Adam Riggs CEO Of Frameable | Can a Virtual Experience Really Replace the Office?

What you’ll learn

• The definition of a virtual reality office
• Why do we need a virtual experience?
• Video software alone isn’t enough – we also need “peripheral vision”
• How to design your own digital workplace
• How a virtual workplace promotes better diversity, equity, and inclusion
• The ROI question
• Distributed vs. remote teams
• Remote work reduces commuting. How will this impact towns and cities?
• Virtual reality offices and the metaverse

Transcript

Frank Cottle [00:00:53] Welcome to the Future of Work podcast. Today’s guest is Adam Riggs, the founder and CEO of Frameable.com. Frameable, as one of the leading digital virtual office providers globally and currently services the likes of Amazon, IBM, Bayer, Samsung, NASA, Harvard University and a number of other major companies and institutions. He is also an experienced executive and investor in ecommerce, finance and media companies. Prior to frame, Adam was the Presidential Innovation Fellow at the US Treasury Department and a subject matter expert at the U.S. State Department and the first President and CFO of Shutterstock.com from 2005 2010. In the last 20 years, he has built, invested in and advised companies achieving a full range of outcomes from successful exits to disappointing bankruptcies, and has learned a great deal from each one of them. Adam, welcome. I’m really grateful to have your insights today. Before we get into any questions. So. Can we define or can you define what you believe a virtual office to be so that there’s no confusion? It’s a widely used term and I think that your use is quite unique.  

Adam Riggs [00:02:17] Thank you, Frank, for having me today. You know, I agree with you that it is confusing. Virtual offices. If you search for them in an Internet search engine, you’ll find things like physical mail boxes that you can rent and phone forwarding services so that you can pretend to have a big physical presence, possibly, or a big presence, even if you if you don’t if you’re smaller. But when we use the term virtual office, what we mean is a place that you can come to, that is a virtual space where you can do your work usually with colleagues. So it’s not just video meeting software. It goes beyond video meeting software. It includes many of the features that people are used to in video meetings, software such as screen sharing. And, you know, of course, you can have your camera on or off your microphone on or off all kinds of familiar features. But we’re really going one step further and trying to expand people’s sense of space while they’re using virtual software to do their work.  

Frank Cottle [00:03:32] Well, you know, it’s interesting. I love your opening your comment about the other virtual office, because you see a little gray hair here. You know, back in 1994, another friend and I from our industry has a rather large company, a company Iwg. And I got together and talked about the confusion of various products in our industry. And we decided that if we both called our business identity plans and corporate plans, etc., virtual offices, we could create a new term and a new product. Mm hmm. So, for better or worse, I am the coiner of the phrase in the way you defined it earlier.  

Adam Riggs [00:04:16] Oh, well, I’m happy to hear. Sorry. And I think that that you have you have done the world a big service because that the by that definition there there is a lot there’s a lot of opportunity. There’s been a lot of opportunity in the last, you know, ten, 20, 30 years to to to help people, you know, facilitate their remote, physical lives and still be reachable.  

Frank Cottle [00:04:43] You know, it is we we believe it combines the combination of people, place and technology into a highly flexible service agreement.  

Adam Riggs [00:04:54] Yeah.  

Frank Cottle [00:04:54] And those three components together create the, the, the core of the product. It’s interesting. Your definition is totally different. However, it combines the same three things. Agreed place and technology. Different rate. Different ratio though.  

Adam Riggs [00:05:12] Yeah.  

Frank Cottle [00:05:13] That’s the the fun. When we first defined this, we said, you know, it’s like making bread. You have three ingredients.  

Adam Riggs [00:05:21] Yeah.  

Frank Cottle [00:05:22] Flour, salt, a little into water and you’ve got it. Now, how many types of bread are there when we describe bread? And what you’ve done is created an entirely different loaf, if you will, to be provided to a very interesting cross-section of customers that are virtual office rarely touches. Mm hmm. So same two elements, the same three elements in different ratios, but addressing completely different marketplaces. I mean, that’s really, I think, the beauty of what you’re doing. And and it’s quite an interesting contribution as you go forward. So thank you for putting up with my definition and I appreciate yours as well. You know what, when we talk about virtual offices in today’s world, we’re talking about hybrid work. And a lot of that is right sizing companies, real estate investment and how their people work within that investment. Why did you decide to go digital with your virtual office solution?    

