Making Remote Meetings Better: Max Makeev of Owl Labs

Today we have Max Makeev, Co-founder of Owl Labs, the company that created the Meeting Owl. This is the first-ever episode that we recorded live in Arc’s office, so the audio is noticeably different!

In this episode, we covered how their flagship product, Meeting Owl, was created, and the struggles Max and his co-founder faced in the early days of Owl Labs,

We also talked about the unique challenges of building a hardware startup, how Max prepares for — and runs — meetings, and his learning/challenges faced when he was still the CEO of Owl Labs.

Outside the Valley is available now on your favourite podcast player: iTunes, Google Podcast, Castro, Overcast, Spotify, Stitcher, Player.fm, and Tune In.

If you’re enjoying the podcast, please consider leaving a review on iTunes!

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Topics also covered on the podcast episode:

How Max started in the world of robotics and helped created Roomba
The very first prototype of Meeting Owl
How Max and his co-founder found early adopters and gathered feedback
How can a hardware startup vet their suppliers?
Does a 100% distributed team need a Meeting Owl?
Unique use-cases of Meeting Owl
Max’s number one piece of advice for founders who want to be better at meetings
The most important things Max learned when he was still the CEO
Why Max had to record an apology video for customers
How Max thinks remote work will affect the future
What’s next for Owl Labs

Mentioned resources:

Full transcript:

Max: You only have one shot at this game. If you buy a piece of equipment and it actually fails your meeting, you will never trust it again. So as a result, customer first is a huge part of the culture.

Jovian: Welcome to another episode of “Outside The Valley,” a podcast by Arc, the remote hiring platform that helps you hire remote software engineers and teams easily. I’m your host, Jovian Gautama. Today, we have Max Makeev, the co-founder of Owl Labs, the company that create the Meeting Owl, the 360 degrees smart conference camera for remote teams. In this episode, we covered how their flagship product, Meeting Owl, was created and the struggles Max and his co-founder faced in the early days of Owl Labs. We also talk about the unique challenges of building a hardware startup, how Max prepares for and runs meetings, and his learnings faced when he was still the CEO of Owl Labs. So Max is not the CEO anymore, he’s currently like the head of product of Owl Labs and leads everything related to the product development.

This is the first ever episode that we recorded live in the Arc’s office so the audio is noticeably different. If you’re enjoying the podcast, please do consider leaving a review on iTunes. And again, if you have any feedback or if you have any guests that you think should be in the podcast, feel free to email me at jovian@arc.dev. It’s jovian@arc.dev. Without further ado, here we go, Max Makeev. Hey, Max, welcome to the show.

Max: Thank you very much.

Jovian: Right. So, Max, so let’s just get started with the basics. Can you share a bit about your background, career and how did you get yourself into learning robotics in the first place?

Max: Sure. So my background really didn’t start off in engineering. I didn’t really have a care for that. What happened for me was that when I was going to college, I had to pay for it myself, my parents weren’t helping. And so when a lot of people were pursuing their passions, I was thinking about the cost of education and how fast I could pay back my student loans. So I realized that I was pretty decent at math and I figured I would go after electrical engineering because a lot of my friends in school were afraid of that career path, for some reason. So it felt like a good challenge.

So I went on to study electrical engineering and in my third year of school, I realized that I actually had no idea what an electrical engineer does. I realized that I was very good at solving math problems but I imagined that work was not somebody coming to you with a problem set and then expecting an answer in the morning. So I became a little bit worried that I wasn’t sure what I was getting into when I graduated. As I was entering my third year, the thing I would always do in class is I would walk up to the professor on the first day and ask how I can get an A in their class, what were the habits that would result in an A? And so I did that and one of the professors in my digital logic course, really, he said, “I really like your energy. How would you like to stop by the robotics lab after class and then I’ll show you around, see if you’re interested in participating.” I said, “Sure.” I had nothing else to do.

So I showed up in the lab and, you know, for the first three weeks, they had me sort out cables together for programming these little robots. It became super frustrating over a period of time but I wasn’t the only person there. There were like three or four people with me. But three weeks later, I was the only one left. And so at that point, they let me do more things. They gave me my own pass code to the lab. And in that lab I started to see how these master students were programming these little robots, these TJ…they call them TJ robots. And I started to realize the power of engineering right then and there, like the ability to use sensors to sense the world, to then make intelligent decisions based off of those sensory inputs. And I never looked back. When I graduated, I knew that I wanted to be in robotics. And so the only game in town was really iRobot Corporation.

So I packed up my car… I was at the University of Florida for my undergraduate degree. I packed up my car, moved to Massachusetts and started working at iRobot Corporation. iRobot is the first mass market consumer robotics company out there. They have sold millions and millions and millions of Roombas worldwide. And they continue to innovate in the space of autonomous homecare. And they’ve recently, I think, announced a robotic lawnmower product as well. So it’s a big brand, a lot of love. I joined pre-IPO. I met my co-founder there at iRobot in 2004. And funny thing about him is he didn’t like me when he met me at first. And then, just a few weeks ago, he got married and I officiated the wedding. I married him and his wife.

Jovian: Right. So that was how you met your co-founder. So you and your co-founder were colleagues in iRobot, in Roomba, and how did you guys get into creating Meeting Owl?

