Episode Transcript
[00:00:22] Speaker A: Hi, everyone. This is Irwin Lazar, our president and principal analyst at metrogy. And welcome to this episode of Metro G's Metrocyte voice and video podcast. I'm excited to be joined for this episode by Jeanine Pelosi, who is the CEO of neat. And in this episode, we'll learn a little bit more about Janine. We'll learn about what brought her to NEAT and her vision for neat's video engagement portfolio. And we'll get her take on how she sees meetings and meeting spaces and meeting environments evolving over time. And we'll obviously talk about the role of AI certainly a hot topic right now in the communication and collaboration space. So, Janine, welcome to the show.
[00:00:58] Speaker B: Thank you. Nice to see you again. And yeah, thanks for having me on.
[00:01:01] Speaker A: Nice to see you as well. So I'd love to start with just a little bit about you. Tell our audience how you got involved with the communication, collaboration, visual industry and how you found yourself in the role you're in today.
[00:01:15] Speaker B: Yeah, well, that's a loaded question.
So I have been in this industry for 20 plus years. I started as an intern at WebEx, right.
Went through the Cisco acquisition and then made my way over to Zoom over in 2015, spent almost a decade there, left last year. And you know, in that time off it was, you know, I kind of thought, you know, what is next, right? Do you go and do another operating role? Do you advise? Do you garden? I don't know, what is it? And this company is so special. And I had the privilege of working closely with them at its inception because frankly we were seeing that hardware was limiting software and that was not something that we were really looking to have be in place in my prior role. And the company is founded with the pioneers in video. I mean, this truly is a product led company with quality and simplicity at its heart. And so for me, it felt like a perfect combination of incredible people and an incredible product. So I've now been here for a little over a year and it has been a really fun journey.
[00:02:33] Speaker A: Awesome. So we'll get into the a little bit more about NEAT in a second. But I always like to share what's the fun fact about you that our audience should know?
[00:02:41] Speaker B: Fun facts.
I'm incredibly handy. There's nothing I can't do for myself. Whether it's around the house, around the yard, you name it, I can probably do it myself.
[00:02:54] Speaker A: Yeah, that's awesome. I'm kind of trying to be the same way. Certainly YouTube helps in that regard. Right?
[00:03:00] Speaker B: I was lucky. I grew up with a contractor as a father, so I had no chance. It was in my DNA whether I wanted it or not.
[00:03:09] Speaker A: Excellent. So you mentioned you went over from Zoom. I think you said you'd been there about eight years since the founding, and then moving over to NEAT a little over a year ago.
What was it that brought you over? You touched a little bit on that. Hardware potentially being a limiting factor, I guess, maybe even deeper to dive, is how do you see that ability for hardware to overcome some of those limitations?
[00:03:36] Speaker B: Yeah, I think first and foremost, we hear the term hybrid a lot. Like, it was a word that I got pretty allergic to, because I think people are not thinking about the end user. Right. The people at the end of all of this communication, which is what keeps me in this industry. I think it's just fascinating, the concept of connecting people. Right. And when we think about the unique position that Neat plays, it was the time in the company. Right. So I think there's nothing more fun than the stage where you have incredible customers, you have an incredible product, you have a great team, and it's now, let's operationalize what we're doing and take it to the next level. And that was really the stage that Neat was at last year when I. When I had the chance to join. And it's just a ton of fun. I mean, the ride and doing this with incredibly smart people is what makes it a lot of fun.
[00:04:34] Speaker A: That's awesome. So, obviously a lot of competitors in the space you're in, what do you see as the primary differentiators for neat?
[00:04:42] Speaker B: You know, our simplicity and our quality. That that is something that other competitors don't have. And when we think about what we're developing, we don't think about it as a piece of hardware. We think about it as, you know, a device, a portal that lets you into this world of communicating. And so when we think about what I. What I touched on in terms of Hybrid, where I see us differentiating is it's not about the connections that we have when we're online. Right. You can have a great Zoom or teams experience when you're all remote. I think we've all learned that and we've gotten pretty good at it. And then, you know, there was. There was the pre time or even, you know, now in certain industries where everybody is in. In the same room. I just took a trip to Asia in Tokyo, that that was the norm, right? It was everybody in the room. You didn't have people connecting in in the same way for the meetings that I was in.