Adam Riggs [00:06:36] Well. I’ve been working remotely. By which I mean I’ve worked in a place that’s physically separate from many of my colleagues for a very long time, you know, more than 20 years, depending on how you count. And and I remember when there wasn’t a reliable video meeting solution. I remember when a live video box next to another live video box was really a technological achievement worth talking about on its own. It was just phone calls before that. Phone calls and emails. First phone calls, then phone calls and emails. And then you had these video boxes. But what what we are excited about is the opportunity to go beyond the video boxes. It doesn’t mean that what we’re doing doesn’t include them. It just means that we’re trying to use the technology to help the people connect in a different way. And for our company, during the pandemic, our lease just happened. We had a physical office and our lease just happened to be up. It was an easy decision not to renew it because we weren’t going to be able to use it. And we quickly realized that we really had all the tools and vision that we needed to to build a compatible, you know, sort of easy to use corollary experience that could replace the physical office.  

Adam Riggs [00:08:06] It’s just meeting software is not on its own enough to replace a physically. You have to go beyond just the meeting software because an office is is more than just meetings. It’s actually a place where a full spectrum of interaction types take place on a daily basis. So if you want to build a virtual corollary, if you want to build a virtual version of that, it can’t just be a place where meetings can take place over and over and simultaneously. It has to be a place where serendipitous interactions can happen, where collisions can happen, where you can find yourself pulled into things that you weren’t planning on making a contribution to. But you can make a meaningful contribution, just like in a physical office.  

Frank Cottle [00:08:54] Well, you know, I think that’s really important. And we share the experience of having worked virtually from our teams for long periods of time. And in fact, I remember the first video system that we had was in 1984, if you can believe it, and my video system wouldn’t talk about anybody else’s. So we always had to go through a third party or two third parties to connect those systems. So it was rarely used and very expensive, and today we don’t even think about it. It’s a wonderful progression we made along with those. But your point about. Interactions and collisions and spontaneous work. All of that doesn’t lend itself well to most of the video structures that we see today. Video alone is not the answer. It’s just one of the tools within the answer.  

Adam Riggs [00:09:52] Yeah, agreed. And, and I would say I’d like to focus in our product we use as one of our most important sort of design, you know, core cornerstones. The idea of peripheral vision. So when you go into a physical space, whether it’s a hotel lobby or an office building, you, you, you are taking in a huge amount of information that’s relevant to your decision making process through your peripheral vision. You’re focusing on something, but you’re taking in other information and you’re using that same when you’re driving, you know, they say when you’re driving, you make one decision per second. On average, you see a car stopped and it’s supposed to be stopped. You see a car parked and you don’t see a driver. So that’s fine. You see a car rolling to a stop sign and you’re not sure they’re going to actually honor it. So you have to make decisions every time you take an information.    

Adam Riggs [00:10:48] Well, in office space is similar. You see people working together with the door open. That means one thing. You see people working together with the door closed. That means something different. You see an office with the shades drawn that mean something different. You see a bunch of people in the cafe, you know, getting a cup of coffee or tea that mean something. So being able to take in this information is very important. And it’s also not it’s not just important for getting work done efficiently. It’s also important for feeling satisfied as a human. So the problem with video meeting software is that you don’t you don’t really collect any of that information when you’re in a meeting with someone and it’s a bilateral exchange, there’s nothing that is telling you anything about the other people in your office. So if we’re going to create a virtual office experience that’s compelling, we have to figure out how to enable the bilateral discussions, the one on one or two on to, you know, whatever discussions with small groups and individuals. But we also have to, just like in the real world, give people peripheral information that can be actionable. And that is a difficult thing to do. I think we are way ahead of others in terms of our execution, but ultimately all video office products are going to have to figure out how to do this or else the users are just going to continue to feel disconnected from one another.  

