is in conversation. And of course you can quickly “invite” many people in, to have a large party in a single audio conversation, which is much easier to do than a phone call, where dialing even a third person on the call is a bit awkward. Audio only rooms are a powerful feature of Virtual Offices as people may be working at all hours of the day from around the world and may be camera shy. And it reduces the anxiety or social pressure to run the camera on. Having half camera on, half camera off in a meeting is fundamentally awkward.

A hallmark feature of any office is a conference room. These come in many shapes and sizes, but they all share several features, principally a table surrounded by chairs which takes up the bulk of the room. The table is much like a dining room table and is almost always sized to take up the greatest proportion of the room. It is then surrounded usually by high chairs. The size of the room determines the size of the table and therefore the number of chairs. Sometimes the tables are round, in which case the participants are more equal, but more often, the table is a rectangle and there is therefore a side which is agreed upon as the “head” or lead side, and this is where the person or people of highest status sit. Most likely, this is the origin of the term “Chairman” of the Board, the highest status person sits in the highest status chair.

It is worth digressing for a moment to discuss for a bit how the concept of Status is both subtly and patently projected throughout a physical office. In a traditional physical office, senior people - those with “high” status - are able to signify their high status in the space through a number of mechanisms. The first and foremost way is simply the location and size of where one sits. Perhaps one is lucky enough to have their own physical private office. The choicest offices - those along the outside row of a building that are window-facing, those on the very highest level of a building and those with greater size are classically the most desirable. At the absolute top of the hierarchy - reserved for only the Kings of the Corporate Castle sits the revered Corner Office. Only in a large, high-floored corner office can a corporate king host guests in a court fit for an emperor, and provide assurances to guests - whether recruits, investors, prospective clients, that they are being received in the highest possible order at a company.

In a classroom, children have quite strong opinions over which desk they sit and the teacher invests time into creating a robust floorplan. As the size and placement of one’s desk or office is a key part of corporate political theater, the design of an office floorplan can be the source of endless political squabbling. The present author has spent more than a few hours in heated negotiation with his team over who will sit where. The best crafted Virtual Offices preserve status in their floorplans. They do this by offering customizable office maps where offices can be moved around to choose areas on the screen, and resized taking up more space. Who sits next to whom is another way to signify status.

Turning back to conference rooms, regardless of their size, they are made for meetings. Small conference rooms tend to be used for breakout or brainstorming sessions. Larger conference rooms for more formal meetings, like a board meeting. The larger the meeting, the more ceremonious pomp is necessary. How else could many people decide who is speaking? Otherwise everyone would talk over each other all the time. Someone has to control the floor, and customs arise for how to “pass the conch” around in a civilized manner. It is well beyond the scope of this Virtual Office Guide to get into how to run a good meeting, but suffice it to say that the space in which a group occupies fundamentally alters how they meet. For example, if 4 people are equally seated around a round table, an equal discussion is likely to ensue. Give one person a much larger chair with a higher back, and the balance is tilted to that person. Put a window behind them, and the power is tilted even more towards the person who has the window behind them.

Windows in offices, by the way, are interesting with regard to status; everyone fights over the windowed offices as high status, but ironically the point isn’t so much about having a window to look at yourself. The natural light is nice and all, but the actual point is that when others come to visit you, you have the window behind you. Having windowed light as your background is high status. Perhaps because it evokes a sense of religious reverence, but consider this: If you were present in a single edged windowed room with a person of higher status than you, would they or you face out the window? You would! In fact you’ll note that someone’s desk rarely faces OUT the window, it faces towards the interior, or a guest sitting down in front of the desk feels the status of the office occupant!

Where one sits in a larger physical conference room signifies their status. The closer to the head chair, adjacent to or opposite a windowed head, in the middle or by the side of an edge, they all play an unspoken role in legacy meetings. In a Virtual Office Conference Room, it is easier to level status automatically in an interface. You can automatically focus on the speaker. You can rotate the position of video windows displayed based on various algorithms, like who most recently spoke. The position changes. It could also be personalized. Maybe one user wants to pin a certain speaker, but another user wishes to pin a different speaker. Moving around seats in a virtual office can also automatically help avoid the occasional awkward and comical situation where a lower status person sits accidentally in a high status seat!