Max: Sure. Yeah. So my co-founder is a brilliant roboticist. And my background, sort of… I started to focus on electrical engineering and then I went into people management and then I went to product management. But he was always focused on algorithm development sensing and higher level intelligent algorithms. So in about 2010, he decided that he wanted to experience startup life and he left iRobot Corporation. I stayed. And he joined a startup called Romotive Corporation. And that company was based out of Vegas and he was not going to leave his life in Boston to move to Vegas for the startup. So they agreed that he would work remote. And so for three weeks out of the month, he would work in Boston and for one week, he would travel out to Vegas to meet with the team.

And back then, when he started, we were sort of entering the world where Google Hangouts makes it super easy for people to communicate over video. It’s embedded into your calendar link. And so for him, he was surprised at how effective he was being a remote employee with Google Docs and those types of tools. So one on one conversations were super easy but what he realized was that he wasn’t adding very much value in group meetings. Whenever he would join a group call, he couldn’t see everybody in the room, he couldn’t hear people. And if you can’t see and you can’t hear, you can’t understand. And that’s where he first realized there was a problem.

Now, one day during a meeting, during one of these group meetings, somebody started to rotate the camera at the person speaking to help him see. And this was the epiphany, this was the moment when he realized, “Well, we can automate this.”

So he flies back to Boston and we go out for a couple of beers and he starts telling me about this problem. And I’m sitting there, I’m thinking, “Holy crap. You know, this is something we can really do something about. If there’s anybody in this world that can solve this problem, we can do this.” And we have the iRobot background, we can build hardware, I have been the product manager at this point, so I understood what it takes to structure a profit and loss statement, like really put a business case around a product. And so it was a no brainer decision that in 2014 we quit our jobs to start this company.

Jovian: Yeah, it’s a great story, like everything is falling into pieces, right? Because if…I mean, a lot of people have been in new co-founders position before but only the right person with the right background can get that epiphany. Can you explain to the listeners, now, what is your product, the Meeting Owl?

Max: Sure. Yeah, so Owl Labs is about empowering remote teams to communicate effectively. And it’s a big problem, it’s a growing problem, many people identify themselves as working in a remote team. So what we built is the Meeting Owl, which is a smart 360 degree camera, 360 degree microphone array, and a 360 degree speaker. And all of this is packaged into a single device called the Meeting Owl. And we embed a lot of intelligence into it. So we use computer vision techniques and acoustics techniques to fuse the sensory data to be able to identify people as they speak in the conference room. So if one person speak, we cut them out of a 360 view and show them automatically. If multiple people speak, we put them side by side together.

And all of this intelligence is embedded into the Owl. So all you need to do is plug in a USB cable from the Owl to the computer. There’s no drivers to install. It is automatically recognized by every operating system on the market, and it works with Zoom and Hangouts, GoToMeeting. Pretty much, if you’re a small company or even an enterprise, we can plug into whatever you’re using. And if you switch what you’re using, we’ll come along with you.

Jovian: Yeah. Yeah, for the listeners out there who are listening to this in Spotify or in our podcast player, you probably cannot see this. You can go to our YouTube channel to see the Own Labs right in front of us. So I personally can vouch for Owl Labs because we here in Arc is a hybrid team. Other solutions just sucks, and it really helps us a lot. So, yeah, go check it out. And if you’re listening on the podcast, check the show notes. It will be an Amazon link. Okay, I’ll link this directly to the company product page by the Amazon link so you can just one-click buy it.

Max: Oh, thank you very much.

Jovian: Cool. It’s an Amazon affiliate link.

Max: Perfect.

Jovian: Perfect. Yes, I can get more money. So, yeah, but…so this is the Meeting Owl that we know now, but what was the very first prototype looks like?

Max: Yes. So the very, very first prototype was actually a Python script that…so we tried to make a very lightweight prototype. We took and recorded a scene. My co-founder, Mark and I, along with a friend, we acted out a meeting experience and we recorded three cameras and then we used the Python script to cut ourselves out of the video recordings and kind of animate them together in the way that the Meeting Owl animates meeting experiences today. So that was the very first prototype that we made and it was wholly insufficient for [inaudible 00:10:52]. So we did actually struggle a little bit to get the initial rounds of funding. But once we got some angel investments, we started to really focus on building a physical prototype.

And so that was…the 0.1 prototype was amazingly…it was a Frankenstein product. And so, at that time, it was a combination of an ODROID computer, which we plugged into an image sensor that we sourced from Hong Kong. And we were also hot melting, on top of that, a fisheye lens. And so the funny thing about those prototypes was that because of the hot melt, the longer it ran, the less focused it became because the way that the lens was sinking into the image sensor, so you started to lose focus. We also put in some microphones in there and this was the very first thing that we built, which was a product…it was not compatible with any conferencing platforms, but what it did really well was identify a person that was speaking, showed them automatically, put them side by side.

And one…we had a pitch for YCombinator where we actually took this prototype to. That pitch was horrific, horrific. I mean, you only get 10 minutes to pitch YCombinator for $120,000 investment. And so, number one, it’s hard to get selected. We were selected. We flew out to California. My co-founder dragged a monitor in his backpack and I brought a 12-foot extension cable. We brought this prototype. We had all of 30 seconds to set up. And as we’re setting up, he’s struggling to find the power outlet. He wraps me up in the cord. And like my voice is starting to break because I’m trying to tell these folks what we’re all about. He plugs in the prototype, it hardly works. And then, of course, sure enough, we get rejected.