Frank Cottle [00:12:12] Well, I agree. One of the things that I found interesting, I as you know from our prior conversation and so the audience knows you and I chatted for beforehand about a week or so ago about some of our experiences. And one of the comments that I made to you after reviewing frame of all AI is that we looked at just about every. Technology based virtual office product that comes along. And almost the great majority of them are are designed to look like a floor plan of an office.    

Adam Riggs [00:12:52] Yep.    

Frank Cottle [00:12:54] And there is benefit to that. The you know, you can see you can see the layout, the lay of the land, so to speak. You’ve chosen to organize your virtual work environment more like a. Corporate department. Org chart if I can use that analogy to so that you can see who’s working, where with whom, when, as opposed to just who’s happens to be at their desk with their door open. Right. And so one of the things I found fascinating was in your virtual office, which is primarily for larger clients and institutions as opposed to individual solopreneur, is like we serve a lot of you are you are very organized, organized on a departmental or a workflow basis as opposed to a physical basis. You weren’t trying to emulate the office so much as emulate the activities within the office. Yes. And I found that very when you talk about interactions, when you talk about video, I found that that was ability and I thought of my own problems with video. I said one of the problems that we have is we’re in the middle of a meeting. Hey, we need Harry. We need you. We need Suzy. We need somebody in this meeting. Where are they? What are they doing? How do we get them? And who’s going to invite them? Are they going to pay any attention to their email on the invite? You know, all that goes on and half the time you can’t get them into the meeting. So you reschedule a meeting in in the organizational structure that you’ve used. It seems as if while that that problem has been 100% solved, I don’t think it can be. But you’ve moved a long ways towards coordinating the flow of work, not just the place of work in a virtual office. And I found that very, very exciting to think about it, because it was really a next dimension. That sounds like pitching your darn company. And I’m not. Well, I look for differences, and I did identify that one difference as being a next step. I was very intrigued by it. Which which is why we’re talking today now.  

Adam Riggs [00:15:14] Well, I appreciate that very much. And and you’re exactly right. We we tried to we tried to design an environment that was flexible enough that if people wanted to organize it, visually, organize it according to the workflow, they could absolutely do that. If you want to have project rooms, you can do that. If you want to have private offices, you can do that. Any mix of these things and any any amount of the org chart and the workflow and people’s personal preferences can all be honored.    

Frank Cottle [00:15:46] Well, it seems like it also has them the benefit of being more inclusive, creating greater accessibility, not just individuals, but to the teams overall, and to expand the benefits of how team building actually works. Could you elaborate on that a little bit?  

Adam Riggs [00:16:05] Yeah, well, there’s a lot of great research about remote work and the benefits of remote work. A lot of it comes from Nick Blum at Stanford University. I encourage your listeners to check out his research. But one of the things that he’s found is that better diversity, equity and inclusion results are a clear benefit of remote work and successful hybrid approaches. Employees are happier. They’re more productive. You know, if it’s done right and we can talk about what that means. As we mentioned, it allows companies to right size their real estate investment and save some money there if they if they have physical investments to to manage. And then the DTI piece is really it’s something that extends beyond that. You know, what most people probably think of when they think of DTI, you know, diversity, equity and inclusion is really everyone benefits because of the you know, the diversity of perspectives is what helps a company that’s doing difficult that’s solving difficult challenges. It’s the diversity of perspectives that really helps them solve it in a special way, design a special product or feature or bring something to market that you know that people haven’t thought of before. Diversity of perspectives is always worthwhile, and and remote work just makes it easier for a broader range of people to make a meaningful contribution.  

Frank Cottle [00:17:28] You know, it’s funny, when we look at diversity as an issue, I’ll go back, as I often do, many, many years when we first created our first network of centers globally and we were competing against a large single branded group thing with all the trim was blue and all the coffee cups matched globally. That was their, their, their brand. And our brand we made a decision says we can’t compete with that five star in India is different than five star in London. And so we thought we’re going to be dealing with with the local environment. And we decided that what we learned from all of our local environments and applied universally. Gave us more strength and we were quite competitive. As a result of that. So one of our phrases we used internally was that our differences are our strength, not our similarities alone. We were branded unbranded an R, we had a variety of facilities, but only one quality of service rather than one type of facility. With who knows what the heck the service is. Yeah. So we really focused only on service, but it gave us something to strive towards. And I think as we look at the issues of today, a lot of that same thought is you learn from diversity. You don’t have to deal with diversity. It’s an opportunity for learning and about what you learn does make you better.  

