The a16z Show - a16z Podcast: Telepresence and Tech for a Distributed Workforce

Episode Date: November 3, 2015

Telepresence. It's an ugly, outdated word for an attractive and current/ emerging phenomenon where people can work from anywhere, anytime. It's technology for the way we work today. But is it as easy as adding good tech to a constantly evolving problem? What about etiquette? And design uber alles? And finally ... why does telepresence even matter? Well, if you can't hire talent locally, you can hire them remotely. That constraint is the easier of all the other requirements to relax. Or so argue the guests on this episode of the a16z Podcast: Scott Hassan, president and CEO of Suitable Technologies, maker of the popular Beam robots and formerly founder of Willow Garage and eGroups (now Yahoo Groups) as well as key software architect and developer of Google, Alexa Internet, and the Stanford Digital Library; Shan Sinha, formerly of DocVerse (acquired by Google) and co-founder and CEO of Highfive, video and web conferencing for everyone; and Craig Walker, formerly of Google and Yahoo Voice, now co-founder and CEO of Switch -- makers of Uberconference and other products for cloud-based enterprises looking to update their communications. Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hi everyone, welcome to the A6 and Z podcast. I'm Sonal and today we're talking about telepresence, which is a really ugly word and really old-fashioned word for something that's actually very relevant and interesting and it has to do with the technologies for how remote and distributed workers and even people in the same office talk to each other using conferencing and other tools. And today we have three guests joining us to talk about this trend. First, we have Scott Hassan, who was the key software architect of Google back in the early days and also Alexa and the Stanford Digital Library. He was also the co-founder of e-groups, which is now Yahoo Groups, and later was the founder of Willow Garage. Now he's the founder and CEO of suitable technologies,

which makes the Beam Robots, which are basically there's really cool. You're probably seeing them on TV, robots for conferencing. They're like people's heads that roll on wheels, but they're basically robots. I personally don't like my devices, be called robots. We should actually talk about that. Because they are not robots. Because robots, if you ever watched any of the documentaries coming out of Hollywood, robots usually walk around. round and they usually kill off the human race. And these are, these are nothing to do with. These are just remote-controlled little devices.

No killing of the human race. Yep, no killing, you know, and just friendly people. Like, there's some of Walking Dead. They never call them zombies either. It's always walkers or avoid the hot words. Yeah, but, you know, it's so easy for people to call them robots for some reason. Okay, so speaking of walkers, although not the Game of Thrones kind, And we also have Craig Walker, who is the co-founder and CEO of Switch Communications, which is a

communication service that's integrated with all of the cloud-based productivity apps that people already use at work. So things like Google Apps and Office 365. And one of their other products is the voice conferencing system Uber Conference. And finally, we have Sean Sinha, who's the co-founder and CEO of High Five, which provides an all-in-one hardware and software system. So it's both in-room and web-based to help bring big company video conferencing quality to companies of all size. So that's all the introductions and what you guys do. Okay, you guys, welcome.

Thanks for having us. Good to be here. We wanted to have a podcast on telepresence trends, and I got some pushback on the word telepresence. Like, what does I even mean? Why does it even matter? And I think the broader question here is like, why the hell do we care about telepresence at all? Like, what's a point? Like, why have a podcast on this topic? Yeah. Great question. So as the only non-telepresence company here, I think it's more the broader trend of people being able to work and collaborate from anywhere at any time on any device, right? And if you're going to do video, there's options to do video. If you're going to do audio, if you're going to have a next-gen phone system, there's ways to do that. But the reality, like, what we see is businesses are moving their productivity suites to the clown, their email, their Gmail, their office 365, and their workers are now able to work and be.

productive from anywhere, and it's kind of our job to give them tools to make them even more productive from any time, any place, any device. Yeah, I think Sonal, I think the reason why you might get pushback around the telepresence term is because it's kind of like asking the question of what's going on with the mainframe market. Telepresence is sort of dead these days, but the thing that is unique about today's world is that people are actually working in fundamentally different ways. People are more distributed. They can do their work from wherever they are, because we've We've got bandwidth, we've got connectivity, we've got devices, we've got mobile phones, everywhere we are, and we have access to all our information.