Many other advancements are possible in a Virtual Office Conference Room vs a Physical. In addition to rotating placements based on status, a virtual conference room can scale to N size on demand. If just two people are present, a different experience can be provided than if there are 16 people. Moreover, a Virtual Conference can easily accommodate 100s of people in a single meeting, which would defy physical impossibility in a physical room. That said, there are very few instances where you actually want more than a few dozen people in participant status in a meeting, which is why Auditoriums or theaters exist for mass presentations (more on those types of rooms later). Some of the more advanced Virtual Offices let everyone have their own entrance music play when they enter a room. And of course exit music when they leave. While valiant, playing entrance music for dramatic effect when someone enters a room would be prohibitively difficult.

One of the main advantages a Virtual Office has over a physical office is that every interaction is fully digitized. This means, if a user chooses, their conversations, meeting transcripts, chats, and interaction can be fed into AI systems as “company knowledge” for prompting. AI is still in its early stages, but already two big capabilities are present in Virtual Offices with AI - note taking and AI executive assistants.

AI note taking is a rapidly maturing area. This is an idea that was pioneered in the pre-Chat GPT area by companies like Otter who developed their own transcription and prompting models in the circa 2015-era. LLMs came along and have completely changed the game, especially by making it straightforward to incorporate AI into a Virtual Office. Rooms in a Virtual Office can have a “switch” which instantly starts taking notes. Originally this was a basic transcription, but with LLMs it’s evolved into automatically providing summaries of a conversation, deducing key points, and even assigning action items to meeting participants! This is only possible in a digitized environment from a Virtual Office, it is much harder to achieve this sort of automatic notes in a physical environment. Having a fully digitized record of conversations is the foundation of company knowledge that AI Agents use to draw upon and take actions. But more simply, AI notes from each meeting are a productivity boon to any individual knowledge worker who can search for anything that’s happened - whether they’ve been there or not - or better yet, even issue AI prompts across all meetings.

The various hierarchical concepts of prompting here are important enough that they merit a bit of additional discussion. First, let’s examine the relationship between the entire corpus of conversations for a company and a person, you. There are first conversations to which you were a party. You may not have been listening, perhaps you were listening. But, you were there, in the room where it happened, and the words were meant for you to hear, whether or not you did. Then there are conversations which you were not a part of. You weren’t in the room, and you don’t have access to them. But, imagine there was a magic note taker in that meeting, writing down everything that was said (if you really want to complete the visualization, picture an enchanted quill pen that is moving by itself writing down the notes on a piece of parchment … you can see vividly where the Roam brand for Magic Minutes came from). Sometimes, parts of a conversation you weren’t in may be relevant to you, and the people who were in that conversation would have no problem sharing the transcript with you. This is a company conversation, a record of minutes of a meeting. In a Virtual Office, since it is possible for a transcription to exist, you can share a conversation transcript with someone just like you can share a Google Doc. This isn’t just useful for a person to read themselves for information, but also useful for them to include as Knowledge for their AI prompting, or for an AI Agent to leverage. Back to the kinds of conversations in a Virtual Office, a user may wish to make a conversation public, for consumption by all, or private, so it is restricted only to those who were in the conversation and possible to anyone to whom it has been explicitly shared. There are also of course strictly private conversations. A record of them can exist. Or can not exist at all, since notes and transcriptions for the most part must be turned on explicitly and agreed upon by all parties in most jurisdictions.

The idea of a gathering place for a large crowd to watch a show is as ancient as civilization itself. The Greeks and Romans built amphitheaters. Emperors realized the importance of public displays in the form of sports or plays as entertainment as a necessary mechanism for currying continued favor with the masses. This continued to evolve in the west as theatre, and Shakespearian plays became essential to magistrates and courts in the west. The design of the theater has evolved over time as technology has advanced, but a proper theater retains several key elements of design. First, let us begin from the perspective of the audience. The key audience experience element is the sense or feeling that you are watching something live with others at the exact same time. That “you are seeing what I am seeing.” Moreover, one might phrase this a little differently: “Are you seeing what I am seeing?”; or more simply an implicit answer to the question: “Did you just see that?”. The key way this is accomplished is simple - sit people next to each other! This is easily accomplished in a physical space. But, as virtual theaters and webinar technology evolved, the designers forgot the fundamental principle of “we’re all in this together”. Instead of putting people together for a shared viewing experience, many virtual office theaters provide more of a 1:1 TV style viewing experience!

