Recorded on 01/20 in Dublin, Ireland at Jonny’s house. CEO of meetingRoom Jonny Cosgrove invited Remoter to his house to talk about innovation management and his journey of working remotely. meetingRoom is a virtual space-as-a-service, using virtual reality tools to help distributed teams hold better, engaging meetings. Being a remote-first company has allowed for innovative ideas to take off, this one specifically addressing the life-long question of how to hold better virtual meetings.
Recorded on 01/20 in Dublin, Ireland at Jonny’s house. CEO of meetingRoom Jonny Cosgrove invited Remoter to his house to talk about innovation management and his journey of working remotely. meetingRoom is a virtual space-as-a-service, using virtual reality tools to help distributed teams hold better, engaging meetings. Being a remote-first company has allowed for innovative ideas to take off, this one specifically addressing the life-long question of how to hold better virtual meetings.
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Josephine Tse 0:00
It's time for season two of the Remoter Podcast. I'm your host Josephine.
Josephine Tse 0:05
As a continuation from season one with Alex and Andres, I had the opportunity to interview some remote work leaders, ranging from companies, consultants, advocates and more to add to Remoter's stash of free resources and human-centred stories, enriching our educational platform about remote work. This podcast is sponsored by Torre, a new kind of professional network that automatically connects talent with opportunity. Founded by Alexander Torrenegra, our goal is to make work fulfilling for everyone find the job of your dreams by visiting torre.co. That's T O R R E dot C O.
Josephine Tse 0:49
I met Jonny the night prior at a Grow Remote Dublin event. And I could already tell that he was a very articulate presenter and that really showed it in our recording. This episode contains the most succinct points from our conversation. So I hope you can hear that Jonny's story is one that comes from the heart, his passion for emerging tech stems from his childhood. And he's been able to bring that out of the box mindset to his career ventures. Coupling that with the offerings of remote work, Jonny has been able to make work fulfilling for himself and shares his lessons learned along the way. Here's Jonny story.
Josephine Tse 1:25
Right now I am in Dublin and I am in the suburb of...
Jonny Cosgrove 1:31
The leafiest of suburbs.
Josephine Tse 1:33
The suburb of Rath- Rathmines. Jonny Cosgrove, CEO of meetingRoom. I'm in his house and it's this really cool old building with really high ceilings and, what are those things called like the, all that ornament... the...
Jonny Cosgrove 1:53
I can't, I can't think of the word either but they it's the little things that we don't see in modern houses anymore. A little bit of ornate detail or maybe in the corners of the ceiling,
Josephine Tse 2:02
That's that's kind of what I'm looking at right now. And huge windows. We've got huge windows behind us. Apparently there are construction people trying to work in the park, build something make noise. That's the more important part. And Jonny chased them out today, which actually, I really, I'm surprised that you know, that worked.
Jonny Cosgrove 2:23
Yeah, Dublin City Council have been helpful this morning. And we made a bit of remote compromise that I won't be here on Monday so that they can let us go on with today. Remote compromise is the way the world works.
Josephine Tse 2:35
Jonny, can you tell me a little bit about yourself? And a little bit about your background? Give me an introduction.
Jonny Cosgrove 2:40
Yes. So I started off my life working in I suppose activism is the broad terms for it, but charity sector activism around actually, when I was in the Student Union, and which helped me actually to get to know my current co-founder. But I would have worked in in marketing and events for over 10 years between Dublin and Boston. Did my MBA over in Trinity County. Dublin. And over that over the course of time, I started taking a bit more of an interest in technology. And during my Trinity years, I would have spent a little bit too much extracurricular time trying to get my head around how hardware works and engineering. If you don't understand something, go and get deep in it. From there, I suppose so overall, I've been working innovation management and helping companies bring in technology over the last number of years since my MBA. That's led me along to working in the wonderful world of remote work and virtual reality with meetingRoom.
Josephine Tse 3:29
Awesome. Awesome. So well, were you born and raised in Dublin?
Jonny Cosgrove 3:32
Yeah, so born and raised in Dublin, but I would have spent a bit of time living over in Boston as well, during my studies over in the States. Okay, but overall, been a Dublin kid all my life.
Josephine Tse 3:41
Could you tell me a little bit about how you got more interested in technology? Like what was the trigger? What do you remember?
