How Your Office Will Change Post-COVID-19 w/Cory Clarke at RXR Realty

09/21/20 • 29 min

The IoT Unicorn Podcast with Pete Bernard

In this episode of The IoT Unicorn Podcast, Cory Clarke, VP of Product Management and Strategic Partnerships at RXR Realty, discusses some of the IoT solutions his company is using to facilitate a safer return to the workplace during COVID-19.

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00:00 Pete Bernard: Cory, thanks for joining us, appreciate you taking the time. And I've done a little bit of looking at your LinkedIn profile and kind of understanding where RXR is at, but maybe you can kinda give us a little introduction about who you are and what your story is, and then we can talk a little bit about what you're doing.

00:19 Cory Clarke: Sure. I'm Cory Clarke. I lead product at RXR's digital labs. RXR is a New York real estate company, we own around 26 million square feet, 20 or 30 buildings, many really iconic ones like the stair at Lee High or the Helmsley Building. And yeah. Before RXR, I worked at WeWork for a couple of years, leading their Powered by We Group and Powered by We Technology. That was the technology they were building for enterprise clients to improve the experience of the workplace. And always kind of been interested in the overall workplace experience, actually I trained as an architect.

01:03 S1: Yeah, I see that.

01:05 CC: Seven years of architecture school, and then got entranced by technology and started working in software development and never really looked back. I did a lot of work for companies doing intranets and a lot of employee enablement, and really got interested in how technology can transform the employee experience, and that's what led me to WeWork and ultimately to RXR.

01:29 S1: Yeah. Well, it's interesting, you mentioned that... I talk to a lot of folks, and it seems every company is turning into some kind of technology company, or every company needs to have an element of software technology as part of its strategy. There's no such thing as a kind of a pure play, non-tech company anymore.

01:47 CC: Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. Every financial company is a technology company, I think every real estate company is eventually gonna be a technology company.

01:55 S1: Yeah. I was actually... A kind of a side bar, but I was futzing around with these bluetooth connected water systems over my long weekend made by Orbit. And Orbit makes all these little sprinkler googahs. And... So now they have these Bluetooth connected googahs, and they have an app that you download, and it's pretty cool, but you can tell at Orbit at some point the switch went off to say, "We're not just a sprinkler company, now we need to be a tech company with sprinklers and we need to write apps and we need to do stuff." So I suspect realtors like RXR and other folks are like, "Yeah, we're doing this thing, but now we really need the tech to take it to the next level." And...

02:37 CC: Yeah. I think the real estate world's kind of where I feel like where retail was maybe in the late 90s, early aughts, where like the... Brick-and-mortar was making this huge transition to online and real estate really in the last five, 10 years has gotten a ton of investment in PropTech and trying to make that same transition into a more... Like... Technology enabled services.

03:02 S1: Yeah. No, I can imagine. I asked you this before we started recording, but... You're kind of... You said you were a East Coast, you're an East Coast transplant.

03:14 CC: Yes.

03:15 S1: Or you're a... You've acclimated to become an East Coaster. I'm from New Jersey myself, that's why when I saw the background in New York, I thought maybe you were East Coast-y. You consider yourself now the East Coast person.

03:28 CC: Yeah, I am naturalized... Naturalized.

03:31 S1: Naturalized, yes excellent.

03:32 CC: Yeah. I've been in New York City... There's definitely people that were born and bred here, but there's a lot of people that come here and never leave. And yeah...

03:43 S1: Awesome. Yeah, it's an incredible area. I was actually in Long Island this summer for a little bit and got the New York vibe there, so that was good.

03:52 CC: Yeah, it's definitely been interesting during this time. [chuckle]

03:56 S1: Yeah. Yeah, clearly. And speaking of crazy times... You guys are kind of right in the middle of a lot of big transformations going on, not only technologically from your business transforming, but obviously the world is transforming in the way we are being much more remote in what we're doing. And maybe you can share with us where does RXR see offices and office work sort of transforming and moving post-COVID?

04:29 CC: Yeah, and I think the... The phrase is, the reports of the office demise are greatly exaggerated. I don't see the office going away, but I do think it is gonna fundam...

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01:03 S1: Yeah, I see that.

01:47 CC: Yeah, yeah, it's interesting. Every financial company is a technology company, I think every real estate company is eventually gonna be a technology company.

03:02 S1: Yeah. No, I can imagine. I asked you this before we started recording, but... You're kind of... You said you were a East Coast, you're an East Coast transplant.

03:14 CC: Yes.

03:28 CC: Yeah, I am naturalized... Naturalized.

03:31 S1: Naturalized, yes excellent.

03:32 CC: Yeah. I've been in New York City... There's definitely people that were born and bred here, but there's a lot of people that come here and never leave. And yeah...

03:43 S1: Awesome. Yeah, it's an incredible area. I was actually in Long Island this summer for a little bit and got the New York vibe there, so that was good.

03:52 CC: Yeah, it's definitely been interesting during this time. [chuckle]

04:29 CC: Yeah, and I think the... The phrase is, the reports of the office demise are greatly exaggerated. I don't see the office going away, but I do think it is gonna fundam...