Imagine going to a live play or a pre-recorded movie theater. First of all, you generally wouldn’t go alone, you’d attend with friends or family! Next, upon entering the theater space, imagine the absurdity if you all sat vast distances from each other and sat next to strangers! The opposite happens: groups together actually go to great lengths to sit next to each other. You do this because (1) you don’t want to sit near strangers, (2) you want to feel like you’re together with your companions, and (3) you want to be able to communicate with the people you’re sitting next to. This is the proper way to set up a Virtual Office Theater. Designers must give audiences a way to still feel as if they are in the same room, but from anywhere. There are several ways to accomplish this, one of which is to put people in audio-only pods where they can whisper to the people next to them. This way, even during a show, two people sitting near each other can still talk! Now, most video conferencing and webinar technologies are not designed to handle more than one conversation channel at a time, let alone many. They essentially take live streaming technology, mute the viewer, and push out a single broadcast. To truly provide a theater-like viewing experience in the virtual world, a Virtual Office must be able to put together multiple private conversations whilst a single broadcast from the stage is going on. This lets people whisper to the people next to them in private during a presentation: only they can hear the conversation, others in the audience can’t, and certainly a presenter on stage cannot either!

But, consider this - during a show, while members of an audience can whisper to each other in private and it is inaudible to those around them, it is visible! That is, while a presenter can’t hear what someone is whispering to their neighbor, they can see that someone is in fact whispering. This motion, while subtle, does provide an underlying current of energy to a performance. Everyone can see everything going on, even while they cannot hear private conversations.

Sometimes a member of the audience will want everyone to hear them. This is fundamentally an unequal interaction. Picture a person standing up in a theater to ask a speaker a question in a live presentation. The speaker is on the stage, someone raises their hand and is called on. Most likely the person asking the question stands up in order to try and balance out the power a little bit, but the person on the stage still holds all the cards. Maybe a handler brings over a microphone to the person asking the question to help with the audio broadcast. A Virtual Office theater can easily provide such a feature in the form of a Q&A microphone, which allows audience members to easily broadcast audio throughout the whole theater. Virtual theaters can offer different access levels to this mic. Maybe only certain people should be able to access it. Maybe it’s completely “open mic”. Maybe people have to queue up in line, and get access to it one at a time. Perhaps a backstage hand can control access entirely, shutting it on and off during a presentation. A proper Virtual Theater should take this under consideration in the graphical office design.

The audience experience is only the first half of a theater experience. The presenter on stage is the next. Presenters feed off the audience. The basic setup here is properly oriented. The audience faces the presenter, the presenter faces the audience. This sets up a one to many type of dynamic, which you would expect when a single person is on stage facing out to a viewing audience. A Virtual Office theater must capture this essence elegantly. The problem with traditional Video Conferencing rooms are that they just flatten everyone equally with “heads in a box”. This is great and works well for conference rooms. But it is not properly optimized for a 1 to many presentation type environment. Sitting in a theater watching the show is in fact fundamentally different than standing on stage, lights on you, projecting your voice to be heard in a presentation. The phrase “blinded by the lights” exists for a reason!

In a Virtual Office Theater, there is a stage. And the presenter clicks to enter the stage. They are opposite the audience, which is beneath them. Instead of looking at heads in a box, the presenter can see a glyphic representation of each audience, seated in rows. Audience members can switch rows, providing a sense of motion. Just like in a real theater, the speaker can’t hear what audience members are whispering to each other, but they can see that the whispering is happening! A talking indicator illuminates over the glyph of the person speaking. A “stadium mode” exists for overflow seating. A screen does not have enough surface area to show more than a 100 or so people at a reasonable size (not unlike a real field of vision, btw). So the solution is to visually show smaller sections which people represented as dots as the field of view fills up. This “overflow”, along with the motion of people in their seats, along with the visual, but inaudible, cues of who is talking form the basis of energy in a Virtual Office Theater audience, upon which a presenter can feed off of.

Nothing energizes a presenter more than a rapid round of applause or enthusiastic laughter. In some traditional video conferencing environments, during a large presentation, people leave their cameras off and mics on mute. So natural reactions are muted, lost in a void of nothingness; a blank stare of empty to a presenter who has no idea how people are reacting to their art. But what is possible in a virtual audience is a way for an audience member to signal a reaction with a click or tap. And your sound to phonically amplify based on signal. That is, if a single person claps, everyone in the crowd hears one clap track; (and also a visual cue that shows who is clapping). As more people begin to clap, the applause proportionally increases so everyone feels the increasing energy. With enough people clapping, you can imagine the deafening roar of a stadium. It needn’t only be applause - a virtual office could offer auto amplification for laughing, crying, booing - other natural sounds people make in theaters. Shared sound and visual cues give great energy to a live performance!