And so, you know, you can just look at all the statistics. You know, companies are increasingly more distributed. Two-thirds of workers are now working from remote locations, not going into the office. And I think this is the trend that you might be really interested in. So there's a whole need for a new set of tools to help connect people in the ways that they want to work using the technologies that they're using today. And that's the thing that's making this particular set of technologies and trends really, really exciting. Well, that's exactly what I'm interested in.

But I think the question I have is that this problem has been around for ages. I mean, granted, the workforce is more distributed and more remote than ever. And I think the need for communication and connection is tighter than ever. But why is it a problem? Like, I mean, it may seem obvious to you guys. The way I see it is that starting a company, and there's lots of, and lots of companies being started every day, right? Actually, coming up with an idea for a company is not that hard.

It turns out what I found is that the hardest thing about creating a successful company is actually hiring the right people, right? It's just so utterly hard, especially in the Bay Area. The Bay Area is so hard to get a good engineer who actually knows what they're doing and things like that. And so, I mean, basically, in my company, we're usually fighting over that engineer with Google, Apple, and Facebook and a whole bunch of different people. And so if you think about it, using technologies like, I guess, telepresence technologies, allows you to source staff people to work your company from anywhere in the world. You think about it, right? You need to find the right person or the right talent in the right location, right, for the right price.

So if you can relax one of those constraints, well, That's great because trying to solve three constraints is really hard problem. And location is actually probably the most liberating of all the constraints to relax in that context. Yeah, you can try relaxing the salary, but people don't like that. Yeah, I'll expand. I'll expand on the way we think about the world is very similar. But it's not even just the people you're trying to hire. Companies are able to get an amazing amount of leverage by working with other partners.

So I don't have to have everything in my company anymore. I can work with the best hardware design firm to go build our device. I can work with the best manufacturer in Asia to go pull together our entire service. I can work with people up in different geographies building the best cloud service infrastructure like Amazon to deliver an important part of our service. And so you look for the best way to deliver your product or service in your company. And that doesn't necessarily mean having to just hire people, but it's also. the way we work with partners. Companies are able to get more leverage out of that.

And the thing that binds all of those things together is how we communicate with each other. And the way we think about the world at High Five is, how do you help people communicate better and more effectively in today's world where things are increasingly distributed, not even just from a location perspective, but from a company boundary perspective? So both the remote workforce, more distributed sense of partnerships and collaborators, more permeable boundaries. But why can't I just pick up the phone and get on a speaker call and talk to people and collaborate that way? So it's interesting. So when we were starting an Uber conference, what we wanted to do coming from like the Google Voice background is, hey, for those 80% of minutes that are being consumed by people just on the phone, the guy who's in the car, the guy who's in the taxi, you're traveling or you're not in front of an ability to get on video,

you don't want to still be stuck in that like 1970s dial a number, enter a 10-digit, PIN. Let's focus on a place that everyone's ignored. And I think there's awesome partnership opportunities. There's awesome ways to make voice and video work really well together. You're seeing probably more diverse businesses getting together over video, but still the most, like the most intense use case of just audio conferencing is one business getting on a conference call with another or a law firm. You know, like those guys don't talk to their clients on video. They're on the phone all the time. And so how do you do it? You know, how do you make it better without, you know, without having to go compete with all these great guys in the video space.