Jonny Cosgrove 3:49
Yeah, so I would have always embraced technology. I was, you know, I was the first kid in the country I think could genuinely pretty, was definitely first kid in my school and one of the early adopters for Pokemon back in the day. Playing on games like Everquest, not World of Warcraft where everything was force fed to you, but games where you have to go out and question the world around you. I was a really cool kid, talking to trees and seeing if they'd speak back to me. This was on a 56 k dial up all done via, you know, the old type no voice chat back then. But when I was going through college, when I was going through the nightclub and marketing end of the things that I was working in, I wanted to automate my guest list. Started off as a tool we were trying to build for ourselves. And then that actually ended up turning into my first company in the tech world. That was the first time I realised the power that could come. Not just from me saving maybe 15,000 clicks a week by not having to type in people's names and all these bits and pieces, which was, my fingers were very happy at the time to get the feedback. I'm going oh, this will just be a nice little printout on a on a Monday on a Wednesday and Thursday to Saturday night, all these things and or when you're having your corporate events, but for me the real ticking point and this is where the most important thing part of my technology journey, has been working with the right co founders, teammates, colleagues, friends who just had different opinions and different processes. And that's really what I've been learning most over the last few years. And some things only made sense, five years later. And some things made sense at the moment, but it's like all these things, technology has a place. I'm just lucky to be in a position that I get to A) play with some really cool technology, work with some really interesting institutions who want to enable technology. But what I've learned about technology is it's about the problem you're trying to solve. So whenever I'm coming at these different solutions, whether it's when I was working with homeless charities, whether it was working with the nightclub that used to or whether it's working with Fortune 500 companies now trying to enable better work, better meeting processes for my own bias right now. It's about the problem. You know, if there's a problem that has someone's hair on fire, you need to put it out right now. If it's something where it might work, it might be helpful. You might have all the will in the world, but nothing might never happen. And technology is only- technology becomes most powerful when it actually gets used.
Josephine Tse 5:57
Talking about technology and your point of view of you know, it's the, it's the people and the problems right now that are trying to solve. I want to hear a little bit about meetingRoom how, how the meetingRoom come about?
Jonny Cosgrove 6:09
Post MBA 2015. Jonny was not in the best physical health. Jonny had, talking about myself in third person, past tense. And so I was going through an interesting point in time. I'd done the MBA because I wanted to change course, but in terms of with the MBA, I had done it because I knew I wanted to arm myself with that toolbox to make change. I'd actually knocked Dr. Abraham Campbell, but he goes by Abe, and he's our Art of Abe. So myself and Abe, we're catching up. That's where it came from. I wanted to see where the technology been because over the previous three or four years, we kept knocking into each other at different, at different events, mainly AR based, but very much looking at the virtual and immersive future.
Josephine Tse 6:51
Okay.
Jonny Cosgrove 6:52
Then Abe had to go to Beijing. He spent three months of the year they're out there teaching. He runs, he runs- so he's head of the VR lab in University College Dublin, in Dublin, and in Beijing. They have a partnership programme. So, again, I was going to make sure a friend was dedicating himself to something that was, you know, for a brain like that I wanted to make sure how to go, okay. Yeah, this is, you're on the right path, being totally honest and then realise I want to be on this path too.
Josephine Tse 7:14
Got it. Okay.
Jonny Cosgrove 7:15
And because Abe spent about 15 years researching, at that point, researching immersive technologies as well as how do you teach across borders? How do you and it was a no brainer for me to look at working with someone like Abe, we realised quite quickly, none of the services that we wanted to use any video call services, audio call services...
Josephine Tse 7:33
Social media... anything...
Jonny Cosgrove 7:34
All these things like they work perfectly fine, but wasn't in a way that we could collaborate effectively and be it through bandwidth issues and something that us here in Ireland don't really get, we're lucky enough not to see what happens when you have so many people trying to sap from the network at once. Oh, scalability with these things is, it's also an issue. So what we decided to do, really simply we built a room with a table and a whiteboard. Two meetings in or probably even for two minutes into our first meeting in this room, I was on desktop, not even in VR. And I said, guys, it myself, it was Abe, and then one of our colleagues Tadhg, who helped kick things off. And we were sitting there going, this sounds really good. I know what's happening. But let's just retract here for a second. Why does this sound so good?