Adam Riggs [00:19:12] Absolutely.  

Frank Cottle [00:19:13] You know, so I think there’s a lot there that you press forward with that can really make a difference overall. And so it is really coming down to a lot of your modeling, a lot of your structures is around employee wellbeing. Removing schedule, meeting fatigue, if you can, by creating spontaneity and collaboration, etc.. How does the bottom line of that hit a company whose practical point of view you’re going to ask someone to invest in your technology and to use your technology to manage certain aspects of their company. So you’re asking them to invest in you and your company. And how do you see the bottom line, not just on your products, but on all of the aspects of remote work? There’s so many big CEOs today, big name CEOs are saying back to the office or else, and it’s like they got blinders on or something or they’re living in an alternative reality. Yeah, that just doesn’t make sense with what we have learned. What? What you’ve learned. What I’ve learned. They haven’t learned yet.  

Adam Riggs [00:20:31] Yeah.  

Frank Cottle [00:20:31] How do you bring this bottom line issue to a company that has to answer to their shareholders?    

Adam Riggs [00:20:36] Yeah. Like all companies do. And even if you’re a nonprofit, you know, you’ll have a board of directors and you’ll have contributors that you need to answer to. So there are always stakeholders. It’s not it’s not surprising that in the last two and a half years, we’ve we’ve experienced again, according to Professor Bloom out of Stanford, you know, if you look at the trajectory of remote work from from 1965, which is the first year that they had data up to 2019 as one period of time. And then from 2020 through the present, we have experienced in terms of rate of change, we’ve experienced, you know, decades growth in a few years time. So it’s not surprising that many leaders are struggling with they’re either uncomfortable or confused or, you know, some combination. I believe that when a leader or when the leadership of a company says, everybody come back to work and we’re not discussing it anymore. They’re they’re making an assessment that’s based on a very incomplete set of alternatives, because for them, the pandemic period forced them into a technology stack, which was never meant to replace what the pandemic forced us to replace, which is the physical office. So they are unaware that technology can actually deliver something better than remote work, which is calendar, invitation after calendar, invitation after calendar, invitation each one with a separate link, which are all of which are disconnected from one another. And as a result, make the person who’s using this technology feel disconnected from their colleagues.  

Adam Riggs [00:22:28] So the benefits to the ROI I question, you know, it’s it goes beyond, you know, managing the real estate, reducing the real estate footprint, reducing the environmental footprint, all of which are good. It actually should start with the well-being of the employees. Are employees that are happy, that are more engaged, that are able to have a better balance at work, are going to do better work. And as a result, the customers and the and the, you know, the beneficiaries of that organization’s products and services, they’re going to get a better result. So talent acquisition and retention is really where it starts. Savings in real estate, savings in the environment, in the, you know, lower environmental impact. These are very important. But in those ways, you know, things change much more slowly, whereas for for people’s expectations about, you know, what does it mean to live a balanced life? I work really hard. And now I’ve learned in the last couple of years that I don’t need to go to my office five days a week in order to do my work. One of Professor Blum’s most interesting findings is that the average savings on a work from home day versus a commuting day is 70 minutes. 60 minutes a day? Mm hmm. What they have found up until now is that right now, about half of that is spent working more.  

Frank Cottle [00:24:00] Yes.   

Adam Riggs [00:24:00] And about half of that is spent on cooking time with your children, your own physical health, you know, family time, etc.. So it’s truly a win win win, but it is very different from the way it was in 2019. And it also challenges the managers and companies to to go beyond simply, you know, whatever tactics were working for them in 2019 when they were walking around the office. They have to, in a way, evolve their management styles and and and and do do their best to. Meet the employees where they are. And if they do that, then I think there’s savings available for everyone.  

Frank Cottle [00:24:47] Well, you know, it’s funny, there’s an old saying and I it I think was originally applied in the military that once you see the eyes of the enemy, all strategy changes and a lot of variations on that same.    

