What if you could step into a virtual office where your team feels just as connected and productive as in a real one? Join us for an exclusive conversation with Cliff Pollan, co-founder of Willow, and uncover how spatial computing is reshaping the future of collaboration and community building. Learn how Willow's immersive platform is transforming team dynamics by simulating physical spaces, offering a more engaging experience compared to traditional tools like Slack, Teams, or Zoom. Hear firsthand success stories from organizations like Landmark and a U.S. government department, illustrating the revolutionary potential of virtual spaces for training and collaboration.
In this episode, Cliff also delves into the cognitive science behind spatial awareness and its impact on productivity in virtual workspaces. Discover Willow's thoughtful design ethos, with features like shared workspaces, quiet zones, and collaboration areas, all aimed at enhancing user experience. We also explore the future of virtual workspaces, including the role of avatars and the complexities of hybrid work post-pandemic. Key integrations with platforms such as Zoom, Atlassian, Slack, Miro, Mural, and Google Workspace are highlighted, showcasing how Willow enriches virtual collaborations. Don’t miss out on this fascinating look into the future of work and the incredible innovations driving it forward.
What if you could step into a virtual office where your team feels just as connected and productive as in a real one? Join us for an exclusive conversation with Cliff Pollan, co-founder of Willow, and uncover how spatial computing is reshaping the future of collaboration and community building. Learn how Willow's immersive platform is transforming team dynamics by simulating physical spaces, offering a more engaging experience compared to traditional tools like Slack, Teams, or Zoom. Hear firsthand success stories from organizations like Landmark and a U.S. government department, illustrating the revolutionary potential of virtual spaces for training and collaboration.
In this episode, Cliff also delves into the cognitive science behind spatial awareness and its impact on productivity in virtual workspaces. Discover Willow's thoughtful design ethos, with features like shared workspaces, quiet zones, and collaboration areas, all aimed at enhancing user experience. We also explore the future of virtual workspaces, including the role of avatars and the complexities of hybrid work post-pandemic. Key integrations with platforms such as Zoom, Atlassian, Slack, Miro, Mural, and Google Workspace are highlighted, showcasing how Willow enriches virtual collaborations. Don’t miss out on this fascinating look into the future of work and the incredible innovations driving it forward.
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Speaker 1:
Hey everyone, fascinating discussion and guest today around virtual spaces that feel like real places. What's next for collaboration and community with Willow Cliff? How are you?
Speaker 2:
I'm great, evan, great to be with you today. Thanks.
Speaker 1:
Great to have you here, Really excited about your mission and vision so interesting. I gave Willow a try and I'm really intrigued Before excited about your mission and vision so interesting. I gave Willow a try and I'm really intrigued Before all that. Maybe introduce yourself and what is the mission or the vision at Willow Sure.
Speaker 2:
I'm Cliff Pollan. I'm the co-founder of Willow. I co-founded with a colleague, Philip Caesar, who's based in Munich, Germany, and I'm on the east coast of the United States. The vision is pretty simple that there is an enormous opportunity to help people and teams and communities to thrive, and by using the concepts of spatial computing and a visual sort of interface, we can accomplish some pretty great things. That may be surprising to many.
Speaker 1:
Well, it is a surprise and a delight to use WeLo, but maybe describe a little bit about the application you've built the environment. We don't have a live demo, but this is not your Slack or your Teams or your Zoom. No disrespect to those great applications. You've taken a different approach.
Speaker 2:
We have and it's complementary to those approaches. So I want to be clear that we think integrating with them is an important piece of making this type of spatial computing successful, bringing your current tool set to it. So the concept is, at some level, pretty simple. We've basically created a visual space Thank you for sharing that and the concept is that you know the old a picture is worth a thousand words. A picture is worth a thousand words.
Speaker 2:
Looking and seeing your colleagues around you, being able to walk over to where they're sitting, gives us an enormous opportunity to sort of have that sense that we are together and that visually we're taking all of that information in. So being able to do that in a very simple form and by simple form I mean on any web browser having a sort of physical representation of space and putting yourself in that space can accomplish the sense of both practically and sort of cognitively being together. And then we can talk about some of the applications there. But a virtual office where our teams can work together, a workshop where we're breaking out and coming back together, those types of things are patterns that we know and we take those physical patterns and we basically have visualized them.