Jonny Cosgrove 8:21
Because I've been paying like I was with previous companies, but I paid for a fantastic video calling services, and it never sounded like this. It just never sounded so crystal clear. It didn't sound like like we're here today. You're sitting in front of me, right? When we were having our first meeting was it was a meeting just like this. We had the whiteboard here, we had you here and just in the middle of us, but we had a third colleague just here. And I could hear the direction they were coming from. We all knew we were all interested. So we knew what spatial sound was back in 2016, which was at this point, the tech wasn't easy to get access to. Not everything came with spatial audio and stuff just yet. And that was an eye opener for me. I was like, okay, so we started scratching the itch. We started saying, could we do something more with this little... wasn't even a room at that point, it was that literal table and whiteboard and we weren't in space or anything. But we I think we had a basic floor, maybe. We spent about three months validating, testing. We got some support from Enterprise Ireland to do a feasibility, or we did an innovate voucher to give it a better design around what might one of these systems be. And yeah, I think was by March 2017, we had our first customer with Bank of Ireland, okay. But when something is still connected to a PC, it might be fantastic, it might work really well, kind of applies to things like self driving cars, and all these little bits and pieces in the future in the far flung future with all these things. If it still is required to be connected to PC, it's going to be very hard to scale. Not to do it even the cost and the cost of the time was probably 3 or 4000 euros to buy your piece, buy your laptop or buy a nice PC to go with the headset and then have to worry about all the updates. And so he said look, let's keep it nice and simple. Let's get a good sense check. People in the bank, what do you prefer? What we did was an A/B test. Everyone is familiar with an A/B test is but just for what this particular kind was, what happens if people are meeting for the first time, having an icebreaker to talk. So think of onboarding situations, interviews, all these things. And what came back from that was people felt more engaged. They felt more able to communicate and collaborate in a way that we're communicating these days. In a way that I think the feedback was afterwards like, look, I wasn't being judged for what I looked like, I just got to speak to someone about what was going on. And all these little bits and pieces that came back to people felt more excited. They felt more engaged. The end result putting into word, they felt more present, and present being the same way you travelled all the way here today to do this. We could have done this video, we could have done, little bits and pieces. This is more real. This is how humans are built. And I think global collaboration. It's not people living in VR headsets all day and people can make assumptions with these things. But for us as a company, my idea is that people are supposed to be able to get into a room when they need to rather than having a three page Slack or Team's conversation about something or an email thread, and we've all had that Friday afternoon email thread. So it's about fitting into the workflow not creating a whole new one.
Josephine Tse 11:09
I think there's always, there's been this debate around the longevity of VR. I kind of want to know, why do you believe in the technology that you've chosen?
Jonny Cosgrove 11:19
So I love January for a number of reasons. Start of the year, new things and fresh fresh starts. What I also love is the annual VR is dead articles that pop up.
Josephine Tse 11:28
Yeah, every year.
Jonny Cosgrove 11:30
It's become part. It's like, I've worked number different technologies for years. And I've luckily, touch wood, pick the right technologies over here to put myself behind. Okay, and what I have seen with VR, we got excited a little too early, not us personally. Our team has been around the block and some of our team playing with VR since the early 90s. We've seen amazing companies get billions of dollars in terms of funding and kicking things off and people expect an awful lot really quickly. And just because we went from the headsets in the 90s- in the mid 90s, being, you know, maybe $100,000 to purchase to get the system I saw talking about earlier on at the beginning, of course, which was 4000 bucks. And the point I always say to this is A) we don't know what that moment will be for us. We don't know the device that'll be, although we've got a much much, we've jumped forward in the last six months to a year with a number of different things from the likes of Oculus and the likes of Pico. And some really interesting stuff happening there. In terms of VR is why I'm so so gung ho on this. The changes we see in the last three years or the equivalent of say, 15, 20 years in the telecoms industry, going from our lovely old, I had my first flip phones back in the day I've had my own first I had my first phone when I was 11. I got my iPhone when I was about I think, yeah, it was about... I got the iPod and then I got an iPhone. That was probably second year college by the time that came. And the still what I've seen happen over the last few years from price points from willingness to even try, because that was a big thing at the beginning. People were like, I'm not sticking that brick to my face. Are you mad Jonny? Come on. That's changing. The original point we were making on VR is dead. People really want the consumer world to work. And I totally appreciate where it's coming from people think this is like the iPhone, this is like all these things. It's look, it's a necessary part of everything, and I understand where things have gone. But we're on the tail end of this wild west of digital transformation and business continuity. And I'd like to think that what VR and different technologies like this can do is help close that gap, help level the playing field and from a meetingRoom point of view, it's about participation, as I was saying, immersive technology brings people together. And what I'm excited about over the next 10 years is every January reading my VR is that article, because I'm expecting that for a long time.