Another key element in a real world theater is the backstage area. Backstage is where the magic behind the scenes happens. Stage hands work, often in near darkness, on costumes and sets. They move mountains … and curtains … to create illusions. A steady hand backstage is invaluable. The critical part of backstage is that it is not visible at all to the audience. It’s a living, breathing part of the show which is intentionally and skillfully hidden. But, importantly, and this is a key point - while backstage is hidden from the view of the audience, it is in partial view of those on stage. A person on stage can “side eye” backstage to see if the right people are backstage and ready and waiting to come to the stage. They can make eye contact and non verbal signals to each other. It is reassuring indeed when you know, whilst on-stage, that the next presenter or actor is properly set and ready to come out. In addition to actors, backstage also has a role of “stagehand”; this is a specialized function for a person to do things like open the curtain, move the set on stage, and coordinate stage operations like microphone or AV. There’s also, optionally, an orchestra pit!

A virtual office theater should provide a backstage area. This gives presenters a space to gear up and get ready before they enter the stage with complete audio and visual privacy from the audience. Others can be backstage, so that when you’re all in there at the same time, you have a space with other presenters or stagehands for any last minute coordination before the show begins. A presenter can also make eye contact and see the people backstage even if you can’t hear them. Moreover, it is possible in a Virtual Office theater to chat with the people backstage while you’re presenting. It is hard and potentially distracting, but it is possible. From the backstage space, a stagehand can control AV like screensharing, videos, Magicasts, curtains, music and audio, or mic access. Of course it is also possible to record the entire presentation, transcribe it and share it privately or publicly. These things were not possible in the ancient Roman amphitheater, but are possible in the modern office of Roam!

The final area of a real-world theater that may be replicated digitally is … the box office! People purchase tickets for admission. There is an entire economy of this in the real world. In an office, for internal meetings, there is no need for a ticket. But when external guests are involved, like at a sales and marketing event, event coordinators want people to register so they can later reach them. A proper Virtual Office can easily offer a Webinar streaming room, and an event registration page, where “tickets” are tracked as links for admission, and coordinators get the list to market to later.

At some companies, employees blow off steam by playing video games together. This can happen in a large setting where a few players play and everyone else watches. Or it can happen in a smaller game room where a couple of engineers sit on bean bag chairs and duke it out over smash brothers. If you are playing a game, this isn’t a taboo that you’re lazy in some way. It is often the mark of the most hardcore engineers or dedicated team members that need a game break. And, if you’re going to take a break, might as well do it in an environment that builds culture and character. After all, the company put that game room in there with a Playstation or N64 for a reason!

As a digital first interface, a Virtual Office has a natural way to offer a gaming experience. On the computer, individual and group games are very popular. But, we must bring them into the office to provide a cool experience that builds connection and culture. In a physical world, one can glance around the office and see who is in the game room area. What we must do in a Virtual Office is bring the same experience to players and everyone else in the office. It is possible in a Virtual Office to show which players are currently playing right on the map. But, we can take this a step further. Since a Virtual Office will likely want to include team-based titles that encourage collaboration, it is possible not just to show who’s playing, but also a live dynamic leaderboard right on the map. This encourages a vigorous competitive spirit!

The present author ran a company Yext which had a significant “Sales Floor.” The Sales Floor was a key part of the evolution of the whole company. We started in a room with a very strong seller, Dr. Bryan Rutcofsty. He would call gyms and other small businesses all day to sell them our products. He was so successful at doing this that we hired some more junior sellers under him and built an entire custom sales system led by Herr Dr. Professor Kevin Caffrey called SalesPhone. Ultimately we ended up with 100s of inside sellers in a large “pit-like” area famously known as “the floor”. The floor was a bastion of energy during the day and emptiness at night. It was a place where wide-eyed junior people came to NYC to make their ambitions come true. It was a place where dreams came true, or they were crushed, with an escort out from HR when you didn’t hit your quota. The following section describes in more detail some of the theater involved in the a physical sales floor and how a Virtual Sales Floor can replicate it.