But on that same trip, we ended up showing this prototype to our seed round investor, Playground Ventures, and they got it right away. They understood what problem we were solving, they understood the value of IoT in the conference room. And so they made that initial investment off of this sort of hot melted together, 3D printed, frankenstein of a prototype.

Jovian: Yeah. So after that, okay, now you got the investment, how do you go about finding the early adopters, the customers? And can you share a bit more about the process looks like and how did they…the feedbacks…let me rephrase that. How do you go about finding early adopters and what’s your process in gathering feedback from them?

Max: Sure. So hardware is very hard, it’s very expensive to build. And so you have to really be careful about the decisions you’re making. You want to validate as much as you can, as fast as you can. But unfortunately, it’s kind of a catch 22. You can’t test it until you build it, and building it is very expensive, so how do you…?

Jovian: Yeah, yeah. Unlike software, like you can A/B test. Like you can’t A/B test hardware, like it takes months.

Max: It’ll be impossible. And so for hardware specifically, the first thing I wanted to make sure was that I had a view on what the market is. And so for us what…based on industry research, which you Google your way to finding it and you look at products in the same space to see how they think about it, we’ve identified that there were something like 40 million to 60 million conference rooms available to us to serve. So if you multiply that by the $800 price point, which is what we sell the Meeting Owl at, you know, it’s a huge market opportunity, at 100% penetration. So, yes, lots of space to grow into.

Now, the other thing I started reading at the time was the reviews for things like pan-tilt-zoom cameras that are remote controlled. So there used to be pluggable cameras just like the Meeting Owl, except the customer is given the remote control to steer the camera in the right direction. And unanimously, what people loved was the idea of having a remote control so that they can focus the camera on the right place. But they struggled with a number of problems. For example, there was a lot of motion blur when that camera is being steered, physically steered, it seconds the people on the remote end. There’s the sound that it produces, the gearboxes fail. So there’s all these problems.

But the point was that the desire for camera control in the conference room was there. So now we had to understand, is it actually a product worth acquiring? So what I did was I bought seven of these products, these remote controllable cameras and I wanted to test to see what is the value? Does the Meeting Owl have value in the market? So I bought seven of these cameras and then the next problem was I got to find people to test this with.

What I learned early on was that when you’re a startup, no brand, no market, no product market fit, nobody wants to talk to you.

And…

Jovian: Especially in your case, because it’s kind of like a high price point compared to software.

Max: And even before we even built anything they don’t want to talk to you, because what’s the point of wasting their time on like a start up? “Hey, I’m a CEO of a two-person company. Talk to me.” It’s just impossible to get attention.

So what we ended up doing was networking, talking to people, being introduced. There’s nothing stronger than someone making an introduction for you.

And so through this process of networking, as well as stalking people out on LinkedIn, what I realized was we had really good fit with startups, meaning that startups were willing to work with us. And I think a lot of that has to do with just empathy. They understand why…it’s hard to start a company.

Jovian: They know the pain, yeah.

Max: Yeah, exactly. And so they want to be helpful. And I wanted to give them, regardless of whether or not the company succeeded back then, at least the people who were willing to work with me would in return get this $500 device that they could use for their meetings. So their makeup was that their company, they’re a hybrid team and they have video calls using Skype or Hangouts or Zoom even. And so we identified, through this process, through this recommendation process, seven companies that were willing to talk to us. And I gave each of them this competing product…well, future competing product. And this product, it’s sold by Logitech. It’s called a Conference Cam Connect. It’s shaped like a Pringles can of chips. And it has a camera, microphone and speaker built into it, and it’s USB pluggable, with a remote control.

And so I sent it out to these companies and every week I would conduct interviews with them. And so the first interview was about the out of box experience. What’s that like? What did you struggle with? What did you not like? And so there was some really interesting learnings there. So I made really good notes about the things we should be incorporating into our out of box experience. And then the next thing was…everybody unanimously agreed that they loved the USB cable because it just plugs in and works easily. And then, as they unboxed it, what they told me was they loved the idea of a remote control. And I asked why, and they said, “Well, because then I can control the view of the camera for the benefit of my remote people.”

So I said…in my mind, I’m thinking, “This is great but we’ve got to prove to ourselves right now that…we have to understand whether or not the remote control is a net adder or a net detractor in the conference room.” So as time goes by what…and I’m interviewing people, they love the camera, they love the ease of use, but they stopped using the remote control. And I asked, “Why did you stop using the remote?’ And they said, “I just don’t have time to mess around with the hardware.”

Jovian: Yeah, I can see that, especially when you’re leading a meeting, right?

Max: Absolutely. Who’s got the time for…you don’t want to think about technology, you want to think about the conversation. And so what they started doing instead, because this thing is shaped like the Pringles can, is rotating the Pringles can, it’s a lot easier, it’s a lot faster. And that was a very strong sign to me that there’s a lot of desire to show the right thing at the right time, but not a lot of will to do it in the meeting. So automation we felt like would really solve this problem. And so we felt like we were on the right path. The last question that we wanted to answer was whether or not a Meeting Owl should have batteries in them so that way they would be portable.

And the thing that… So this product from Logitech actually had a battery inside of it. And we were on the path to putting a battery into the product. And as I was interviewing the companies, one thing I learned from one of them was that they had a client call that lasted something like three hours and they kept the conference cam camera off battery. And during the call…in the startup, during the call, the camera died, and they never trusted it off battery again. And then I said, “You know, what’s the point of burdening the customer with the cost of adding a battery when they’re eventually not going to trust it at all?” And so we made the product decision that we’re not going to put a battery inside the Meeting Owl.