I think there's two ways that I think about that problem. I think if you think about the things that are coming to market today, you've got cars that are driving themselves. You have rockets being shot into space for 10x less the cost. We have people inventing new types of food. All of these are brand new innovations, but the way that people are still talking to each other is still over the phone. And I think one of the truisms of history has been,

And people are always looking for better ways to communicate. Sometimes that means just getting in a room together and talking. Sometimes that means jumping on the phone. Sometimes that means jumping on an airplane and having to go and connect with people. Sometimes it means just sending an email. And so I think in today's world, we need more options to communicate the way that makes sense in a particular circumstance. So at Google, it was really interesting. So it was 40,000 person company.

the normal way that people talked at Google was using video. We had gotten rid of conference calls, and it ultimately led to a better company or a company that made better decisions because we were able to see each other. We didn't have to wait for everybody to jump into the room together to make important decisions. And just to give a couple of interesting statistics,

when we were at Google, I think we left right around the same time. But when we were at Google, we were around 40,000 people every single day they would do 20,000 video calls. Oh my God, that's insane. The average person used video one to two times a day, and so it became a part of everyone's everyday workflow,

and I know Craig had the same exact experience as I did. What we said was every company in the world should have the option to use video the way we did at Google. And so that's why we started High Five. We saw a bunch of reasons why it worked at Google, and we decided to make that technology available to every other company in High Five's product. And again, it's about giving companies,

options on how to communicate. What about the intimacy of like so one of the things that I've heard about VR for example is that virtual reality might be able to solve this problem where at the end of the day if you're doing like a multi-million dollar contract, you're not going to put that client on a video call or a phone call. You're going to fly, get on a plane, go over there and talk to them in person to close a deal and sign the contract. Do you guys believe that technology can truly replace that? I mean, I know you're not arguing for replacement. You're arguing for options, optionality and augmentation and having choice. But do you think that we'll ever get to a place where we can entirely conduct our lives

over these sets of technologies without having to ever come in person? I mean, I wouldn't want to. Literally, there's the relationships you have with people. You're like people like to work with people they like to work with. And in getting that trust and familiarity, and you build a lot of rapport over dinner and drinks. I'm like, I mean, just more than just, I'm here. for my four o'clock meeting. Nice to meet you at five.

I get out and I go back on the plane. So there's more, I mean, there's more to the fabric of the relationship that I think that's important of. But things like, you know, these technologies allow you to, like, effectively pair that down to the most important times. When there's something big,

when like it's, you know, it's time to go shake the hand or it's time they're having an issue and you've got to go calm them down. That's a face-to-face thing, and I don't think we'll ever get it. Even if you had a killer, virtual hologram. I still would rather be in the room.

I totally agree. A lot of the technologies are more transactional. Like when you make a phone call to somebody, it's transactional, meaning I call you, your phone rings, you pick it up, you talk, and there's a whole formality to that, right? You wouldn't necessarily call someone and just be on the line for four hours and just chat back and forth. That way you usually does that, right? And that's because of the technology. I don't know. It's a social normal.

right. Beam, on their hand, we have engineers that sit on the beam for more than six, eight hours at a time, and they overhear conversations. So they're working from Indiana, from, you know, from Vancouver, all around the world. And they basically are there with their team, embedded with their team. And then whenever they hear something that's about what something they're working on, they pipe in and say, hey, yeah, I'm just working on that right now.

now, are we done with it a little bit? Here's here it is. Or when they are talking to somebody, other team members can overhear the conversations and things like that, right? Right. Which you don't usually get that on a conference call or a voice call because it's very transactional. It's like only I have to talk to whomever or something like that. And that's why a lot of companies like to co-locate all the employees in the same room without anything is because they want that serendipity of communication, right? And with all the other technologies, like phone and video conferencing and all those things, you don't get that serendipity because usually, like, if you have a video conferencing room, you have to go do that room

until only the people that are absolutely necessary for that are going to go to that room, whereas the beam product, you are present there. You move around. You can even, you know, you can go right up to somebody right in their face and say, hey, when are you going to get this thing done? All right. I need this. And it's something like, it's like really amazing.

When someone closes their door, you can go up to the door and rammed into their door. It's knock on the door. And push that door open and come into their off and say, hey, we got to get this done today. I got to fight to pick with you. Yeah. And that's a very, adding that physical portion of it, I believe, it brings it to the next level. That's why we call our system as a smart present system. Whereas you have cell phones and you have smartphones.