Positive energy, it turns out, is one of the most important psychological aspects of sales, especially for cold sales, where you’re going to be reaching out to someone that’s never heard of you. Confidence that you can do it produces an ooze of “aura”; and it is an aura that the prospect on the receiving end of the call can sense. Confidence and aura is extremely hard to fake over a sustained period of time! Anyone can fake it for a little bit of time - it’s called just “being on.” Think of doing an interview, this is an example of time where people try and be on for a bit to create a certain impression. But when done, you retreat back into your normal self. A great inside salesperson must always “be on”, and this is best accomplished when that person integrates that aura into their natural self! And that confidence comes from positivity, hope, and optimism. Belief in one self, and belief in the product they are selling. This is difficult to fake, and prospects can sense it. People buy from people who believe in what they are selling. A great sales floor provides an energizing environment that sets the foundation of hope.

This starts with audio. Everyone can hear what is going on. Unlike private offices given to senior people or staff engineers, individual privacy was minimal on the Sales Floor. Desks were lined up next to each other. Reps sat at their desk on their hardwired internet phones and with headsets made calls all day. The recipe for success was pretty simple - the number of dials you made was directly proportionate to how many people you spoke with, which was directly proportionate to sales, and so on. It is immediately obvious to anyone entering a sales floor how well it’s going. When you can hear lots of people on the phone, animated and talking, you can sense that people are reaching decision makers and closing! As an outside observer, this was obvious. And as a rep walking through the floor to take your seat, hearing others close gave you the confidence that you can do it too. Public audio is important for team confidence.

In addition to giving you confidence, observing others pitch and close is a powerful training tool. An inside sales job is grueling and generally high turnover. Even the best reps last only a couple of years before moving up or on to something else. This means that a key part of a successful inside sales flywheel is a new crop of trainees showing up regularly to cut their teeth. The best reps follow the scripts, and the best scripts are living, breathing documents adapted to the realities of the market, constantly tweaked and updated with new words as top performers uncover new words and phrases that unlock strong reactions from prospects on the other end of the phone. Being immersed in an environment where you can hear everything working is a powerful training tool. And being together with a group of trainees, for fellow newbies, gives them a team sense as they go through the ups and downs of learning the trade together.

It is the experience of this author that the best performing reps tend to be those that most closely follow the company scripts. Possibly the scripts or the “zinger” lines are printed out on one’s desk. Or possibly the script appears dynamically as part of the outbound CRM system as the rep is taking. They take notes, or answer questions, or based on AI, the next thing to say appears. Scripts are a crucial part of the repeatable inside sales playbook.

A manager can walk up and down the aisle. They hear what the reps are saying on the phone. And, often the manager can jump in on the call. Maybe they just jump in to passively listen, which helps them see how a rep is handling various objections. Or, perhaps they will actually jump in and help. Have you ever been on a telemarketing type sales or call center support call where a rep said “I’m going to patch in my manager?”. This can happen on a live sales floor.

A live sales floor has a palpable sense of energy which starts with the crowd of loud people speaking on their phones. You can hear all the conversations. One physical ornament some companies utilize is a GONG. When a rep closes a sale, they get up and pick up a giant hammer to bang against an ancient loud symbol. Everyone cheers them and they get a noisy clangy public recognition of a job well done!

Speaking of public recognition, the scoreboard is another prominent artifact used to highlight performance and drive the competitive spirit. A large TV scoreboard displays dials and sales for the day in real time. At a glance, you can see how you are doing, and who is in the lead. There is no greater motivator for people than being part of a team that depends on them. In fact, the US Marines use small elite squadrons where the main motivation is to never let your squad down as primacy even over virtues of country, valor and honor. “Don’t Let Me Down” keeps reps going even on the slowest of days. The scoreboard makes it plainly visible who is the best and, at worst, who is letting down their team.

By the way, the best inside sales floors are so loud it is absolutely necessary to physically separate them from desktop knowledge work that requires deep focus, lest a major distraction occur. But a company may wish to reveal some of the energy of the sales floor by surrounding it in glass. This means a desk knowledge worker could voluntarily look up, and catch a glimpse of the surrounding energy from a visual cue. But there would be no involuntary audio distractions.