But really the opportunity and where I think we're uniquely positioned is when you combine those two worlds. Like what happens when you are trying to connect the folks that are sitting in. In an office and the folks that are online. And that's where it continues to break down and where we're really focusing primarily on making sure that the product is delivering on those use cases specifically.
[00:06:04] Speaker A: That's a really important point. It's something we've seen in our research where it's almost become a reverse scenario. It used to be pre Covid days, the people who were remote, maybe they were dialed in, if they were lucky, they had video and they were really not fully participating in the meeting and probably had tuned out. And now you're in an environment where the people who are remote can share content, can chat, and those people who are in the meeting room might not necessarily have access to that same quality of engagement experience. So I know our friends at Zoom like to talk about the idea of earn the commute. And there's. I'm not even going to get into the whole holy war that's going on right now between whether or not people should come back in or they can work remotely. But how do you build an environment where there is an incentive to be in the office above and beyond informal collaboration and it's not driven by a mandate?
[00:06:54] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I think first and foremost, and yeah, you're right. I mean, that's a whole nother episode that we can go into, which is a whole lot of fun.
But look, it can't be a mandate. And I truly believe that humans are not meant to be sitting in their rooms by themselves all the time. Like, I get so much energy from going into the office and seeing the folks that I work with. Like, I just couldn't imagine doing it other way, but on the same, I couldn't imagine going and doing that commute five days a week the way that I did in the past. Like, believe it or not, we were in the. In the office five days a week at Zoom. In the. In the past. It was just how we started the company and. And grew up. Like, that seems silly to me. Right. And so it's like, where is that balance? And so, yeah, it's finding.
Finding a good way to blend those environments again, I think, is what's going to be really important.
[00:07:46] Speaker A: Yeah. How do you see the devices playing that role? Like, what do you bring beyond just, you know, we put a picture up in the front of the room.
[00:07:56] Speaker B: Yeah. I think first and foremost, we talk a lot about video. I mean everyone when they think about video conferencing, right. It's in the name, it's incredibly important. But audio to me is what is absolutely critical. If you can't hear someone, you get completely distracted, you can't even understand what's happening, you can't follow a presentation, a train of thought. And so audio, what we're doing around audio is incredibly important and especially you think about shared spaces. So this is one I think everyone was kind of trying to move to pre pandemic. I don't think it really was ever fully successful but that's I think because the products were kind of limiting. So if you think about things like, you know, the way we're doing barriers and you can set your barriers if you have a big board in a shared space, you know, you don't absolutely need everyone in a 50 foot room but you know, you can have a 10 by 10 space where you're picking up the audio and the video participants, for example. Another is, I think about, at least for us, what we're doing with App Hub natively bringing in the apps that you are using, using and know and love when you are at home or remote into the office is critical. And so that's an area that we are going to be investing in further to really again allow the device to be a portal into your workflow. Right. It's not just about getting someone on video, but how do we take it past that?
[00:09:20] Speaker A: Yeah, I had a chance to see that as part of the neat board approach we'll talk about in a second launch at ucx. I guess it was early October in London and it was interesting, like we talked about earlier, that challenge of making sure that the people in the room have access to the same content so that you could just launch applications directly from a device and from a management standpoint have very tight control over what's available and what's pushed out to the different devices. So it sounds like that's something you look at as again, how do we ensure the term, I guess equitable meetings. I hear a lot that no matter whether you're at home or in the office, you have access to everything beyond just voice and video.
[00:09:59] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:10:00] Speaker A: Excellent. So segue into the Neatboard Pro. So you just launched that device recently. Tell us a little bit about it and how you're positioning it and where you see it fitting into a meeting environment.
[00:10:12] Speaker B: Yeah, so it is an all in one video collaboration device. It's elegant, it's gorgeous, it works really, really well and it delivers Exceptional audio and video quality. And it really, I think, is removing that friction. Again, I think that's incredibly important. Frictionless for the end user.
It delivers on choice. So whether you're using Zoom or using Microsoft Teams, you add neat app hub in there.
That's incredibly valuable to the end user.