Smart phones adds as a whole level much more than just a cell phone, right? It's not all about talking. It's about all the other things that are. Yeah. We ran a survey or we ran a study a couple of months back. And one of the things that we learned, I don't know if this is going to be a surprise to anybody, but it turns out two-thirds of people actually prefer in-person meetings over everything else. Oh, that's interesting.

And, you know, everybody jokes about how meetings suck and they're terrible and all of that. Yet two-thirds of people actually prefer in-person meetings. I think it's what both Scott and Craig are talking about here, which is there's something about being physically present that makes a difference. Now, when we think about communication tools for today's world, I think it's one of those, the ways that we like to think about it is that it's kind of a compromise. It doesn't make sense to be there in person all the time because it might just not require the investment. If I need to catch up with a customer or a partner or somebody who's working in a different geography, sometimes a phone call suffices. Oftentimes,

video could be a useful tool when a phone call isn't enough to convey what you're talking about, but getting there in person is just too onerous. So when we think about the ways that people communicate, it's always a spectrum. You know, at the absolute lowest end might be a text message, at the highest end might be jumping on a plane to go meet with them, meet with somebody. And there's a whole bunch of options in between. And the way we really like to think about sort of what companies are trying to accomplish is it's really about the culture. It's about, How do you preserve the culture between all of your people? And that's kind of where we see at least video being a very powerful tool.

Because if you can't be there in person, it's a really powerful way to help connect people at a cultural level. That's exactly right. Particularly internal to your company, you're able to dictate, you know, what's the platform? So everyone interrupts with everyone. And it's really easy. And you have this culture of, hey, grab this guy, even if he's not there. And I guarantee it's exactly like ours. There's not big, eight-foot-high cubicle walls.

There's not a lot of desks or offices with closed doors. It's wide open, and it's wide open for a reason. So you can have that product, can talk to marketing, can talk to sales, can talk to engineering, can talk to design, like, all the time. And having that for, you know, people who aren't physically there, being able to have, kind of like be part of that conversation is really, really important to the culture and to make a better product. Well, so I'm hearing some themes around culture, productivity, the physical. physicality of it. So let's actually take a step back now and talk about the implications for

etiquette and design. So what I'm curious about is how does this shift? Because one funny thing about Beam, which I love, is that when we have meetings and, you know, when some of the GPs are remote and one of them will roll in, there are things that we will do to the beam that we will not do to them in person. It just makes me think about like how these technologies, because you're all talking about this theme of human connection, how they shift our social interactions with people. Can you guys share some insights from each of your work and your own history in trying to build these products? We had a customer. They were, they're in, they're based out of, they're based out of Wisconsin, the Midwest. And I'll try not to be too specific. But we,

they had two teams that were just at each other's throats. I mean, they just could not get along. Every single thing ran into an issue. And we ended up deploying high five there. And as soon as you deployed high five across those multiple offices, and these were two offices that were right across the street from each other, as soon as you required all of their meetings to be done over video, and the thing that made it work was it was easy to you, all that kind of stuff. But as soon as you got everyone to be able to just plug in and use video, everything softened. Because when you look at someone, you're going to be way less reluctant to go and say, some really bad things to them in the way that you might over the phone, like some of us might

have done to the support person that, you know, on the last product that frustrated is. But when you use video, it's really hard to look at somebody in the eye and say, oh, my God, fuck you, right? And so we saw that benefit. And we got all these notes back from our customer who said, you know what? We have these two teams that are working together. And that hasn't happened in, you know, months. I think that sort of connection.

I think that's one of the best ways that I can describe the ability to or the power of being able to see someone when you're talking to them. Yeah, I think it actually, that notion that you don't want to offend another person, you want to be most socially conscious. I believe it has more to do with just your humanality. When you see somebody else, your brain, like, you know, we have a long line of evolution, sees another face and go, well, there's a person there. Yeah. Right. And they can,

it's embodying them. Yeah. And we have and this technology has only come about in the last 20 years where you can interact with a screen, right? And then there's a person on the other side and your brain just hasn't evolved to actually understand that no, the person's actually not there, right? But in all intents and purposes is. So for instance, in our product, since our product, now you can move, it's really, I've sat

in meetings where. I'm the only person in meat form. And everyone, I've been in like six or seven beams all surrounding me for hours. And afterwards, I sit, I walk out and then going, huh, I just sat in a room with a whole much of pieces of metal and plastic, right? But my brain told me that there were all these people there. Right. And I was interacting with all these people.

