Pendo is a perfect example of a rapidly growing tech company that prioritizes employee happiness and team connectedness to drive company results. Pendo started as a five employee company working out of a co-working space in Raleigh, NC. Flash forward a few years later, Pendo is now over 170 employees located across Raleigh, Tel Aviv, San Francisco and NYC.

While their growth is a testament to their great product and team, their new distributed employee-base triggered a new challenge: How will Pendo continue to communicate effectively while growing as a distributed team?

Luckily for Pendo, employees already valued video as a more high fidelity form of communication than phone alone. However the company's previous video and meeting room technology had some significant shortcomings.

"One of the big problems we had for remote people is that it was hard to see who was talking when we had a crowd of four or more people in a room," shared Jeremy Smith, IT Manager at Pendo. When you can't see everyone fully, you're putting a major divide between the people in the room and the people on the call.

The other challenge was that it was extremely confusing to use. For example, Customer Success Manager Fanny Laufters would often arrive to a conference room ten or so minutes early just to make sure everything was set up to work properly.

Pendo needed a solution that was simple to use, consistent across all rooms, and gave employees and customers the best possible meeting experience.

Jeremy first heard about the Meeting Owl after Pendo CEO Todd Olson learned about it at a networking dinner. At first, Jeremy was a bit skeptical that the Meeting Owl would do everything it promised. In his words, "I reluctantly ordered one, just to try it out." When the Meeting Owl arrived, he installed it in one of the highly-used rooms for testing, and he was pleased at how easy it was to set up. "In less than two minutes I had the Meeting Owl ready to roll," Jeremy shared.

The Meeting Owl is a 360° video conferencing camera that combines the mic, camera and speaker into one device. It then sits in the center of the conference room table and uses audio and visual cues to automatically highlight and pan to different people in the room as they talk. The result for the remote people on the call is a more natural meeting experience that captures the most important components of the conversation.

Fanny recalls trying the Meeting Owl for the first time. She was both surprised and delighted when the Meeting Owl automatically highlighted either her or her colleague as they took turns talking. When Todd describes it in his words, "It seems to know who needs to be in view at what time, when to show that person, and it does that in a totally automated way."

Since the test, Pendo made the decision to standardize the Meeting Owl and add it to every conference room. "I knew that the technology that the Meeting Owl was providing was a lot better, and especially at the price point I couldn't beat it."

The Owl Labs team is incredibly honored to have Pendo as a customer. Their thoughtful approach to supporting all employees in every location is absolutely inspiring. Pendo's growth and success can be pinpointed to their team, culture, maniacal focus on the customer, and delightful appreciation for each other.

The Meeting Owl is just a teeny tiny part of the Pendo story, and we're honored to be a part of it.