And so through this process, we developed what we call the MVP, Minimum Viable Candidate, but the cost was $3,500 and my time.

So instead of building all that hardware, we just acquired a bunch of proxy technology that we can test with customers and sort of learned. Now we learned the periphery of what the product is but we had to build it to actually understand what it has to be to satisfy customer needs.

Jovian: Yeah. It’s super interesting and also…because all that is the very first hardware startup that is in the podcast. So I specifically want to ask, which I think most of listeners don’t have, especially if you’re starting out, they don’t have a most experience, and is finding suppliers. And this is a challenge especially if you’re based in the U.S. and usually the best suppliers are [inaudible 00:21:03] different factors, you know, quality, sometimes cost and whatnot. And how do you go about finding the suppliers right now? Can you take us through the process, starting from you doing the research and then probably meeting them?

Max: Sure. Absolutely. So we were fortunate in our case. Well, number one, I have personally a lot of experience with Chinese manufacturing specifically and iRobot manufacturers, this is public knowledge, JBL and a couple of other suppliers. So I at least understood who the players were that we could reach out to. So I suppose, in some sense, I had some built in knowledge about this. But if I had none, I would just go back to the same thing, which is networking, meeting people and try to get the introductions and then get on the plane and travel. Meet them face to face, form a relationship, give them the same sales pitch that you give your venture capitalists.

Because you want a partner that’s really a partner, at the end of the day. They need to have confidence in your business, and a lot of that confidence has got to come from you and your ability to show conviction in your business plan.

Now, the other thing we actually went to… We manufacture with Foxconn and they’re not a supplier that I’ve ever worked with in the past. And there’s…through our investors, we got connected…we were connected to Foxconn through our investors. And so that was also helpful. But again, this was sort of, we networked our way to our investors and then we said, “Hey, we need to be able to manufacture this. What do you guys recommend?” They connected us to somebody that had an opinion. And we were choosing between Flextronics and Foxconn and we ended up going with Foxconn because camera was going to be one of the key value props. Foxconn manufactures the Apple products, of course, so what better place to go than Foxconn?

As well as scale. If you go to a tier three supplier, I think it’s a fine thing to do, but just know that your process at the end of the day is the thing that produces reliable product and hardware. I mean, processes we rely on it everywhere. You guys rely on it for like how you interview [crosstalk 00:23:23] folks. We rely on process for product development and manufacturing as well. And Foxconn is…they have an amazing process, the process scales, it scales across regions. So it just felt like if we’re going to truly be a global brand, we need to partner with capable global manufacturers.

Jovian: Yeah. I really like that you mentioned that it’s from networking because it’s…just like everything else like hiring employees, referral is the best thing, especially when you’re finding suppliers abroad. I also like that you say that you actually give them the sales pitch even though you’re a supplier. I think most people [inaudible 00:24:01] have this misconception, “The suppliers need me.” But sometimes it’s like, “Meh, he’s a partner,” right? Because these suppliers also need to make sure, is this client worth it? Just like in every business. That’s a fantastic insight. Now I’m going to…still around the use case of the Owl Lab.

So it’s very obvious when it comes to hybrid teams like us in Arc, when like, say, five people wait on the same meeting rooms and five people is remote, then you can use this, and it can bring the feel of togetherness. But what about the 100% distributed team where no one is co-located? Have you had customers with that use case before? Like how do they use it? Because in my mind, like correct me if I’m wrong, because I feel like if everyone has an Owl Lab, that’s kind of like a huge cost. But I’m just curious, like how do your customers use Owl Lab if they’re 100% distributed?

Max: Sure. Well, so the short answer for that is 100% distributed team does not need a Meeting Owl. And a Meeting Owl is more for the use case you described. It’s an investment into your team and to communication amongst your team members. Do you guys use Slack?

Jovian: Yep.

Max: Great. Yeah, we do as well. What’s your video conferencing platform?

Jovian: Zoom.

Max: Zoom? Okay, we do as well. A lot of companies look like this, right? So I’d say that there are other tools out there that will make 100% distributed companies extremely successful. But going back to the Genesis story with my co-founder being remote and struggling to participate…you know, they brought him in as a senior roboticist and in group calls he can’t give his insights. That’s where we really shine. But there are times when…so for me, personally, I don’t dog food to 100% distributed. We have an office and then we have people… We actually have folks in China, we have people in California, all over the U.S.

And when I’m working remote, usually I’ll just through Slack/Zoom somebody that I want to have a conversation with and we have a quick one on one chat. Whenever there’s a group call though, I want the Meeting Owl there because I want to see people’s reactions. I want to see who is not happy with the meeting, who is attending the meeting, who’s participating and engaged? Do I need to follow up with anybody, right? There are social cues that tell you more about the person’s perspective than you can ever get through their participation, right?

Jovian: Yeah, I agree.

Max: And so you need to be able to have those insights, and it’s almost impossible to have them without having something like a Meeting Owl on the group call. So 100% distributed, I would not recommend the Meeting Owl, I’d recommend an investment in headphones, I would recommend an investment into Zoom. I think they’re a very good and reliable conferencing platform and Slack, of course, for that asynchronous communication. A Meeting Owl would not make sense.

