Why You Need an Owl

One of the surprising discoveries I made while researching my new book, Can You Hear Me?, due out from Harvard in October, was why it is that video conferencing is so difficult to get right. You’d think it would be easy, since you’ve got sound and visuals. It’s just like being in the same room with someone, right?

Wrong. There are significant issues involved in talking to someone via a video connection. The good news is that Owl Labs has turned its attention to solving those problems, and it has come out with a video camera that represents a real improvement over the standard equipment in an office conference room — or your laptop.

To understand what Owl is up to, I talked to Rebecca Corliss, Owl’s V-P of Marketing.

Nick: Rebecca, thanks for speaking with me. Can you tell me the basic premise of Owl Labs — what’s the problem you’re trying to solve?

Rebecca Corliss: Absolutely, we’ve rallied the company around two core ideas:

One, teams are becoming more and more distributed as it becomes easier than ever to work from anywhere. We call these groups hybrid teams. At any given time, some folks might be at home, on the road, or even congregated at the office. And thus the most prepared teams expect that they’ll never be in the same place.

Two, communication becomes extremely imbalanced across distributed teams, especially during team meetings. That’s because most conferencing cameras and meeting room technology underserve remote meeting participants. They don’t capture the nuances of what’s happening during the conversation, giving the folks in the room the advantage through more visual information, facial expressions, and body language that is typically lost over group video calls.

That imbalance is exactly what we want to fix, and we created the Meeting Owl 360° smart video conferencing camera to help. It goes in the center of the table and automatically focuses on different people in the room automatically as they talk. Also as a 360° camera, it gives a full panorama of the room at the top of the screen as well.

Now at any given time, the remote participants can see the entire room, everyone’s facial expressions, if someone gets up to go to the bathroom, or if Jane is rolling her eyes again. And what’s so interesting, having the camera in the center of the room gives the remote person nearly the same perspective as someone sitting right there at the table. How cool is that

Nick: This is brilliant! Where did the idea come from originally? Why an owl?

Rebecca: The idea came from our very own CTO Mark Schnittman when he was a remote employee himself. Before starting Owl Labs, he took a job as lead roboticist for a startup on the west coast while living in Boston. It worked out great — except for one key (and very important) aspect of his day-to-day: team meetings.

In his words, he could never see, hear, or follow the conversation. And whenever something was missed, he had to decide whether it was worth disrupting the flow in order to hear it again. He felt more like a burden than a contributor.

One day, one of his smart and helpful colleagues decided to put the laptop they were using for the call on a swivel stool in the center of the group. Every time someone started talking, the friend rotated the laptop to face that person. That was Mark’s a-hah moment — he could BUILD this.

From there he started Owl Labs to create a product that used robotics — with no moving parts — to automatically capture the most important visual and auditory information during a conversation. With a device like this, there’s no reason why the remote person couldn’t have nearly all the same information as those sitting in the room.

Why the Owl? I bet you could guess! Along with their awesome ability to spin their heads nearly all the way around, they also have exceptional hearing and sight — and are wise! And with that, we decided office hardware could also be fun and have a bit of a consumer vibe, and so we designed the product to resemble an owl too.

Nick: What kind of response are you getting from companies and individuals — is the feedback helpful?

Rebecca: My favorite comment is when a customer says, “This product makes me feel like I’m sitting in the room with the team.” Those words are music to my ears. It means we’re making the conversation more natural for the person, and she feels like an equal participant to her distant colleagues.

We also hear that the Meeting Owl is very easy to use, which is also extremely important. What good is a product if you can’t use it? I like to say if you’ve used a webcam before, you already know how to use the Meeting Owl.

We get new ideas and requests all the time too. People wish for Meeting Owls that serve larger rooms and can see and hear even further away. We get requests for Owls that can be mounted to the ceiling. All amazing ideas. What this tell us is we’ve hit on something good, and now we need to work on getting it to work in even more contexts and spaces.

Nick: Let’s get down to brass tacks — what are your rules for a successful video conference? How long should they last? How do you handle who speaks? Is an agenda essential? What else?

Rebecca: Love this — first, even the most well equipped meetings with the best video conferencing technology can still be absolutely terrible if you don’t follow some basic rules for good meeting hygiene. With that:

Designate one in-room participant to be the “voice of the remote folks.” This person should always be on guard to make sure those on the call are having an impactful experience. For example, this person might keep an eye out to make sure the remote participants always have a fair chance to speak. Imagine that a work-from-home individual starts to talk but is cut off. In that case, the designated person would acknowledge it and give the floor back to the remote person. Mark plays this role often for us at Owl Labs.
Set an agenda, send it beforehand, and have a purpose for the meeting. Time is money! A little prep goes a long way, and makes sure the meeting is valuable and effective for everyone.
Use great technology that provides an excellent remote experience. While I won’t go so far as to say “Use a Meeting Owl” as one of my rules (that’d look a bit too self-serving), I will encourage you to think about the technology you have in your room today and what the experience is like for those on the other side of the call. At the end of the day, that camera and mic isn’t in service of the people in the room — it’s there to capture the conversation for the people outside of the room.
A bonus tip – make sure you’ve experienced a meeting remotely yourself. You need to fully know what it’s like and create that empathy to be equipped to improve it for others.

Nick: Tell us about Rebecca — how did you get into the vid con biz?

Rebecca: I’m a gal who had to follow her heart! For context, before joining Owl Labs I spent the last 8 or so years at an amazing company called HubSpot. I originally joined when it was 45 employees, and left after we crossed 1,500. It was an amazing ride, and as we grew I observed how crucial it is to invest in culture and employee engagement as a lever for overall business success. Helping my fellow teammates be successful developed as a passion for me, and I was eventually recruited to run a function called team development for our 150-person marketing organization.

Eventually I got the startup itch again, and I knew that it was time to find an early-stage company where I could start at the beginning and drive growth. My hope for my next company was simple: I wanted to find a product that was in service to employee success — the same way I personally like to be.

That’s how I found Owl Labs.

Nick: Rebecca, thanks very much! The Owl doesn’t solve all the problems with video conferencing, but it’s a great start. To find out more about how you can improve your videoconferencing, check out my book, due out in October.