Adam Riggs [00:25:01] Yes. I like Mike Tyson’s version. Everyone has a plan till they get punched in the face. In the face.    

Frank Cottle [00:25:09] Absolutely. Or actually, you could say Evander Holyfield, everybody has a plan till they get their ear bitten. And, you know, that’s that’s in any number of ways. But it it is like that. And I think a lot of people really haven’t figured out that they’ve seen the eyes of the enemy here. So they don’t know what their new strategy is supposed to be. Yeah. Or all the other thing that we’ve all said. I’ve said it a. Thousand, 10,000 times. I’m sure you have to. And you’ve heard it a million times is. Oh, if I just had another hour of the day.  

Adam Riggs [00:25:44] Yeah.  

Frank Cottle [00:25:45] We have gained another hour in the day. We honestly how and if we can apply that to the productivity of work life balance both directions, not just one direction. Yeah. Then if you think about it, we look at economies and we say, oh, the US economy is only going to grow 0.04.02 this year. Well, if you add in an extra hour of the day to everybody. Half an hour of the date every month that economic growth actually look like. Yeah. So there’s a lot of things here. And you you mentioned sustainability. From a ecological point of view. There are some benefits there. I think they’re they’re over counted or we don’t have to commute anymore. Yeah, but you actually got to heat your whole house instead of going to the office, you know? So there’s some exchanges there that haven’t really been well defined. But I think in our hearts we say we know much better. We just don’t know much yet. Yeah. But that brings about if you look at office use today, on average, Mondays are used about 40%. Tuesdays on Wednesdays are used about 60 to 70%. Thursdays, about 50%. Fridays, fact about 40%.  

Adam Riggs [00:27:07] Yeah.    

Frank Cottle [00:27:08] Overall, you’ve got a 30, 35% loss in the utilization of office space, which was already only 60% efficient. Mm hmm. Okay. So that means that companies that get it will be the first ones to give up their leases. You did? We have. Overall and distribute their workforce. And I think I like distributed work more than remote work.  

Adam Riggs [00:27:39] Agreed.    

Frank Cottle [00:27:40] On remote about the way I work with my team. We’re close, we’re tight, we’re aligned. We’re just distributed.  

Adam Riggs [00:27:46] Yes.  

Frank Cottle [00:27:47] So we have a don’t put all eggs in one basket. Don’t put our brains on one building approach and we think we do better by that. But when you you you look at this core cities that are commuter dependent. New York is a perfect example. London is another perfect example. They’re commuter dependent cities. When the commuters start coming in, that really affects the city.    

Adam Riggs [00:28:15] Yes.  

Frank Cottle [00:28:16] They’re not doing their laundry downtown anymore. They’re doing it out by their house. They’re not buying lunch. They’re not doing anything. There’s a reduction in marketplace. No. And office use. And as companies start changing the commitment to new office space, that’s going to leave a lot of vacancy in the cities.  

Adam Riggs [00:28:37] Absolutely.  

Frank Cottle [00:28:38] Especially cities repurposing themselves or redesigning themselves into the future of work to fit this new model. How do you see that happening?  

Adam Riggs [00:28:49] Yeah, I mean, I’m very interested in this side of it, although I’m not a commercial real estate expert. But it’s easy to see from the research that that the work from home or the distributed workforce, the implications of distributed workforce have huge will have a huge potential impact on commercial rents, on commercial real estate values, on the tax receipts, on the tax receipts that the that the municipalities collect when the values of the real estate goes down, when the values go down, the real estate becomes, you know, less productive from a tax base viewpoint for the for the cities that, you know, that rely on that revenue. So I think there’s going to have to be an evolution in the way the tax bases are calculated and in the way in people’s expectations about the contribution of commercial real estate to the tax base of a of a municipality or a city. Again, I’m not an expert on commercial real estate, but there is a there’s a big corollary piece of corollary, you know, thread of research that part of the work from home research is about the benefits to the company and the benefits to the to the employees and the effect on work. But there’s another big vector of research that’s that’s about this question of real estate.  