Speaker 1:
It's a fantastically interesting approach and there have been some attempts at this in different ways over the years. Virtual communities I go back to Second Life. Yes, I'm that old. I had a blast in those communities. Of course, gaming this is very familiar. But how do you see yourself separated about the more modern peers out there? What's your unique sort of elevator pitch here?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, I think the unique piece is how do you do the visual look at this in a way that's both practical and engaging? So the first piece is it has to give that feeling of being real, but not too real, that you're trying to replicate exactly what a physical space is and have a virtual space help to guide you into how you're interacting. So just on what you're showing there, I'll point out to people there are stairs going up to different levels.
Speaker 1:
The rooms are more obvious.
Speaker 2:
So the first thing we've tried to do is create a visual space that is both engaging but takes the core concepts of visual and thought to make that a place where people are both comfortable and it works for them.
Speaker 1:
Fantastic, and you talk a lot about not just collaboration but community building. Not an easy thing to deliver online, but very powerful. How do you build a sense of community? Any success stories, examples of communities you're building?
Speaker 2:
Yeah, so what we've seen there. And let me step back for a second in trying to bring people into this visual world, because we've heard so much about the metaverse and various pieces of that. Partially, I think there's two things. I'm old enough and I ask this question often when was the first video call?
Speaker 1:
Great question. It's in internet history. I can't even. It's like when was your first phone call. You know, you just can't remember.
Speaker 2:
So the first video call was in 1964. I was there. I'll give away my age I was eight years old and it was at the New York State Fair the World's Fair, rather, in New York and in Bell Labs they were making video calls. So we're about 60 odd years later and the video call has now become the way that we think we want to collaborate. It's been great. Zoom is a great partner of ours. Respect for all the video calls, respect for all the video calls. But we need a different medium to collaborate as we've come more virtual. So when we're talking about the time to do this, Evan, I think the reason the time is right is that the pandemic at least has us thinking differently and straining as to how does this work, straining as to how does this work, and while the quote back to office and all of those debates are there, practically, it's time for another sort of leap, just like we went from DOS interfaces to Windows interfaces. We're graphical people and that tells a big story.
Speaker 2:
On the community side, we've had several big success stories where companies are, or online communities are, basically chat and then response, response, but we don't bring them in for a what might you think of as the virtual community center where we all can get together. We can break out. Some of us can co-work, we can do an ask me anything sort of session. We can send people off to experts. We can bring our champions in. So we have a number of our customers who are using this to create a different experience for people, where they both can see what's around them, have agency and bring that together.
Speaker 2:
We've done that well. There's a company called Landmark which has trained over 3 million people and had a thing in the box over 30 years. They use us in their cafe. We have we have our a part of the US government that actually builds community and educates people that are going to go overseas and creates a community for them to interact. So there's a number of great examples of those types of sort of online communities. A whole set in Sweden that's using it as they try and work on climate initiatives and open space people if you've ever done an open space exercise, are big users. So all of that. Those are just a handful of sort of examples of taking those large communities and creating a much more intimate, engaged setting where people get to interact and talk to each other and really have both productive and enjoyable time together.
Speaker 1:
Wonderful. Well, it's an amazing idea, practical idea. And what's the typical audience? Are you going after these large global enterprises as well as small businesses or brands who might want their own communities? How do you see the different, diverse needs of those kind of constituents, customers?
Speaker 2:
Yeah. So what we're seeing and let me is the easiest part for people is organizations in the case of an office, that are our virtual by their nature and don't have a physical space and are smaller. Those are easy early adopters because they see this and they go. Yes, my people are all over the country, they're all over the world. I want to bring them together. I don't have a place to do that. I'm on Slack, I'm on Zoom, maybe on Google Meet, but they don't have a home where we can freely interact. So those are great sort of early adopters, or we'll find pockets of those in larger companies.
Speaker 2:
On the community side, it's really pretty. In one sense, it's wide open. One of our corporate customers has a large community in the robotics area and they're bringing together their partners and their. At the same time, we'll have what I call communities of interest, not sponsored by a corporation, but people who have been together. It's a vibrant community. They either want to have some co-working time together, they want to hold what were traditional, maybe workshops or things in here. So, again, those well-formed communities are good prospects for us as well. And, to your point, you're trying to separate. We have large companies, have used us. It's a much harder process both for approval to get a new tool in, both for approval to get a new tool in.
Speaker 1:
So we tend to be careful as a company how much time you invest in those, because the barriers to entry these days are much higher. That's just a practical issue way dealing with small groups. And look at them now In terms of technology integration and how difficult or straightforward is it to turn up a community, to get started?