It is worth for a moment digressing to consider the physical material of glass, which is used in homes and buildings everywhere. But why? It is hard to transport, and more fragile than opaque substances. It’s more expensive and harder to work with and transform, like curve for Apple HQ. The reason is obviously because it is transparent, it lets in light, and internally in an office it can give people a sense of what is happening while securing audio privacy. A person in an office can walk around and through a glass door, see who is in their own private office, who is meeting with whom, and what someone is doing. The visual cue of what is happening without the specific audio gives people a lot of signal. Body language is apparent. The cluster of specific people plays in the office political theater. Glass isn’t just a window to the outside, it’s a window into the innermost workings of a company, that only a transparent visual stream illuminates for the best companies, bringing them closer together and helping them win. A Virtual Office elegantly emulates the transparency of glass by showing everything going on in an office without revealing private audio.

One of the common quarrels within an inside sales organization is the distribution of inbound leads. When you walk into a high end luxury retail store or a car dealership a basic next up system defines who gets the next lead. This can be replicated digitally even better - an inbound caller is routed to the next available representative.

A Virtual Office can replicate the best in-person aspects of a sales floor, and take it to the next level with the power of information technology and AI. Before even getting into any product design, a Virtual Sales Floor offers a company many benefits. They can bring on reps from anywhere in the world, any time. They can save money on office space and hire from the most cost effective regions. People can clock in or out when they are available to make and receive calls. They don’t need to commute anywhere so availability can change fast and they can immediately connect to the “energy”.

A Virtual Sales Floor product design can instantly show the entire sales floor. But unlike other parts of the office space where everyone may want to sit in their own private offices for deep individual work, reps aren’t in their own offices. They’re in a common area, making calls. Maybe the calling is happening from a dialer. Maybe they are in a videoconferencing call like Zoom. Maybe they are using Roam for the call. It should be instantly obvious to anyone on the floor (or looking in through the “glass”) who is on a call and who is not. It is possible to even show who the rep is on the call with! A “thought bubble” or other type of visual indicator can occur over the rep’s head on the map with information about the receiver, and possibly a link to their CRM. This is immediately helpful to a manager or anyone else on the floor. Maybe they have a connection to the receiver. Maybe they have an idea for how to help. They can instantly glance and see if they can help and then chat with the rep on the phone with any ideas.

A Virtual Sales Floor can contain the same common ornaments as a physical sales floor. It can have a Gong, which could have its audio contained to just those people on the floor. It could provide managers a microphone to broadcast audio to everyone on the floor, including those people on a call. It could contain a “passive drop in” feature for managers or trainees to passively drop into a call so they can listen and coach. It could contain an “active drop in” feature for managers to drop in as an equal participant so they can play a live role in the call.

Perhaps there is an idle bleed of audio mixed to provide the energy of ambient noise to anyone who is on the floor but not on the call. It is possible to mix all the streams of concurrent audio together, scramble them a little, and play that for anyone in or near the floor. Possibly there is a spatial audio component. You hear more clearly and more loudly the people you are closest to. But, as soon as you (if you’re a rep) join a call, the audio is gone, flipped off like you’ve just put on noise cancellation headphones. When a manager or trainee joins the call - passively or actively - it’s visible on the map, just like it would be in a physical office.

There’s a space for non reps to gather and observe. This is a fundamental part of any sales floor. Execs pop in to see what’s happening. People bring their guests in to tour the virtual floor to show the energy of the company, visually and a trace of audio from what’s actually happening right now. There’s a rest area for reps to be present in the energy of the floor without being at their desk, and therefore available for a call.

Paper airplanes can fly back and forth to tease people. In a virtual office I could throw a paper airplane at someone on the sales floor, just like I could in the real world. The horsin’ around creates some energy. A Virtual Scoreboard provides space to showcase who is winning and losing, and gets the competitive juices of the team flowing. This can appear at all times on the virtual office map.

Meetings that actually occur on the Virtual Sales floor have some special advantages. The calendar booking system can use a common company Lobby with lead routing rules applied. Companies can receive external drop-ins and they can be routed instantly to a rep who is actually available now. The guest experience can be bespoke. Guests could feel the energy of the floor too. And scripts with pathways can appear in the UX for a rep. Defaults for the kind of meeting can be set - automatically record the meeting video, or just grab the audio. Maybe it’s different by rep or for different leads or people. All meeting recordings can be stored in a company library and tagged for later, used for training or improvements, or even AI Agents.