Josephine Tse 13:50
Now segueing into meetingRoom itself. You guys are a remote first startup. I want to know on top of your mission of creating your product and helping enable better meetings for other people. What are you guys doing to continue improving your own remote work collaborations?
Jonny Cosgrove 14:09
Great question. You really have to plan more as a remote company, not people sometimes talk about as negative. And I'm sitting there as someone who's run a number of businesses as, what do you mean that's a negative? Planning to make sure you get the best out of your team? Planning to make sure everyone's enjoying the work? Because I've never worked in a job which I didn't enjoy. I liked for everyone to have the ability to be as passionate about the project that you're working on as I am on with that, it's a case of making sure everyone knows, what are the rules for communications? What are the what's that social charter? The founders got together for the very first time in person- we've been meeting for months and years into stuff and we all got together in the same room for the first time only two weeks ago. And the great thing about that, because of the even the prep we did there and that's part of the answer for you're asking. When you're doing anything, simple things like we don't have a meeting if there's no agenda, but where we are right now because of the size of the team and the resources we have, and we're proudly bootstrapped. But where we've been going is building a lean and mean business, not just a product that helps other people do what we've done. I will never start a business in the office block again. Just from a simple economics point of view, it makes ab- like remember, you're talking to someone who's in Dublin, where we've a homelessness crisis, we've got a housing crisis we've had, we've had more years of prosperity and yet still, we're in the middle of all this. From a simple trying to get access to the best talent, whether that's again, I, Abe and myself kicking it off, he had to go to Beijing, that was part of my talent team suddenly being on a different part of the planet. So when he was over in Beijing, we changed our daily meeting time. This is going to sound so obvious to anyone listening. But the next time I saw Abe in real life, and this is something that wouldn't even come true from a video call. It was the mannerisms was everything. Abe was a little bit more tired. Five minutes of scratching at that itch, he was like, oh, we didn't just think of the knock-on effect there. So we put different timezone clocks in our, in our in our own virtual meeting room. We put up a time for local, yeah, we put a time for London, we put up a time for Beijing and we put up a time for LA for the West Coast. I was like that natural fixing of the situation kind of going okay, we have to think about it. And we were a little annoyed we hadn't thought about these things, but it's about trying to look at it from a solution point of view to a real problem, which is we live in a globalised world. That is not a negative thing. But with this globalisation, when it comes to us having to apply that thinking and that learning process ourselves. Every day, I'm learning something new, like we're a small team, but the same cracks that can appear if you're in the same office, you actually have to think of it more as a remote team, because the worst thing in business is winning without knowing why you're winning. Because then when you start losing, you have no idea how to fix it. But I think if I was if I was put into one line, remove ambiguity, that would that was something that I failed a bit along the way, just not understanding that I might have thought about something...
Josephine Tse 16:56
...but then your team might not have heard...
Jonny Cosgrove 16:58
Exactly! So I might've spent three, I might've spent a whole weekend thinking about this one thing, I'm a terrible thinker, I will go deep. And I will go too deep at times, just to try and understand the problem. But if you're just coming in on a Monday morning going, Oh, I think you should do this without explaining all that? It's documentation matters, not just writing it down. But actually thinking about this, like the ambiguity thing. You're hired to do X, Y, and Z. For us as a team, if you're hired, trust is a no brainer. Like, I know, it's a big thing when people are talking about trust. I work with people I trust. It's a unique situation that I get to choose everyone I work with, as well as that is part of it. And you're always gonna make mistakes along the way, just like in real life. If you can start off by removing ambiguity, be it from what the role is, to where you fit into the team, to what we're even trying to do this year, this quarter this week, this month. If you haven't got that kind of granularity, written down somewhere, that's where cracks start to appear. When it comes to the remote work end of things if you're not clear, and honest and true with everything and it's not trying to be all fluffy about look, be honest and true. It's like no, just say what's going on.
Josephine Tse 18:02
Yeah.