[00:10:49] Speaker A: I thought one of the interesting points or differentiators that I saw was that ability to just easily raise and lower it and to be able to support an environment where you might have accessibility challenges for somebody who might be in a wheelchair and can't reach the board. And so having that flexibility to position the board depending on the environment, the people in the room, I thought was really interesting.
[00:11:09] Speaker B: It is. And they took that one step further too. Right. And this is some of the thoughtfulness of the design. Right. That's also going to work. If you're mounting it on a wall, it's not just on the floor stands that you can mobile around the spaces. And then when you do that, super cool is that you don't even see it on top and bottom. They've been able to position it so that as you're moving it, you never even see that mount in the back. Right. So it's that next level of quality, you know, that, that really. I think NEAT focuses in on that, that maybe others don't do as much in the market. Yeah.
[00:11:42] Speaker A: So neat. I believe it's headquartered in Oslo, is that correct?
[00:11:45] Speaker B: That's right. And that's right.
[00:11:47] Speaker A: So how do you. How do you take advantage of your own capabilities and be able to support seamless collaboration for people who are obviously all around the world, California, as well as those folks who are over in Norway.
[00:12:00] Speaker B: Yeah. So to start, every needer has a neat device. Right. They can pick and choose what's going to work for their environment. We do kind of have what we call a hub and spoke model around the globe. So we obviously have our headquarters in Oslo. We have a great location in San Jose, and then we have smaller locations around the globe. So we really try and be thoughtful in our hiring process too. Maybe this is something that isn't the most popular, but we definitely believe that talent is everywhere. But also accessibility into the offices is really valuable and being able to get in and collaborate with your team members. So we're trying to be thoughtful about that global hiring.
But yeah, making sure that they can physically touch the devices and, you know, understand the experience that folks are going to have when they're in a physical environment is key. Right. And so you can't just do that from your Home office and think that you can get away with it by just doing, you know, zooms and team meetings. So yeah, getting the hardware to the teams, having them be, you know, co located as much as possible is really helping us. I'm also an early riser so it helps with my California home base and our Oslo teammates. So yeah, yeah, you've had quite a.
[00:13:11] Speaker A: Few early morning meetings since the last year since you've joined.
[00:13:14] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, but I'm okay with that. Right. And it's, you know, I think we've all seen that the workday has shifted a bit. Right. Like this whole nine to find concept is another thing that feels so silly to me. Right. And so if you kind of break out and that also works with people that frankly just are more, you know, like I'm more on in the morning, you know, you're not going to get the same Janine, you know, at 7 or 8pm at night. Right. I'm ready, I'm ready for bed at that point because I got to get up by, you know, 4:30 and start my day. So. Yeah, awesome.
[00:13:46] Speaker A: So we got to talk about AI. How do you see AI impacting? You mentioned voice and video quality and just even the overall meeting experience.
[00:13:55] Speaker B: Yeah, So I mean from the start, NEAT devices have relied on AI to deliver the video experience that we all are used to from neat. And it has patented two pioneering features with symmetry and neat boundary, which I spoke of just a few minutes ago. And look, we believe that AI is going to continue to evolve to help us deliver, you know, again, more fluid, frictionless experiences, you know, for folks whether they are in their home office leveraging the technology or in a co located space.
[00:14:30] Speaker A: Yeah, it's definitely one where, you know, we're moving well beyond the hype and into the reality. I think, you know, in our research we see a lot of interest in AI both for things like meeting summarization, transcription and what you hear talked about a lot of, but also the voice and video and quality improvements and then the management improvements. So if somebody who's responsible for managing say a NEAT environment, can they use AI to automate tasks, to handle provisioning, to handle troubleshooting and so on? So assume those are all areas you're looking at.
[00:15:00] Speaker B: It is. And look, this goes back to what you brought up earlier around, you know, I think there was a vision. I know, I know Eric had this and many others shared this, but how do you make the experience better when you're remote? And I think we both said, okay, we've kind of Checked that box in a lot of ways, but we all still need to get together because there's something innate that you just do not get over video that you're going to get when you're in person. And so how do we bottle that? And so now it's like we have to pull that back into the physical spaces which that for me is where I see in terms of our industry AI really needing to play a big part is making that seamless and doing so in a way frankly too, that, you know, privacy, security, like all of those things are incredibly top of mind. And so you can't just have everyone come in to a room and have it be recording. You know, you can see that being a plus, but a lot of people could see that being a negative. So doing that in the right way is going to be incredibly important.