I knew I was, you know, interacting and being very productive with, right? So I think there's a, there's a lizard brain thing going on where, um, where once you add video, when you can see the eyes of the person that adds enormous amounts, right? And then when you add the ability to move, it's just really hard for your brain to go, you know, to think it's not real. Do you think the flip side is also true, where sometimes you actually want the intimacy of just voice and not have to see someone's face and interact with them physically, whether it's through body or, you know, person? We have a policy of all employees. Once someone's beamed in, a customer or an employee or anybody beamed in, you're not. not allowed to touch the beam at all. We apply the same principles as if they were there.

So you don't touch them, even if it would be more easier for you to move them around, you don't touch them. Right. And that's sort of an etiquette that you guys just haven't learned. It's funny you say that because the way it came about was Peter had beamed out of his office and he was rolling back to his office and then he bumped into a group of us, you know, having a little water cooler conversation basically for lack of a better phrase because there wasn't a water cooler there. but we were standing there. And we were all kind of laughing about talking and seeing Peter there. We weren't treating him as if he were a person because we knew it was Peter.

What was really interesting about the interaction was that it broke a little thing that we couldn't have done otherwise. But you're right. At the end of the day, we do try to treat the person respectfully as if they're a person. But because they're not there in person, you can do a few extra things you might not be able to necessarily do otherwise. Well, we actually say that they're actually there in person and they're actually, they're physically there.

and they are there in person. That's how we should be viewing. That's how we view it. It's like there's no real difference. One of the values of, you know, working from home or working remotely or not being in the office is the ability to not have to be presentable to office level at all times. And I got to tell you, I love working from home. I'll take early morning calls. I'll take late night calls.

But you don't want to be seeing me for a lot of those calls. And I sound, you know, like no one knows. And that's actually great. And it's not just me. It's like, you know, our team loves it. We actually work remotely Tuesdays and Thursdays just so we can work from home and crush it without having to deal with commutes and anything that's going to slow us down. And with, you know, we have video. We have hangouts.

We have Uber conference. We have switch. We have ways to communicate like all the time. But there's plenty of times where video isn't an option. And there's plenty of times outside of the company when you're talking to, you know, vendors, customers, partners, what have you. And they don't have a beam in their office or they don't have a high five in their office where it's like, hey, you know, like, hey, you know, like. Let's just have a super efficient conversation. So, yeah, I love, I love, like, the openly, I love all the video stuff, but I also love sometimes just being the sultry voice.

I think it's interesting, too, because there's a power differential that's addressed through some of these technologies where people who wouldn't otherwise be able to come into the office, like working parents, you know, who are on babysitting duty or other things. Like, there are things that it liberates you from not having to be physically tied to a particular location. So let's just, I'm going to switch gears and talk about, so we'll talk about tools. So, okay, so we're still treating these as isolated tools, and you guys are not talking about them as part of an ecosystem of tools that you can choose in different contexts and settings. But how do these technologies fit in with the other tools that we use every day? Well, I mean, the crazy thing to me is there was just a report out last month

of how many businesses have moved to the cloud for their email and their productivity suite. And it's like, currently it's like 48%, which is pretty high, but it still makes you realize that 52% of the businesses aren't. Right. And so they're using, you know, their exchange server in the back room. And they're using, you know, the DVDs of Office 2012 in their computers. Like, insane, right? So we're looking at this as, you know, this trend of everyone moving to the cloud is happening

because it was a much smaller percentage just a couple of years ago. But there's still a whole chunk that aren't there yet. So we love that trend. And they're really going to, it's a two horse race. So you're either going to move to the cloud with your productivity suite. It's going to be Google Apps. It's going to be Office 365. And Office 365, it was this recent Bitclass report,