Frank Cottle [00:30:13] Well, you know that that’s true. And used New York as a good example. There are sections in New York where when the commuters leave that section, the town is a little bit dead financial because a good example of that, I would say that it’s pretty simple repurposing. Yeah, the reason people live in the suburbs, they can’t afford to live in the city. So as the use of commercial space goes down, that creates space availability to be repurposed to residential, which drives the cost of residential down.  

Adam Riggs [00:30:54] Yeah. Well, you know, it goes back to Jane Jacobs and the death and life of the great American city. And the idea of mixed use, which is for for her in New York, was a big part of the story. I think that when you’re talking about converting commercial buildings, you know, the building code has a lot to say about what you’re able to do in New York, for example, bedrooms have to have windows. Might even be the bathrooms after that windows, too. I’m not I’m not exactly sure. But I mean, compare that to like the footprint of a big downtown financial district or midtown, you know, footprint of a of a commercial building that might be several hundred feet in each direction, square or rectangle with a ton of interior space. And it’s difficult to to see how they’re going to to get residential space out of that. So only a percentage of the available, what we’ll call like low performing commercial space can actually be converted to residential. And that’s something that the big architecture and interior design firms are thinking about very carefully.  

Frank Cottle [00:32:00] We chat with those folks all the time and design and the changes need to be made. You mentioned changing the tax code. I’ll I’ll make a comment. I think it would be easier to change the building code than the tax code.  

Adam Riggs [00:32:13] Maybe so.  

Frank Cottle [00:32:15] Because they want the tax money and they can’t get it unless they change the building code. Yeah. And time will tell how that work works itself out. Or time will tell if a new form of commuting is created that allows for. US to grow into that space commercially and and use it as we have. But, you know, we talk about commuting and virtual offices and this and that. I can’t think of any of that without thinking about the metaverse. Yeah, we were promoting the concept of Virtual Reality Office in back in 2000, 16, 17, 18 in that period, saying this is on the way, the technology is there. This is the next one of the next generations of office. Yeah. Which we always use the term office saying we think it’s an activity, not a place. We believe that. And we’ve always believed also that there’s no such thing as an occupant. There are only travelers. Mhm. So how do you address your business model towards the metaverse? If you think the metaverse is even has merit relative to the conventional models that we’re seeing today, what position do you see in this evolution going on and do you all end up? Working inside of the multiverse as we work inside of our computers today. You know, when I started business, we used to handwrite letters and mail them. Yeah, that. We don’t do that anymore. For good reason. We found a better way. Do you think the metaverse is going to offer us better ways?  

Adam Riggs [00:34:02] Well, for me and I think for a lot of people, the word metaverse is is a bit.  

Frank Cottle [00:34:09] It’s like virtual office.  

Adam Riggs [00:34:11] Yeah. Yeah.    

Frank Cottle [00:34:12] Maybe it’s like different definitions.  

Adam Riggs [00:34:14] Yeah, I think it’s it’s on it’s on a spectrum between confusing and polluted, maybe. I mean, there is nothing wrong with the idea that virtual reality can provide entertainment opportunities, can provide, you know, technical training opportunities, can provide, you know, compact, you know, travel simulations. Like all of these things are interesting. And there are plenty of there are plenty of customers for things like that. Once the technology gets, I think, to a better place than where it is now. But when it comes to work, I mean, work is really a different category because work is you know, it’s for for many of us, it’s, you know, it’s eight plus hours a day, five days a week or more. Some for some people, it’s 10 hours a day. And first of all, just at the base level, the idea of of wearing anything at all for that much time, if you don’t absolutely have to, it’s hard to make peace with. So our technology works with the software and hardware that’s built into, you know, to the laptops that that people have already. And I think that built in hardware, like, I’m not wearing any earphones or anything like that, you know, I’m interacting with you here. This software is working wonderfully well and we start with that set of hardware and software to deliver our experience.  