Jovian: Yeah, it’s funny you mentioned about seeing what the social cues where people are. Because just yesterday I was…I listened to a podcast episode. I forgot the…the podcaster is Lisette Sutherland, she was interviewing your VP of Marketing, Rebecca Corliss. And she mentioned that she got very good at like reading the social cues through Meeting Owl that she can say, “Oh, do you want to say something?” And it’s a really small cue. And she also admitted that sometimes she got it wrong and, “No, I was just yawning or just stretching” or something like that. So, that’s very funny.

Max: Yeah. And Rebecca is especially empathetic. This is what makes her such a great marketer, in my opinion, that she just really can easily put herself into the shoes of the customer or even the person she’s speaking with. So I have no…I believe 100% that is exactly what she does, which is try to extract as much value out of those meetings as possible through those social cues.

Jovian: But it’s also like… So a while ago I interviewed the VP of Engineering of Help Scout, they’re 100% distributed. And she mentioned this point that I never thought before, basically, working remotely or working with remote people actually kind of trained to be more empathetic in all situations. Assume like once you… Meeting Owl you get better at reading social cues. And she also mentioned that on her team she got…when…they have a very established company culture and process, and one of the core values they have is like be more empathetic. And she feels like, “Oh, now I can always assume good intentions with my co-workers on Slack because remote.” And she also felt that it also transferred into her daily life. That’s super interesting because… Sorry, it’s probably a bit of a tangent but…

Max: Oh, that’s okay. I mean, I think that’s right. I find that… So there’s levels. So the least empathetic form of communication is just messages like, Slack, for example. Sometimes it’s very ambiguous, you can lead to confusion. A very quick reply may come off to the person reading it as just offensive, at times. You really have to kind of go the extra mile to be verbose and provide context if you want to have a good Slack message, but that’s not what Slack is for. Then the next level is video. I think video is extremely high fidelity communication where you can see the expressiveness of a person and have good communication. And then, we’re social beings so there’s nothing like a face-to-face conversation. Unfortunately, we can’t teleport yet but the Meeting Owl…I like to think of the Meeting Owl as helping to bring the room to the remote people when they can’t physically be there.

Jovian: Other than internal meetings, is there any other unique cases from your [inaudible 00:30:07]? For example, have you ever like give Meeting Owl to their clients, like, “Use this when you’re meeting, it’s much better.” Something like that.

Max: Yeah. So there’s been derivative use cases for sure. So for example, there are focus groups that like to use the Meeting Owl. So focus groups are groups that kind of talk about a product or a concept. It’s for their marketing studies. And typically, in a focus group, you have a camera that sits behind a one way mirror and they record the conversation. And then if you’re the decision maker, you get this kind of a flat recording of the output of the meeting. But we find very big companies actually using Meeting Owl in their own internal focus groups.

Jovian: I see.

Max:

And the benefit is that since our focus is on the person’s face, that’s speaking, when you give that video summary to your decision makers, they’re actually seeing the face and the expressions and that empathy of…they’re establishing that empathy with the customer.

So that was an interesting use case. Another one is in education. So there’s one that I’m thinking about where an elementary school contacted me telling me that there’s this student that they have who cannot physically be in classrooms because she has a deficient immune system and just the slightest cold can possibly lead to her death.

And so, it’s a sad thing, and what they do is they wheel in a cart that has a video camera attached to it. And the problem is that the field of view of that camera is fixed. So when the teacher walks out of the field of view, the student can’t see the teacher and then the student never sees the rest of the classroom. So with the Meeting Owl in there, the Meeting Owl splits the view automatically so it will focus on the teacher. And then if there’s questions being raised by the students, it will focus on the students. And it’s a very unique use case but it solves this kind of empathy problem or connection problem for the student.

Jovian: Yeah, that’s actually super fascinating. Yeah. So I want to move on to the Owl Labs organizations itself, Owl Labs as a company. And how big your team is now?

Max: So we are just 150 employees.

Jovian: A hundred and fifty employees. And you mentioned that you also have team members outside the U.S. What countries are they?

Max: Yeah, so currently we have employees in China. We have two employees in China. And then we have lots of employees peppered all across the United States. I think we’re somewhere between 20% and 40% remote. I don’t recall the exact statistic. Our CFO is in California. Our customer support is all over the United States. We have engineers, both mechanical and software. all over the United States. So we really dog food this problem of remote work. And the benefit is that…well, there’s a couple of benefits. We just recently released a state of remote work, our third survey of what it’s like to be a remote employee or part of a remote culture. And what we find is that companies that support remote work tend to have happier employees. And a lot of that has to do with your ability to strike the work-life balance.

Jovian: Right. Exactly.

Max: So like your kid is not feeling well and you need to stay at home, that’s totally okay. If you want to travel and work in a different region and enjoy like the Colorado Rockies but still not worry about leaving work behind, you can totally do that in our company. And I think that’s something that people are experiencing more and more on a global level.

One of the interesting statistics out of this report, that I find, is that companies that support remote work, their employees feel more trusted because you have to trust them, right? If they’re doing work remote, you have to trust them.

And so they’re less likely to want to leave than companies that don’t support remote work. Yeah. All over the… My hope is that one day we’ll have employees all over the world.