but has now overtaken Google Apps. And just over the last year, it went from 7% to 25% of the market. And so we look at that of like, okay, great. I don't want to have to sell to the guy who's still running exchange and DVDs in his office. The guys who the 48% have moved to the cloud, hey, that's perfect. Their IT guys effectively raised his hand and said, I get the cloud and I understand I want my workers to be productive from anywhere. I want to be able to collaborate on documents anywhere, get their calendar from anywhere, and send

and check their email from everywhere. And if they do that, for us to go in and say, yeah, shouldn't your phone system be the same way? Isn't it crazy that you have a PBX with a phone on your desk that's ringing when no one's there to answer it? And I guarantee if you look at the stats on that PBX, even when they're sitting at their desk, the guy's talking on his cell phone. Oh, totally. Of course.

So that's, I mean, it's that shift to those online tools for productivity that means communications goes with it. And you want to have video everywhere. And you want to have the ability to be as if you're in your office when you're not in your office. And all these things weave together really nicely. And then once, you know, from kind of like the phone system perspective, once you have that in the cloud, you can start doing cool stuff. Like, Sean calls me as it's ringing. It's showing me his LinkedIn profile.

Like you can't get that. on a phone call, but you can do it now that it's coming through a cloud-based system. Oh, because it's digitized. You get more contacts that is embedded from... Yeah, so once we see the phone number coming in, we can go do a search and do all these public searches or go into my address book, see who it is, grab his email, then search on the email and pull in more information. If he was an opportunity in Salesforce, it could pop up that. Before I even answer the call, I could know where he is in the pipeline and stuff. So there's just so much more you can do once it's all kind of into the cloud that all those tools,

become really nice if you have a platform that can take advantage of it. It actually reminds me of Mark Weiser's concept of ubiquitous computing and what would the natural successor of that was going to be context-aware computing. It's actually making context-aware computing more of a reality with all these things. We'll call it context-aware communications, right? So before you even start talking, you know what the topic's going to be about, right? I have the last three emails I traded with Sean right there in front of it. It's probably going to be about one of those or the last three documents we collaborated on right

there. So it does make it much better than just the blind answer of, hello, this is Greg. You know, I think I'm going to probably take sort of a, a sort of less kind of future-looking kind of lens at it. And, you know, I think the thing that we find most interesting is that we have all of these tools in front of us. And integration with all these tools is really important because we're all just trying, at the end of the day, we're just trying to get work done. Yeah, exactly. Like, I'm trying to sell a new customer. I'm trying to run a new campaign.

I'm trying to build a product. And I just need to get my job done and tools more often than not get in the way. And how many of us have walked into a conference room? And if you walk into a conference room these days, it feels like maybe we just stepped into a time machine from like 1980. Right. And what's the first thing that happens? We spend 15 minutes trying to figure out how we get. someone connected. How do I get my document up on the screen? How do I dial in this other person?

And we're busy shooting rockets off to the moon, building cars that drive themselves. But we spend every single meeting burning 15 minutes of everyone's time trying to get everyone connected. God, that is so true. People still have that problem. We all have that problem. Every single one of us that says this. And somebody, you know, and every single one of us, I imagine, have probably echoed the same exact thing. Somebody should fix this. And so if you go, look at, you know, the set of tools that we're talking about here, I think they're all sort of attempts at fixing that problem. And a lot of the reason why that problem exists is that the set of tools from 10, 15, 20 years ago that people are still using that 52% of the market are still

using today. They just didn't contemplate what today's world was. They were invented when, they were invented before the internet was a thing. They were invented before Wi-Fi existed. They were invented before laptops became popular. And these are still the same tools we're using today. And so that's the way we really think about how you participate in the ecosystem. How do you design something that assumes the things that we have today? Smartphones, high bandwidth connections, the ability to connect to a cloud service. And so the way we think about the world is just solve that problem of getting the first 15 minutes of us connected and let people just do their work. And whatever we need to integrate with to help people do their work, that's the way we think about the world.