Speaker 2:
And if you are an SME and it's the kind of business, how, of pre-built spaces that are diverse and people just grab one of those, they can easily come in and bring their colleagues in low. The big thing I say is you have to learn how to move yourself, which takes most people about a minute to figure out how to move from room to room and knock on a door and those things. Let me just say these are very simple avatars and they're not walking around. You just click and you're in a room, and that speed has been incredibly important for most of the use cases. So onboarding is pretty simple. Having a space, it's always there and so making it happen either for communities or for a virtual office is very straightforward. To get people up and running, we obviously have a lot of sort of tools and things to just help them get comfortable. Fantastic, evan.
Speaker 2:
I'll add one other thing. There you do things like you name the rooms. You can put resources in the rooms. So one of the things I just want to add in getting people, one thing we can do virtually is we can project information to people. We used to do that. We used to quote have the war room, do not erase, and there was sets of information about a project. We can radiate and project that information in a space. So, whether it's your OKRs or whether in a room it's a project room with the relevant resources, or you can mouse over my avatar you can see my schedule for the day. You can see the JIRA tickets that I may be working on. You can know whether I'm having a good or bad day by looking at my avatar and I may say I'm really tired today or I'm feeling under the weather. Just projecting that information is incredibly valuable for how we interact with our colleagues.
Speaker 1:
Wonderful. What sort of feedback have you gotten from members? You must have lots of interesting stories and anecdote. And how do you take on that feedback to kind of build it into the product and evolve it over time? You guys must be moving pretty quickly.
Speaker 2:
It's, first of all, wonderful because something as simple as this hearing people say it's working and they're amazed that it is doing what it's doing Let me give a couple of examples there and then talk about how we take the feedback. What we hear from people is I didn't expect it to be this powerful. All of a sudden, I come in and I'm feeling connected because I can see everybody around me. The worst part, let's say, of a Zoom breakout room is it feels like you're being put in isolation and you're put there and then yanked back out. Just as an example. People just move themselves. They can see everybody around them. Their colleagues are there to get and give support. So they say that it dramatically changes how I feel.
Speaker 2:
By the way, there's cognitive science. There's the connected part of our brain where we do the best work and when we have spatial awareness, that fires off, and I could take people through the science of that. So what we hear from people is we are really able to feel more comfortable with our colleagues. We're there and it's easy to support them and understand what's going on. And if we have to rally we can are that the feedback comes in all sorts of forms. They can drop into our office anytime which they do, and they give us like live feedback and come in and we talk to them and then we are basically share our roadmap, get their input and are constantly iterating and, you know, and bringing new features. We just released three or four critical features today to our users based on their feedback, and that, again, is just exciting when you're getting that feedback.
Speaker 1:
Very fun Talk about some of the partnerships you mentioned. Zoom mentioned lots of integrations. I believe Zoom's an investor as well as a partner. Is that right? How does that relationship work?
Speaker 2:
We're not quote exclusive with them by any means, but we get to work closely. So in Zoom, we've built a Zoom app that people can use with Zoom and that app basically takes a lot of our functionality and sits it on top of Zoom. So that's been a wonderful piece. So that's been a wonderful piece and we're part of a bundle called Essential Apps where those are available about 10 great apps to people who fit a class of about 5 to 10 million Zoom users.
Speaker 2:
With Atlassian, we built an integration into Atlassian, but overall we integrate well with Slack, where you can use the Slack messaging while you're in Willow, and our room resources, where you can put content. We can take any URL so it could be a Microsoft document. On OneDrive, we've done great integrations with Miro and Mural, those whiteboards which are so relevant, as well as with Google, both Google Workspace and Google Calendar. So our vision is those tools. You want to bring them to your workplace or to your community and we have worked to do, I think, really good integrations, to start opening More to do there. But all of that is in place already.
Speaker 1:
Well done and talk about your design ethos. It's really clever and appealing. Interesting who's the mastermind behind the graphic design interface? It's really fun.
Speaker 2:
It's taken a lot. So our concept is that we have a thing of a space and then we have rooms that are, and we think a lot about different rooms. Is this a shared workspace? Is it a quiet workspace? Is it a guest? Is it the water cooler? Is it the outdoor fire pit? Is it a collaboration room? So, having different types of rooms, and we use those concepts to try and put those together when we're building different spaces.
Speaker 2:
And then the avatars are rich but simple. It's a picture in a circle but associated with your avatar can be your calendar, the work you're doing, your work profile. I hate email. I love getting messages on Slack. I'm slow in the morning, I'm good in the evening, whatever those are. We're projecting that as part of your avatar, which signals a lot of information to people. We have a wonderful designer and team that has worked on that, amy and Stefano, two people who have collaborated to both do the spaces and a bunch of the UI design, to both do the spaces and a bunch of the UI design, and it really the piece I can say is it's fun in a business and practical way and it works, but it's very rich.
