Every once in a while I interact with a new product and have an epiphany: "Ah! This is it. This is the future and how the world will work."
Over the summer I caught up with one of my favorite entrepreneurs, Howard Lerman, and he said he had something to show me. It was a new product he and a bunch of colleagues from the various companies he had previously founded were building. He gave me a high-level overview of what they were doing, but showing always beats telling. And when Howard demoed Ro.am, I knew that I was witnessing what the future of work looked like for companies that operate out of an office, remotely, or a combination of the two. There has already been a lot of good coverage of Roam and I encourage you the check it out: Howard's remarks, CNBC, TechCrunch, Squawk Box, and IVP.
Many companies are trying to find ways for people to work better together remotely by creating some version of a browser-based HQ. We've seen everything from Meta's futuristic avatar-based version of the workplace metaverse to various permutations of gamified work experiences. Most of them come across cartoonish and impractical. But Roam actually feels like a HQ, but in the cloud. It's a viable virtual office.
I fell in love with it for several personal reasons. First and foremost, it mimics a physical office. I can see who is present, who they're meeting with, "knock" on their "doors," and have spontaneous conversations. It's the only thing I've seen that comes close to the in person experience. It's intentionally skeuomorphic, or as Howard describes, a "breakthrough office graphical interface," the same way Apple designed for the iPhone when they were acclimating the world to transitioning from desktop to mobile.
I need to be around people in order to feel energized, productive, and happy. If I ever were to build another company, I'd want to work from home 1-2 days per week and be in an office surrounded by people 3-4 days per week. Roam is the tool that creates a seamless experience transitioning through these modalities, ensuring nobody loses out on the magic of collaboration. It also eliminates roughly 50% of Zoom meeting time by making quick hallway conversations practical - the average meeting time in Roam is ~8 minutes!
The shift to distributed teams, remote work, and an asynchronous cadence has been confusing and hard for most founders and leaders. There's always a creeping suspicion in the back of your mind that people are phoning it in and that you're losing the magical moments that make building things so special and rewarding. And for those who value a performance based culture, the transition to remote or hybrid is a steep learning curve with few best practices. Roam is a happy equilibrium. It's the solution we've been waiting for that needs to exist. It's not that Roam enables managers to surveil, it's that it creates a work setting that enables people to flourish regardless of where they are. Some people and roles will always be able to operate asynchronously and that's great. But that's the exception, not the rule. And Roam empowers different configurations to embrace best practices and develop new ones for a rapidly changing work world.
I believe that Roam will be the platform that enables more magic moments between colleagues and helps us to do even better work together. I'm lucky to be an investor backing Howard and the incredible Roam team. Sign your company up here.
For technology companies, the market has drastically shifted from prioritizing growth above all else to the quality of the underlying business and its growth. This is healthy and grounded relative to the irrational exuberance over the better part of the past decade.
One of the things I have been thinking about recently are the parallels between this market correction and the way we think about the broader economy. So much of our capitalistic orientation over the past century has been focused around growth: “Growth in GDP equals good.” It’s a simplistic point of view that doesn’t account for underlying flaws, medium and long-term instability, and negative externalities associated with that growth. It was significantly more good than bad by any measure of progress, but we are beginning to see the objective measures of its limitations.
As more of the global population comes around to the consequences of the perils of the climate crisis, economic inequality, and the rapid attack against democracy, it is incumbent upon us to reevaluate our growth at all costs mindset and begin to value the quality of growth above arbitrary measures of it. We (i.e. Western Civilization) have operated like a company that spends money to grow top line without accounting for the health of the underlying business and its constituents. And that is now completely unsustainable.
While I am no fan of presenting problems without solutions, I do believe this is a critical concept to collectively wrap our heads around in the decades to come. We have an entrenched set of behaviors and way of life that is comfortable, but not healthy. We produce significantly more foods than we need, and as a result there is an obesity epidemic. To our hearts’ content, we manufacture and buy an unfathomable amount of shit we do not need and let much of it go to waste. We partake in activities daily that are enjoyable, but detrimental to long term health and sustainability of virtually every natural and human made system.