Interesting. Integration, we have a slightly different problems with integration because we actually, our devices are our physical in nature. And so, so they have to basically be, well, we're integrating with things that other products can't. Like we integrate with doors, like being able to open and close the door. Wow, that's actually, that's really countering. So for instance, we have a store on University of in Palo Alto right across street from the Apple Store. and it's been, we opened it in October of last year, a Halloween, right, was our first day was open, and it's a fully automated store.

There are no, none of my employees are there in MeatForum, and it's been an entire year. And the doors are all automated. Everything in the whole store is automated. So that's what kind of stuff we have to integrate with, right, is actual, it's just HVAC systems, alarm systems, because when you have the alarm set on your building, and then you beam in and moving around, you can set off the motion sensors

and so that. So we have to be able to interface to those things to turn those off while you're beamed in. So, okay, so one last question then as a natural follow-up from this question around the tools and the integration and the environment or with other tools, what are some of the design lessons or experiences you guys have had?

Because all of you built products for many, many years and over different types of companies. I mean, what are some of the interesting things that have come up with the problems you're solving for today, like on the design side of things? So the interesting thing is for, you know, for Switch or Uber Conference, we can't just build this really cool web app or this really cool mobile app that does all this cool stuff over IP and talks to its other people in IP. We actually have to integrate with this 140-year-old PSTN phone system that's kind of like the lowest common denominator all around the world. Right. Right. So it's not only, can we just be the coolest next-gen guys, you actually have to work, like, as someone in Schaumburg, Illinois, picking up their telephone expects it to work with really reliable dial tone and I can call any number in the world and get a call from anywhere in the world.

So, like, beyond just design, like, the whole infrastructure behind it, like, we now have, you know, data centers on four continents. We can make sure the voice quality is great, no matter where you are in the world. and we have, you know, companies with offices in 42 countries where we're able to get phone numbers and have to do all this, like, traditional stuff. But the good news is, like, all those traditional telephony guys generally are the worst designers on the planet. If you've ever seen an interface for a PBX or, like, a traditional phone system, they're horrific, right? No one, like, when I was at Yahoo, they put in a new PBX and they handed us, like, a hundred-page manual on how to use it. Oh, my God. Terrible.

So being able to kind of like have a group that has that killer web design aesthetic of end user first, it should be intuitive, it should be delightful, it should make sense, you shouldn't need instructions, and then being able to like cross that Venn diagram of the Bell telephony world of it has to work everywhere and comply with regulations everywhere. Like very few people care. Companies do that really well. So like we've always, and we have out of 100 people, 10% of the company, we have. of 10 designers. And it's always been, we've always had a minimum of like five designers. One of our co-founders was a designer just because it's so important. And it's, you know, when you're competing in the telephony world, it's one thing that

can really distinguish you from the competition because usually design is the last thing to think about. Well, even if it's something subtle, because I remember when you got, you still do, but when you had like fun listening music while you're waiting on hold, which I thought was brilliant because the worst thing is music. It's like, oh my God, kill me now. But yeah, even little details like that. I think you mentioned the word delight.

I think that's interesting and important because we're talking about human connection here. And human connections aren't just about transaction. They are about delight and joy and all the other things that sadness that come with it. Yeah, well, that's exactly right. Just because you're going to work doesn't mean you leave your humanity behind, right? Like it doesn't mean you should use these cold, austere, you know, tools. You still want, you know, like, that's why people like their iPhones at work. If you can serve that consumer sensibility in the enterprise and still give them high quality and security and all the things they need, then you're on.

something. We, you know, video is not new technology. But the problem is video was just never used. And there's a couple of reasons for that. We were joking about telepresence being kind of like the mainframe market, but that's what it was. It was really expensive gear that you had to install in these huge closets. Right.

