E999: ROOM CEO & Co-founder Brian Chen is building phone booths for the modern office, shares insights on maximizing open floor plans, partnering with Calm to reduce stress at work, maintaining capital efficiency as a hardware startup

This Week in Startups

Jason Calacanis

Technology

4.4 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 8 November 2019

⏱️ 52 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

0:53 Jason intros Brian Chen
1:15 Brian demos ROOM’s collaboration with Calm
2:42 How did ROOM get their room.com domain name?
3:49 Upside & downside of open floor plans
5:52 Why ROOM manufactures the product in Indiana (for US distribution) & Portugal (for European distribution) as opposed to China
13:47 How did Brian convince VCs to invest in his DTC furniture business
18:13 What Brian thinks about ROOM’s defensibility
21:20 ROOM’s case studies with Density
26:20 How does Brian keep ROOM so capital efficient?
31:28 How does ROOM ventilate their booths?
34:58 Will ROOM raise another round or continue building off profitability?
36:49 What will ROOM’s next products be?
40:05 What would a Jason themed booth look like?
44:01 Alternative solutions for manipulating open floor plans

Transcript

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0:53.0	Hey everybody, welcome to this week and startups on the program today is Brian Chen.
0:56.8	He is the CEO and co-founder of Room.com, which makes phone booths. You make phone boots, that's what you do, Brian. That's right, soundproof
1:06.2	fun booths. And most people would look at this and say, is this a technology business? Is this like a great idea for a startup? But you and I were
1:14.9	talking because I noticed that you partnered with com.com to make a signature crossover.
1:22.3	Limited edition collaboration.
1:24.0	So you made a phone booth with the Com logo on it.
1:27.0	What else does it do?
1:29.0	It has smoked glass.
1:30.0	We're looking at it here, so it's a phone booth. Yeah so so first of all I guess the phone
1:35.4	booth ships flat assembles on site it's designed to give a little bit of
1:39.5	peace and quiet in the open floor plan and the calm collaboration the design of the booth is inspired
1:46.4	by calm's nature imagery the frosted door gives visual privacy because it would be a
1:51.6	little bit weird if you were meditating inside and people
1:54.2	would see you.
	...

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