[00:15:54] Speaker A: Yeah, we've seen in our research a great deal of concern over things like voice. How do you identify people who are in the room? So you can transcribe what each individual person said. So that means you need some way of matching voice and maybe image to an individual, right?
[00:16:08] Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.
[00:16:10] Speaker A: So do you see any role for augmented virtual reality? Is that something that you're looking at as well?
[00:16:15] Speaker B: So look, it's interesting and we definitely are looking, you know, right now for us.
Look, my, my worry is that we're going to go to a place where it doesn't feel authentic and for neat. It's about creating those authent experiences and holding that true. I think that's why you're not seeing, you know, folks just sitting in their home office with their VR goggles on, you know, and you know, entering their virtual office every day, like it sounds interesting, but like are you actually going to do it? But, but all of that said, I also am wary of those that just dismiss this as well because I think a lot of the major technology improvements that you've seen over the years started out sounding kind of crazy. And so do I think it's going to end up the way it looks right now? No, but I do think that it is going to drive to kind of what that desired outcome is. When we think about the value of augmented reality, like what are we really trying to achieve and then backing out, what's the technology that's going to really deliver upon that?
[00:17:15] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that makes sense. We've seen interest in our research is around really targeted use cases, training, show me what you see, help guide you through something. But the idea of meetings where we're all sitting like you Said in our homes or even at our desks wearing headsets. Probably a bit of a reach.
[00:17:33] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, exactly. But you know, there are some real life examples. Right. So you see things like car mechanics overlaying AR to the car manual on a real life car that we're pairing. Right. Like that's really cool. Or you think about all of the experiences that you see to navigate you through virtual spaces. So again, I think there's going to be elements of this and you're going to see it kind of stream in and then become more prevalent over time.
[00:17:59] Speaker A: Yeah, I think that makes sense. So we made it through conference season as we're recording this. We just got through Microsoft Ignite last week. I assume ISE is next up on your radar.
What are you starting to think about for 25?
Where do you put your focus as you think about the year ahead?
[00:18:16] Speaker B: Yeah, so look, we've had an incredibly strong past year that we're incredibly proud of and continuing to grow.
We've also expanded the product portfolio. So I think this is key of ensuring that NEAT was by design focused in on ensuring a simple, wonderful user experience for most size conference rooms. But we were, we didn't want to bring complexity into the portfolio by going into spaces that we felt like we couldn't do the NEAT way.
That said, with those product enhancements we brought out such as center, it's allowed us to actually go in and have the products work together in a way that they hadn't really in the past to actually play in those large spaces. So we're incredibly excited about delivering upon more, more solutions for the customers and then we've had some fun. Right. So we, we just recently launched another global partnership with Oracle Red Bull Racing.
On top of the partnership that we announced a few months back with the LA Clippers and their new kind of state of the art home at the Intuit Dome. So really expanding what we're doing, expanding the footprint, expanding our market opportunity. Those are, those are the areas we're focused in on now.
[00:19:40] Speaker A: Excellent. Exciting times ahead.
So where can folks find more about NEAT or reach out to you if they want to talk more about the product portfolio and services?
[00:19:50] Speaker B: Yeah, absolutely. Reach out to any of us on LinkedIn. But you can go to Neat. No, and reach out to us there. And we're happy to work directly with you, work with your partners however best you are looking to serve your customers.
[00:20:05] Speaker A: Awesome. Well, thank you so much for joining us. And this will wrap up our episode of metrosight. Again I'd like to thank Janine for joining us. I invite you to check out Neat, no, as she mentioned. And remember, if you like this episode, please share with your friends and colleagues. If you're watching on YouTube, hit the subscribe button. We do try and post metrocytes roughly every two weeks and we look forward to seeing you on the next one. Thank you so much and have a great day.
[00:20:28] Speaker B: Thank you. Erwin.