And the only people that could use them, because they were so expensive, were the executives and the important people in your company. And these were the people that had access to dedicated IT people who would come and set up the call so that you could. have a big video call. But what we discovered is if you can make it make the technology really easy to use, if you can make it affordable, you can deploy it way more broadly so that the average person can walk in and just use a system and not burn 15 minutes trying to do the thing that they're trying to do, which is just get their work done. And so what we found was that

design was a huge part of what needs to happen to the whole world. the video, solve the technology problem and solve the design problem and the intersection that I think Craig is dealing with in the sort of the telephony world. Same thing applies to the video world. One of the first five hires we had was a head of design. The thing that's remarkable, I think, is everyone just wants everything to work. But when you go sit down and really analyze what people are trying to do, there's about 10, 15, 20 different use cases that you're trying to do, whether you realize it or not.

And that's the power of being able to apply design, which is thinking about all of those different use cases, weaving them together and then making the technology work underneath that to go deliver a seamless, easy-to-use experience. That you can use to actually bring to not just important people in your company. How do we take video and make that something that is applicable to everybody in your company? Well, I love what you're saying because it's basically talking about using design to democratize communication to anybody regardless of company size or importance or hierarchy. Yeah. Which is exactly right. And I think what design should do. I mean, we tend to treat design as this rarefied thing, but we forget that ease of use is actually what opens the door to that to mark.

Exactly. I think that companies or products that try to, that don't think about where are they putting the cognitive load, right, over how to use a product. Like learning how to use a product, I think that's one of the problems with a lot of the traditional teleconferencing systems. are that it requires both parties to learn how to use it, right, in order to communicate. And so that's why a lot of the old video conferencing stuff don't get that much usage because, you know, one side might be wanting to use it. The other side is like, I don't have time to learn how to use this thing, right? Or they don't have the resources to get someone there to actually help them use it, right?

And so in a design of our product, my philosophy is that you should only put the burden of, learning on the person who most benefits from that technology, right? You shouldn't put it on someone who doesn't really benefit from it, right? So you wouldn't, like, what's a good example? It's like, so for our product, the remote person, the person who is not there, right, on the beam product has to learn how to use a software, install it and all that stuff, right? But the person that is on the receiving side of the beam doesn't have to learn how to do anything. I mean, like you said, you were standing around the water cooler with no water cooler, and someone came up and was starting to, and so you basically were using the technology, but you didn't have to do, you didn't have to use any hands, anything at all.

And so if you look at the beam product, there are no buttons on it at all. There's no switches. There's no dials. There's nothing to do on your side. And that was very intentional that there's nothing to do because I didn't want the, um, the person who is on the receiving side of technology to have to learn anything. It reminds me of the not using the pin codes because that was very liberating. Even that is very liberating for me is to get on a call without ever having to worry about

trying to find a pin code even. I mean, because it puts a burden on me as a participant to have to find the number, exactly. It's interesting you talk about the cognitive load problem. How does it change how you design? I mean, I know you've talked about shifting the load. So you put all the design features, all the controls on the purpose. person who is the remote entity? Well, it's actually really simple.

You say no buttons. Yeah. Like no nothing, like nothing on visible on the device at all. And so you're like, well, I don't know what to do. I mean, if you walk up to it and it's not on, not being used, there's nothing you can actually do with the thing. It's just sitting there, right? And so when people see something with buttons on it, they sometimes go, oh, I don't

want to even try that thing because I mean I need to learn something right how to do something and so if you make a product that just just works that's awesome right that it's just like it's just intuitive because it's just it's already working right in front of you that's sort of how we that's how I see it right and so I think Steve Jobs was like oh only one button on the mouse or whatever right and and eventually got rid of all the buttons and just make the whole entire thing a button basically That's what the advent of things. To make things look simple. I think there's the thing about making it look simple, where it's on the surface it's simple, but it's very sophisticated once you get to learn how to use it.

Yeah. Right. Well, and there's also a school of thought that says that the more you make certain features obscure, the harder it is for some users to figure things out and troubleshoot. But if it works, you should not have to fucking troubleshoot. Yeah. If you're getting value from the product, you know, it should just work. Exactly. And so I love this. So it should just work.

and it should allow us to do our work. Okay, well, I think that's all we have time for, everyone. Thank you for your time and for joining the A6 and Z podcast. Thanks, so, awesome. Thank you so much.