AI can help in a number of ways. It’s beyond the scope of the Virtual Sales Floor to replicate all the features of a modern AI powered CRM system, but to hit on a few basics - all meetings can be easily recorded and transcribed. Notes, summaries and action items are created by AI and automatically update the company’s CRM system, and initiate sequences, etc. It is also worth stating that a group chat channel can provide a lot of centralized CRM energy. Every event that every lead or prospect does can appear as a notification tagging the relevant rep. This can help link marketing and early stage sales success.

If AIM popularized the idea of direct chatting, IRC popularized the idea of group channels. Put them together and you have an entirely new way of chatting in a virtual office. Email of course replaced real mail. And a chat system for internal company communication takes a hunk out of email and presents it in a better interface. A direct message is a bit different than a group channel. It is worth diving into this for a moment. The interface for the best direct messaging apps on the planet look different than Slack or IRC channels. DMs are light and quick. There are not really long, endless, organized threads. They are bubbles whereby you can have quick conversations with a single person or a few people and everything new appears right on top. Even a reply to a previous bubble comes at you as a new message. A set of people on a chat is predefined upfront, so you later cannot adjust the recipients of previous messages. This is key because you would not want a new person to come in and be able to read all previous messages unless that was an intention in the design of your communication system! The most popular messaging apps like WhatsApp and iMessage tend to follow these design principles.

Group or Channel style chats evolved from IRC and today live on in popular enterprise messaging apps like Slack or Teams. The idea of named groups is that they are the container for a set of content within a company and that the members of such a group could change or evolve over time. Since this is implicit in the design of the system, it changes a bit how people communicate in the group. People chat or share fundamentally differently when they know that their messages may later be read by someone else who is known and not presently in the group. For example, suppose there is a group channel about Project X and you are a member of it. There is a discussion about the need to add a project manager to the group. If you were not in favor of a certain project manager, that group channel would be an ill-advised place to state your opinion! You’d share your opinion in DMs where you’d have more confidence that the incoming person wouldn’t be able to read all you’d written about them. On the other hand, such design is important for knowledge sharing. You would with certainty want the incoming person to be able to instantly access all the knowledge about the project.

Deeply integrated with the idea of chat is search. Messages should be able to be either public or private and any Virtual Office member should be able to easily search across messages to instantly pull up any relevant information. Advanced search features let users filter by group, date, keyword, attachment and other variables relevant to them. And, of course, it remains important for all this message content to be accessible for AI prompting. Forgetting AI Agents actually taking action for a moment, there is the “simple” matter of a user prompting company knowledge for their own pursuits.

While DMs and Group Channels are forever preserved, another kind of company messaging has received scant attention: confidential messages that disappear after they’ve been read. Sometimes you need to express a certain truth that you don’t want on the record forever. Examples of this can include HR matters or sensitive deal information or opinions that could change. A Virtual Office can contain confidential messages with different levels of protection including end-to-end encryption, screenshot protections, and that “explode” after they are read. This is the opposite of permanent company knowledge. This is the stuff you don’t want to be able to search and retrieve later. Furthermore, the sender knows that something they’re sending is going to be gone, they’re more likely to express a clear and complete truth; unencumbered by the foggy filter of ambiguous political correctness.

As a digital app that sits on a computer, a Virtual Office application can provide some basic tooling for grabbing and sharing video content. There is a fine line between offering a simple, quick, integrated screengrabber with shareable links such as Loom vs. a professional video editor like Adobe Premiere Pro. Virtual Offices should not go overboard and endeavor to serve the professional market. Instead they must focus on the simple mass use case for grabbing a screen, sharing it digitally, and tracking what’s happened since.

Guardian

Sentinel Systems

Windy

Windmill

Navigator

Pathfind Solutions

Apex

Performance AI

AI is also enabling AI Agents, the fastest emerging field in the history of technology. The vast scope of AI Agents goes well beyond what we intend to cover in the Galactic Guide to Virtual Offices, but one specific type of AI Agent is worth covering here: The AI Executive Assistant. In the physical world, an executive assistant is reserved for the top tier Vice Presidents and Executives at a company. But in a Virtual Office, with AI, everyone can get an AI EA, capable of dramatically improving their productivity.

An AI EA has all the knowledge - chats and meetings - for the person they support. And, it can instantly draw upon the huge wealth of company knowledge to do the same thing. A proper AI EA should be able to draft emails, automatically detect follow up action items, schedule with internal and external people, and follow up via email or chat systems.