Jonny Cosgrove 18:03
It's about the devil is in the detail. I know it sounds so obvious. But when you just think about things, and look at what's missing, and knowing how you're all communicating, removing that ambiguity. It's the it's the biggest lesson I've got along the journey over my entire remote career, not just this business.
Josephine Tse 18:19
Speaking of your team, who's on your team right now, what are they like? Tell me about some of your co workers.
Jonny Cosgrove 18:24
Abe has a young family based out of Killarney. Paul, also has a young family, kicking out of London. I have not started a family with my partner over here yet, but we're all we've all decided to build a baby together, and that baby's meetingRoom, right. Part of the reason why this set of founders got together to do this kind of company, is we decided we wanted to build a company where balance was part of our own internal metrics. And it's something I've had to work on hugely but, in terms of why we're doing what we're doing and who our team are. We're a team who said, you know what, you don't have to kill yourself building a company. You need to work very, very hard. And we're particular, we are a particular set of individuals with a particular set of skills. We're working very well together, I'm lucky enough to be working with a team that has very, we have a very set core, this forward shared set of values, slightly different for different people. But the point is, as a shared group, we're on the same page.
Josephine Tse 19:17
Do you think meetingRoom's story mission and values will encourage enable more leaders and companies to think about remote first?
Jonny Cosgrove 19:25
So if this isn't exactly exact stat, just an example. If 50% of people want to work remotely, that means 50% of people possibly don't want to work remotely. And with meetingRoom, I think by nature we do. People might want to leave the office. We make it a little easier to bridge up divide obviously, and what I would hope I suppose my answer to your actual question is I would hope so. It's a real issue that people have is just a word that dirty word, change. When stuff like meetingRoom, it brings that back a little bit. It's not so futuristic. It's, you know, our end point for us, certain point, I suppose is, Star Wars nailed it with how they did, it was all low, low, achievable if you can get a video call or you can get a hologram call or a virtual call, as we call it, working on Tatooine, then you can get it working anywhere. So from our point of view, lowest common denominator is something that drives us. And it's something that we've we've heard from customers who we never thought would be customers. They might have been in my dream 100. But I would have thought maybe in five years... some of those people came on board in the last two weeks, right. And they're coming to us. I get notes from people like the most exciting messages I get from users. And we live in either rooms with users where we have shared channels and all these little bits and pieces. And some of the best VR for work messages I get are, on a Friday afternoon going, you just got rid of that usual nonsense on a Friday conversation that we have over email thread, and that's gone now. It might be replaced by something else like a someone will be talking too much in a virtual room or whatever. They're they're the problems that people like doing, like dealing with, but overall, it's just the simplicity of it all.
Josephine Tse 21:04
Well, I hope from the however long this episode will be, that our listeners will be able to hear your passion and your dedication to your company. Because I mean, I definitely hear it here. And it's it is really inspiring. And at the same time, like not to make a plug, but our company Torre. Our mission is to help people find fulfilling work, we want to make work fulfilling for everybody. So we totally understand where you're coming from with your vision and the drive you have for meetingRoom because you see that there's an immediate problem. And you guys are trying to solve it and with the technology and it feels like I mean, I feel like I can really relate on that level because even though we're doing different things, we're doing the same things. But I wanted to thank you so much for joining me on this episode of the Remoter podcast and sharing your story.
Jonny Cosgrove 21:58
Thank you so much for having me here today and thanks for making the effort of getting all the way over here to Dublin. I think that's that's part of the fun of all the all these things, actually getting to meet people out there who are equally if not more passionate than myself on this area. So thanks very much for your time.
Josephine Tse 22:12
Thank you.
Josephine Tse 22:16
Remoter Podcast season two is recorded, produced and edited by Josephine Tse. It is mixed and mastered by Stephen Stepanic and Vanesa Monroy. Graphics and visuals by Valentina Castillo. The music track used is Skip by OBOY from SoundStripe. Follow and subscribe to us on Spotify, Apple podcasts wherever you listen to your podcasts. Don't forget, we've recently made our Founding and Growing Remotely online course completely accessible and listed on our site. Visit us at remoter.com, that's R E M O T E R dot com for more relevant content. Follow us on social media @remoterproject to stay up to date with our latest initiatives and collaborations with other remote first companies around the world. We'd also love to hear your thoughts about each episode, so feel free to tag us on socials anytime. And remember, we're here to make work fulfilling, so what part will you play in shaping the future of work?