Jovian: Right. So let’s go about meeting. So this is very meta, so to speak, that the meanings inside the Owl Labs. One of my guests here on the podcast is CEO of a software company called Toggl, you know, 100% team based in Estonia. Great. It’s a time tracking software usually for freelancers and whatnot. So when I was doing research for this episode, and I found the CEO, Krister Haav, wrote a blog post about how to have five killer meetings. Okay, and this is cool. And I realized that blog post was written in 2006. Okay, if this blog post is published yesterday, it’s still relevant.

Now, I was thinking like now imagine if product development or programming didn’t change for 13 years, it’ll be riot. But why is when it comes to meeting there’s not so much innovation? And we have Owl Labs as one of it and probably somebody like Zoom and Google Hangouts, but it just feel like things can be done better. And when you start scaling your team as a co-founder and previously you were the CEO, right? And now you’re focused on the product roadmap and growth. How do you prepare for a meeting? Let’s start with that. How do you prepare for meetings?

Max: Sure. So it depends on the type of meeting.

So if it’s a sync up, generally, I try to focus the meeting so that way it finishes on time. I don’t want to waste our employees time. So it’s on me to make sure I’m aware of the time but also that we’re getting as much useful information out of our employees for the benefit of everybody in the group and we identify things that are follow up opportunities.

So for sync up, a very light preparation. There are other meetings that I have, for example, along with product, operations is a key component in delivery. And so I run a sync up meeting with our operations group every Monday morning. And there, I actually prepare notes before the meeting to talk my agenda topics, to share with the team. And then we have a conversation about these things. At the end of the meeting, I always write up a meeting notes summary. And that is so that the way we innovate perfectly.

Jovian: This is for every meetings, right, or product operation?

Max: It depends. My goal is to… This section is related to where you started.

My goal is that every meeting that we have at Owl Labs has notes at the end of the meeting so that way we can track things and not… But the reality is it doesn’t happen. And why is that? Well, people follow a bell curve, right? Like some of them are extremely good at note taking and others are extremely bad at it. But I think universally, everybody agrees that taking notes is important, for all the obvious reasons.

And so this is a place… And so you asked the question like why are the suggestions in that blog post still relevant today? Well, because we still struggle with the same problems today. And I think whenever there’s a struggle, there’s an opportunity. So the opportunity is to apply some technology to make these things work smoother for you.

And one of the… So my goal with some of the products we’re working on is to enable the entire company to take notes efficiently. That’s one of them. My goal is to enable the entire company, for meetings, not sync up meetings, but for proper meetings, to actually have an agenda. And the way you do this, it comes down to process. And I think you can try and hammer process into people but not everybody will take to process. So I think technology that is seamless can actually embed process into your team. And I start there, how do we make technology useful in such a way that we can get to these meetings where you have agendas, where you have notes, and move the company forward in terms of productivity with regards to meetings? And that way the blog posts sort of go away because that’s a very arcane way of doing it. You’ve substituted those for technology. And the technology is process and process is standardization. And that’s repeatable and scalable.

Jovian: Got it. And how about all-hands meeting? Because I think every company have their own way through all-hands meeting. I think my question, do you still do all hands meeting now or is it your current CEO who do this? And what do you talk about in the all-hands meeting? Because it’s a huge meeting.

Max: Yeah, so we have a couple of meetings. So there’s the all-hands. We also have a little lunch and learn where people can volunteer to share some information with the entire company. That’s a good way to engage our remote employees and also kind of share a little bit about what these different functions do. For the all-hands meetings, generally…so that is set up by our CEO, Frank. And we kind of go through at a high level, give a department level summary of what’s going on. There’s a… It’s a standing or it’s an understood agenda that we’re going to cover the different areas of the business and give people a chance to ask questions during that meeting. So that’s a little more…it’s freeform in the sense that we encourage our employees to ask questions, but it’s organized in the sense that Frank wants to cover very specific top of mind topics. That way we keep the company going and aligned.

Jovian: What will be your like number one advice for founders or CEOs that want to be better at meetings, especially when it comes to like facing the entire company?

Max: Yeah. Yeah, I think game it out a little bit sort of. Write down what you want to cover and anticipate the types of questions that people are going to ask and prepare your answers for those questions.

I think, if you want to have smooth meetings and your job is to get organizational alignment, it’s part of the job description, being prepared, sharing your message, and don’t be afraid to say, “I don’t know the answer to that but I’ll follow up.” And do it because you want to have a culture of accountability.

Jovian: Got it. Let’s talk about the company culture in Owl Labs. When you started to scale the company, it was just you and Mark your co-founder and then you grow. What was the culture you were trying to set or what was the culture you were setting in Owl Labs? What kind of companies that you’re trying to build on a high level?

Max: Of course. So remote work is sort of a byproduct of what we do.

But the culture that I was trying to establish, one, was customer first. We aren’t building solutions just so we can claim to have the first AI thingie. We are building things that customers will value and will reward us with revenue for.

So if you think about the Meeting Owl specifically, people are putting it in between themselves and their customers and between themselves and other employees. And so that’s a lot of trust that they give us. Trust that the technology is going to work, trust that we’re going to be reliable.

And you only have one shot at this game. If you buy a piece of equipment and it actually fails your meeting, you will never trust it again.

So as a result, customer first is a huge part of the culture. Another one, being a hardware company, I always stressed one day that we’ll be profitable. Because unlike… My belief was that if we build a product that customers value, then we should be able to, in time, build a business that is profitable, that we can reinvest back into the business. Our customers will buy the value that we offer them and allow us to reinvest that money back into the business. And so, as a result, that’s where I started, which was making sure customers are always at the center of everything you do and it’s top down in the organization. And, of course, making sure that you’re building products that are wanted, that way you can have a sustainable, profitable future in the end of time.