Speaker 1:
Wow, it's fantastic. You have an interesting bird's eye view of the industry. What are you seeing? As far as the return to work, or hybrid work, it's been still a bit of a mess post-pandemic. I don't think any two companies have the same policies. But what do you see? What do you hear in the field on what people are settling on, or are we? Are we just going to have this really strange fragmented world for the foreseeable future?
Speaker 2:
I think we're going to have a bit of a fragmented world for the next couple of years. This is a big change and I think the pandemic obviously opened up our eyes faster than before that we can do this. But for many people it felt like a loss of control, and the fact that it didn't work the way they were used to working caused some issues, and we've seen some people that were very enthusiastic about remote work pull back from that and I think the pendulum's come back far. I think when we build these solutions out like we are doing, you know, I think we're going to see Google Glasses or Apple Vision Pro or Meta. It's going to take some time, but this spatial interface, these rich interfaces, are going to help.
Speaker 2:
As people who have worked in these environments see it. We will bring it back and people will be taking advantage of the fact of a workforce that could be anywhere work-life balance so people aren't doing some of the commutes all the time that they need to do, and we'll be respecting climate, which is a big issue. So I think there are things, evan, that will bring us back, and that spatial computing does so many positive things through presence and other pieces that people are going to get it. But we're in a multi-year, you know two to ten year transition, as people sort of see it. It starts to work and it gets embraced.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, big changes ahead and you know, this whole idea of virtual you know in 3D or VR, ar environments hasn't taken off despite best efforts recently and over the last decades. Know, like video games or collaboration tools, but do you think there is a desire to work in a real virtual environment with glasses or goggles, or meta VRs, apple VRs it's just two science fiction at the moment.
Speaker 2:
I think it's solving a different problem than we're solving and I think we can solve our problem with today's tech, without any Google or Apple Vision Pro. There will be places where that eventually plays in, but what we're trying to say is you're with everybody else, you can see them, you can start to interact. It's going to change how you're doing and you can wear these glasses and I think that works. I know it works, we've seen it work and I think that's the natural bridge. I think that's the natural bridge, the metaverse piece, I think, if you want to go to the top of how teams can thrive, whether those are communities or whether those are internal teams, I think we're seeing people just get it once they're in it. It's just, it's a mystery to them that it could work.
Speaker 2:
But to your point, I don't want to go too far the gamers and the people who have done this. This is an easy association. Those of us who may not have, you know, we may have done Second Life, but we're not. You know, we are a little bit different because we're not using some of those experiences. Bit different because we're not using some of those experiences. We are using Google Maps, we are using Zillow. These are somewhat spatial applications. We're using Yelp to find a good restaurant near us. So people are starting to get used to the fact that spatial is important in terms of those types of applications, including weather apps when we're getting hurricanes and tornadoes, and those things.
Speaker 1:
Yes, more of or less of those. More wheel of spaces, please, and we actually met in person at a conference. I heard you speak. Do you think every conference should have a virtual space or virtual community community surrounding it like a wheel of space?
Speaker 2:
I do. We could do so much to bring other people in and to open up these opportunities and also to be that much more quote diverse in our thinking. So we traveled to Florida. It was a great conference. We get to do some things there. But what happens if there were more people that could interact in those discussions and break out, and even if they just did their piece online? What I want to be clear about is hybrid is hard, really hard. But thinking about some separate tracks that could benefit from the speakers and the pieces, but maybe they get to process afterwards as a group what did Evan share? What did Cliff share on that panel? And then let's have some good, interactive, not a broadcast with three questions afterwards. Let's let people dive in and sort of break in smaller groups and come back together. I'm a big proponent that we can rock that if we set the right approach to it.
Speaker 1:
Well, that's a mic drop moment, so thanks so much for sharing the vision, amazing mission and yeah, I'll have to immerse myself in a wheel of space soon, now that I have a little time over the summertime. Look forward to signing up. It's you have a premium service right, so there's no barriers to joining.
Speaker 2:
Exactly, exactly. Thank you so much, evan. I look forward to seeing you when we low police drop in and continuing the conversations.
Speaker 1:
I'll do it and thanks everyone. Thanks for watching and pretty popular episode. Lots of people interested in this topic, so take care. Bye-bye, bye.