Adam Riggs [00:35:39] So I think the metaverse as an idea still has promise again in certain categories, but professional experiences that that are not compact, that are open ended. It’s very hard to to to see anything encouraging about, you know, a requirement that in order to work with your colleagues, you’re going to have to wear this device or you’re going to have to have a special camera and microphone set up and 20 microphones in your. Yeah. Around your desk or something like that. I mean these are not this is not appealing and it’s also not necessary, like you pointed out, that, you know, used to write letters professionally and now you don’t need to. I mean, the idea that there’s a piece of hardware out there that’s going to unlock the future, that a future that cannot possibly be unlocked without that hardware is something that, you know, people should be skeptical of.

Frank Cottle [00:36:37] Well, I know you got to be careful when you say that, because I started my first businesses without computers.    

Adam Riggs [00:36:43] Yeah.    

Frank Cottle [00:36:45] You know, the little IBM typewriters were just fine. Yeah. So we’ve, we’ve moved so far. I don’t personally want to place any limitation on where we might go in the. Yeah. I personally put on a headset for a couple of days and lived in the. The Metaverse. With a company over in Europe for a couple of days. And the worst part of my experience was I spilled the coffee all over my desk because I didn’t know where I was.  

Adam Riggs [00:37:19] Well, I don’t. That doesn’t sound like that’s so bad. If that’s the worst thing I know.  

Frank Cottle [00:37:24] I can do that anyway.  

Adam Riggs [00:37:25] Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You don’t need the technology to spill your coffee. We do it all the time.  

Frank Cottle [00:37:30] With your assessment? For two reasons. First is that I have a hard time staying glued to a computer screen for an hour period. I actually have in my own daily schedule a ten minute break between every meeting and I get up and walk around, not just go to the restroom or something. I get up, I go outside, stretch, I move around and then I come back to do it on my next stint. Yeah, I have to do that or I get all cranky. The real thing is, and this is hard even for you and I, we’re used to all this video. We’re used to everything. We’re used to creating with that map. But we’ve created a good relationship personally. We’re used to that. But in business or in all aspects of life. Nonverbal communications. Are critical to really knowing someone or really knowing what someone is thinking or how to act and interact with them properly, especially in a group setting. Yeah. You and I would read a one on one meeting differently than we would read a conference room meeting or a board room meeting differently than we would read an audience if we were standing on a podium. Yep. Okay. And the ability to read your audience through the person that you’re interacting with, through not just your verbal skills, but your nonverbal skills is substantially limited by flat screens, by metaverse, whatever. These are limitations that we have to overcome. Not just through technology.  

Adam Riggs [00:39:15] Yeah.  

Frank Cottle [00:39:16] So I’m wondering how we’ll be able to do that. I don’t know the answer to that.  

Adam Riggs [00:39:20] Yeah.  

Frank Cottle [00:39:22] Next quest, the next generation quest. Another holographic elements that we’ll be considering, if that’s as that is really perfected, which it will be, whether that becomes the bridge that’s built or not, I don’t know. But that’s something that has to be considered as we go towards the future at work is also.  

Adam Riggs [00:39:46] Agreed.  

Frank Cottle [00:39:48] Well, and I’m I’m so grateful to you for sharing your thoughts with us today. You’ve done a whole bunch of cool stuff you really have. And I’m I will say I’m a fan of what you’re doing with Frame of Mind. I like its organizational workflow structure better than I like trying to replicate an architect floor plan and plugging people in offices. We think it’s a better way to work. It’s much more spontaneous, and I’m going to make you send me a check or something after this meeting, because I’ve been plugging you through the whole meeting. But that’s not my intent. It’s it’s a genuine admiration for what you’ve done.  

Adam Riggs [00:40:30] Well, thank you very much. On behalf of our team, you know, we work very hard. We we are really committed to design both graphic design and interaction design in our software. We we believe a lot can be achieved through better design. And and we try to build something that’s flexible enough to to support many different kinds of organizations and all of their preferences for the way work is done inside their organization. It’s not going to be the same. And part of what we want is flexible tools, what we all want. I mean, out of out of our toolboxes for the tools to be flexible enough that that we can make our office in our image, so to speak.  

Frank Cottle [00:41:08] Well, we really appreciate it and just want to see you keep leading us into the future of work.  

Adam Riggs [00:41:12] I will do my best. Thank you.    

Frank Cottle [00:41:14] Thank you. Take care.  

Adam Riggs [00:41:16] My pleasure.