Jovian: When you were a CEO, what were the biggest learnings that you learned along the way, like starting from day one and then you realize, “Okay…” Let’s think about as a general advice to the startup founders and CEOs out there. You were a CEO for how many years? Four years, right?

Max: Yeah.

Jovian: Yeah. Can you share a bit more of the learnings that you had at that time?

Max: Sure. It’s a great question.

So I think leadership by example is a big one. When you’re asking your team to do what feels like the impossible, sometimes you need to be right there in the front of it and working with them to do it.

So we had a lot of issues getting out of manufacturing. It was extremely difficult to get this system to a repeatable manufacturable state. And I remember just struggling a lot to try and get it out of the factory and into the market. We launched the Owl and almost immediately went on backorder.

I had recorded 40 apology videos to customers that were sent out.

Jovian: Oh, wow, you recorded videos?

Max: Yep. Rebecca recorded videos of me apologizing to customers explaining why we couldn’t fulfill their orders. For four months we were on backorder. So it was a beautiful thing because, on the one hand, you’re having a lot of success with sales because customers are buying one and they come back and want to buy more. But on the other hand, you can’t fulfill the orders because you can’t build them fast enough. And so I remember like… I love my team. They traveled so much to China, leaving their families, spending weekends trying to get out of manufacturing. And I was right there with them. At some point, I started buying one way tickets to China. I just refused to leave until we made substantial progress.

So leadership by example is a big one. I think if you’re going to ask the team to do the impossible, you’ve got to be in there doing the impossible with them. I think treating people…just trying your hardest to be transparent. It’s really hard.

One of the challenges, of course, is that you don’t have infinite funds in a startup and so you’re always balancing optimism with realism. And like being transparent with people as much as possible, how the business functions, how money is being spent, what your runway looks like and what you’re doing about it. But trying to keep people…don’t shield them from the journey, help them understand and answer their questions as best you can. And give them the feeling that you understand what the problems are and like you’re working towards solving them.

So those were the early day problems. And then, I think, work closely with your board. This was something that…honestly, it’s something that I wasn’t good at. And I only realize now, in hindsight, with having brought Frank on board, that this was a thing that if I want to do this again, at scale, I should learn how to do that part of it. I think I sort of view it like, I have a pretty good idea of what we’re trying to accomplish.

Jovian: Yeah, especially when you have the knowledge, like you literally were building robotics then…

Max: Yeah, absolutely. And we knew what the market was, we knew what channels we had to be in to be successful. We had a great team. But I think one of the things that I would recommend to anybody, including myself possibly, is that if I ever did this again I would join a CEO group. And just kind of like…the benefit of it is that you will sort of see what other people struggle with, you’ll learn that…you don’t know all the answers, that’s the truth. You just have to have conviction in what you’re doing. But I think what you’ll learn, how do other CEOs cope with these things? How do they manage the board? How do they manage the company? How do they manage themselves? These are the sorts of things that you should not be alone in. So those are the few pieces of advice I would give to a new CEO.

Jovian: So for the transparency about the current runway of the company, is this also covered in the all-hands meeting?

Max: Yeah, so that’s a perfect place for it to be covered, of course. Yeah, absolutely, absolutely.

Jovian: So [inaudible 00:47:14] back to the… So recently, Owl Labs released the 2019 Remote Work Report. So I want to get to that a little bit. So one of the interesting inclusion that I found there is about the results that are basically remote. It says, “Remote employee managers are most concerned about reduced employee productivity, like 82% of them, and reduce employee focus and lower employee engagement, satisfaction, and whether their remote employees are getting their work done.” So these are remote managers that hasn’t been remote trained, so to speak. So the numbers are really high, like 82% of them are concerned about employee productivity. So my question to you is that, when you start hiring remote people, have you ever had similar concerns?

Max: Yeah, so I never did. And part of this has to do with my experience at iRobot Corporation. So even though back then I was only managing one remote person, the one thing that I told everybody on my team was I don’t care if you work 20 hours a week and I don’t care if you work 80 hours a week, I only care that you get your work done on time. And that’s the expectation I set with everybody. You’re right to point out that it’s a management problem, the fear of loss of productivity because you can’t see people working but… So therefore, why don’t you…not you but like generally speaking, learn how to be a better manager?

Jovian: Exactly.

Max: The skillset that you need to manage remote employees is not the same skillset that you need to manage local employees. And there are some really basic things that you need to…I think what you should start with is identify the values. What is the thing you value? So in my iRobot example, I valued on time delivery of product. That’s the thing that kept our economic engine going. I’m a big believer that engineering feeds marketing sales and feeds [inaudible 00:49:07].

Jovian: Especially for hardware startups, right?

Max: Oh, my God, totally. Totally. And so if… So what is the thing you value? Okay, and explain that to your team. And I think at the end of the day, oftentimes it’s going to be schedule.

And so set expectations that working remote is okay, you should do it… Let me know when you’re doing it if I really want to know that, but at the end of the day, the way I’m going to judge your performance is based on your ability to deliver to schedule. So engage your employees, don’t be afraid of them.

You might have the management title, but you’re just a human being like they are, at the end of the day. So learn how to work with other humans to achieve great things and I think your employees will respect you for it.