The possibilities for what an AI could do in the future are endless. Sufficient for the present era, LLMs are pretty good at drafting things like e-mails, scheduling meetings, following up with people and chatting and prompting company knowledge. This is the approximate set of features an AI EA in a Virtual Office can do. With context from meetings, they can grab Action Items like drafting, or following up with people, and scheduling follow up meetings. This gives everyone in a Virtual Office the same advantage as executives in a physical office!

When you walk into an Apple Store, the people in the store are wearing sleek, modern Apple shirts. The UPS delivery guy wears a brown pair of shorts, with a trademarked color of brown (Pantone 4975 C, US Trademark: 2491124)! When you walk into a physical office, there are different dress codes. Wall Street may require a suit and tie for men and a business suit for women. A tech company may be sweats and hoodies. What you wear is a major signal of status and activity. Roman Emperors wore “the purple”; in fact “wearing the purple” was an epithet which came to mean the emperor! Jedi wear hoodies, Disney cast members wear costumes. Steve Jobs wore the same turtleneck and jeans every day, kind of like a monk. Militaries have long understood the power of uniform and ornaments to signify conformity and rank.

Employees working from a Virtual Office can also synchronize their wardrobes, especially in customer facing functions. The power of what you were has several functions. First, it sends a message to your customers. When you’re dressed a certain way, it makes the person on the receiving end of a video call feel a certain way. Next, it sends a message to your team. When team members synchronize their wardrobes the effect is more conformity (the good kind). Lastly, putting on a certain wardrobe sends a message to yourself! Anyone can learn to use the “dress” trigger as a mental cue that you’re about to do certain things. Put on your gym clothes physically and you’re more ready to work out mentally. Put on your Apple Store shirt physically and you’re instantly transformed into an Apple Genius mentally.

Companies operating in a Virtual Office can use the power of uniform wardrobe to manufacture aura with customers, drive team alignment, and cue individual mental mindset advantages.

The walls in a physical office are more to provide a perimeter of sound privacy than visual privacy. Especially glass walls. There isn’t much in an office that a company or executive wouldn’t want someone to see. It’s that you don’t necessarily want someone to hear a private conversation. Essentially, if you think about it, the whole point of the floorplan of an office isn’t really visual design, it’s sound segmentation. Floorplan designers intentionally sit people working together near each other so they have fast access to private or shared conversations. A Virtual Office is designed to mimic this exactly.

Music can play a key role in bringing people together. As Douglas Hofstader once said, “there is nothing that suggests that two minds are alike that they have the same taste in music”. Listening to the same groves in a physical office can help get teams in sync. With the rise of digital jukeboxes and internet radio like Spotify and Apple Music, it is possible to bring this harmony to Virtual Offices as well. A Virtual Office could display what song someone is listening to on their own computer. So people could look it up and choose to play it themselves. Or, in a Virtual Office, a playlist or shared track could be streamed into a room.

To stop the flow of music would be like the stopping of time itself. Music should flow through an office.

The idea of a Virtual Office is as old as the internet itself. As soon as people started using the skeuomorphic metaphor for “home” page, they also envisioned an Office inside of the computer. The problem was, unlike other metaphors such as a “Shop”, the bandwidth and video conferencing technology necessary to make a decent office that actually connected people took a decade. It took two decades, but today it is possible to run a reasonable Virtual Office on most computers without crashing them. With the rise of quantum computing, the ability to bring an office inside of a computer will only become more widespread.

Above everything else, an office - whether virtual or physical - serves as a center of energy for a company. The point isn’t just about the ability to have conversations quickly with each other. It’s the kinetic energy of being together in the same physical space which causes an infinitesimile number of non-verbal sparks which manufacture alertness and awakeness and a feeling of togetherness in the human soul. Imagine a large, beautiful gothic looking library room. There’s a huge difference in how it feels to read completely alone in that room vs if it’s filled up with others reading too - even if they are reading in complete silence. This is the feeling of presence. It exists in a physical office, and today a Virtual Office can emulate it. But, instead of the office building being “the place”, in a Virtual Office, “the internet” is the place.

In the 1960s, Walt Disney had a vision to create the Experimental Prototype City of Tomorrow. It came true in his realization of EPCOT, a thriving metropolis visited by millions each year. In the 2020s, a few people had their own vision to create the Remote Office And More. Today, ROAM is powering thriving companies on the internet, who are each writing the future of civilization as we know it - all in their Virtual Office.