Jovian: Right. Yeah, that’s a great answer. So still about the remote work report, and for our listeners out there you can find the link on the show notes. Another thing I find interesting is that report doesn’t only focus on tech startups, because I feel like especially when it comes to talking about remote work, we’re kind of living in our own bubble. Yeah, remote work is possible but what if you’re a dentist? It’s actually not possible, right? So yeah, it’s interesting on remote work report, it also covers industries like… Basically their survey respondents work in industries like health care, legal or something like that. Is this kind of deliberate or…?

Max: Yeah, I think some industries are better positioned to leverage remote work than others. So there are cases where… So, for example, whenever I get on calls with our lawyers, it’s usually a phone or video call. I rarely go downtown Boston and like to the 26th floor of their very expensive community building.

Jovian: A lawyer is already expensive enough.

Max: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, absolutely. Lawyers are extremely expensive, we use them sparingly. But this is a function that you can have video calls with. Same thing with some of the marketing that we outsource or any number of our consultants. But there’s other things that you just cannot provide a remote workforce. So for example, I’m traveling to China tonight and I’m visiting the factory. And we rely on the factory to produce product, the factory relies on employees to be available and healthy and ready to work and assemble the product. And you can’t deliver kits of parts to people’s homes and expect to have consistent output. So there is a limit where remote work just cannot work.

Now, if you think about…I think about like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, and so some industries are closer to the top than others. So manufacturing is at the bottom. But eventually there’ll be a future where robots are planting crops and manufacturing goods and I think in that future, we’ll all be amazing painters and phone writers. And so it’s a matter of time and it’s a matter of technology. But if you give it 100 years, 500 years, I just think that eventually…well, I suppose work will go away in those periods of times. But like it takes a while for certain industries to be able to espouse remote work.

Jovian: Cool. So it’s a good segue to my next question. So this is more like a high level question right now because we’ve seen, and mostly on the software side of things, right, this derives of remote work, but again, it’s like you mentioned that some job, some occupations aren’t just…you cannot do that remotely. But do you think there is an effect to that? Do you think there is some kind of work where, oh, a lot of things can be done remotely and does it also affect the jobs that cannot be done remotely? For example, oh, do you think the rise of remote work brought higher happiness or efficiency on the software side, and can actually by proxy affect like the manufacturing side of things or…?

Max: Well, I think, for sure if one group of people have access to a better living standard through remote work, let’s say, so kind of… One of the things my co-founder says is I want to enable people to work where they want and live [inaudible 00:53:49]. And it’s…to your point, it’s easier to do that as a software engineer today than it is as a janitor, let’s say. And so think of that in terms of markets. So if there’s a big enough market for remote work in the space of janitor work, then somebody will come along with the solution that will enable it. So allow us to just make something up, maybe remote control cleaning surrogate robots that are planted into the company and people can steer that remotely.

And so if the problem is there, and the market opportunity is real, there will be a solution for it. So it comes down to market, in my opinion. What I would love for the world is if everybody could have all the time they want to spend with their family, their loved ones, their pets, all these things that matter to them. I think we’ll get there, it’s just…it’s going to take time. The technology is ready for some industries, it’s not ready for other industries. But as long as there’s a desire for the technology, for a solution, I think there’ll be an entrepreneur out there that will solve the problem.

Jovian: [inaudible 00:55:09] you mention pets, it’s totally on record. We know all the [inaudible 00:55:11]. Yeah. And it’s a fascinating answer. So, yeah, I think for my last question for today, it’s that, now that you are not the CEO anymore, so you focused on the product roadmap and product growth. What’s next for the Meeting Owl, what can we expect? Any potential new features or are you…will just focus on to improve the existing features to need perfection?

Max: Sure. So for eternity, we’re going to…for as long as this company exists, we’re going to continue to improve camera quality, speaker quality, microphone pickup performance, because we’ve already established this Meeting Owl line. So the first one was kind of a hypothesis that’s been proven to be correct. And now we have an obligation to our customers to make improvements, incremental improvements, and that kind of thing. But there’s other opportunities. So we talked a little bit about what happens before the meeting starts, what happens after the meeting starts? How do we take notes? How do we set agendas? How do we make sure that meetings run efficiently? There’s problems in the meeting space that still need to be solved with whiteboarding and being able to… So there’s just so many opportunities there where we are exploring a fair number of them.

And so while you can rest assured that there will be newer versions of the Meeting Owl, there will also be brand new and innovative products that help you run your meetings better, start your meetings on time, capture your whiteboard content, and that type of thing. And it’s all going to be done through this roboticist lens, the idea that we can automate all of these things just by applying…leveraging intelligent sensors and computer vision and robotics algorithms.

Jovian: Good. Max, thank you so much for your time today. And I learned a lot personally and I hope the audience can also learn a thing or two from this conversation.

Max: Thank you so much. Yeah, I had a pleasure, and I hope your audience found some of what I said useful to them. Okay. Cool.

Jovian: And that’s it for another episode of “Outside The Valley” brought to you by Arc. We created this podcast with the hope that in each episode, you can learn something new from other remote startup people. So if you have any feedback or suggestions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to me at jovian@arc.dev. It’s jovian@arc.dev. Or you can find us on Twitter @arcdotdev. See you next week with another episode of “Outside The Valley,” and ciao.

Blooper: Can you give me the charger? Almost dying here. Bye, guys. This is the blooper. So in some episodes I have bloopers probably and then like I mentioned this, the…

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