Previous Episode

Lessons Learned on a Submarine, and the Heroic Internet, with Rob Tiffany from Ericsson

In this episode of The IoT Unicorn Podcast, Rob Tiffany, VP and Head of IoT Strategy at Ericsson explores the development of 5G and LPWA technology for IoT solutions, what it looks like for Telco’s to be successful in the IoT space, and how the Internet is playing the hero during the uncertainty of the Covid-19 pandemic.

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00:00 Pete Bernard: Great, so Rob, thanks for joining us today on the Unicorn, and really appreciate you taking the time. I was going to start by asking you a couple things about what your role is currently at Ericsson, kinda how you got there. I know that you and I did work together at Microsoft years ago back in the Windows Mobile days.

00:24 Rob Tiffany: Woo hoo.

00:25 PB: Good times, good times.

00:25 RT: Those were good times. Yep, absolutely. [chuckle]

00:28 PB: Yes. I thin, I think you were... Let's see, when did you stop working for Windows Mobile, like 2008 or something? Or is that...

00:38 RT: Yeah. And certainly by 2010 or around that timeframe I took an architect role in another group and probably started spending more time on Azure. I was at Microsoft for 12 years and so the first half was Mobile, Windows Mobile, CEE, Windows Phone. Second half was Azure, Azure IoT. And you know what? We had some good times in the Windows Mobile days when it was just us and BlackBerry slugging it out. We were making... When things like Exchange ActiveSync was a big deal to people.

01:21 PB: That's right, that was a big deal.

01:24 RT: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then no doubt, when we rebooted and did Windows Phone 7 and 7.5 and all that, I used to do so many EBCs for mobility and you noticed a difference and you had to get really thick skin. [chuckle]

01:42 PB: Yes, yes, yes, I know. Well, I peeled off after six... I think, so I went on to Zune incubation, I did Kin and I did all kinds of weird phone things and went off into the wilderness for a while on that while everyone else finished up with Windows Phone, but...

02:00 RT: Oh my gosh.

02:01 PB: And I also noticed on your LinkedIn profile. So you went to SUNY Albany. Are you from that area originally or...

02:07 RT: You know what? I finished college on board a submarine, so when I was in the Navy driving subs I had what, maybe 30 or so hours to go to graduate, and so I've actually never set foot on the SUNY Albany campus...

02:26 PB: Oh, wild.

02:27 RT: But the military has programs with lots of different universities around the country and to show how old I really am, I was able to take college courses underway on the submarine using Pioneer LaserDiscs.

02:42 PB: Wow.

02:43 RT: For college instruction, if anybody remembers what that was. [laughter]

02:47 PB: Yeah, that is old school, that's old school.

02:50 RT: That is fully old school.

02:52 PB: I actually just dropped my daughter off at Bard, which is a little south of Albany, so I was just there like a week ago, so that's why I asked.

02:58 RT: Oh, okay.

02:58 PB: I saw that on your profile and I was like, "Oh, yeah." It's a cool area, the Adirondacks, the whole upstate New York thing is cool.

03:04 RT: I know. Absolutely. Yeah, I just dropped my daughter off at Arizona State last week.

03:09 PB: Yeah.

03:10 RT: It was a little warm down there.

03:11 PB: Yeah, I could imagine, I could imagine.

03:14 RT: To say the least. But you know what? I think everything started back then with submarines and teaching myself how to code and do databases, and when you think about IoT, you're just remoting information that you had on these local sensors and we were surrounded by sensors on the submarine. There's the obvious things like sonar and things like that and this higher frequency one to see what your depth is below the keel, but inside you had CO2 radiation, all kinds of gas sensors and things like that to make sure we were still alive, which was kind of a thing. [chuckle]

04:02 PB: Yeah, it's kind of important.

04:04 RT: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

04:06 PB: That's interesting. So you did the Microsoft thing and so you joined Ericsson a couple years ago, I think?

04:13 RT: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I did the Microsoft thing. I was recruited out of the Azure back when we were doing incubating Azure IT. There was that time... And actually Microsoft IoT stuff started in the embedded team with Intelligence System Service, but then I went to Hitachi actually to build an industrial IoT platform called Lumada, which was really interesting. But yes, I joined Ericsson a couple years ago. Up until recently, I split my time between Seattle and Stockholm. Normally I'd be in Kista, the Ericsson headquarters with the rest of ...

Next Episode

Exploring the 5G + AI + IoT Wave with Rene Haas of Arm

In this episode of The IoT Unicorn Podcast, Rene Haas, President Intellectual Property Group at Arm, discusses the development of edge devices and the 5G wave.

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00:00 PETE BERNARD: Rene, thanks again for joining us here on the IoT Unicorn. I was trying to remember the last time actually we saw each other face-to-face. That's something that we do these days. I think it was Barcelona 2019 or something. It was a while ago. But again, thanks for joining us today.

00:23 RENE HAAS: You are welcome. I wasn't sure if it was CES of 2020, but...

00:28 PETE BERNARD: It could be.

00:28 RENE HAAS: Gosh, you might be right. Barcelona, 2019. My gosh, over 18 months ago.

00:32 PETE BERNARD: Yeah, that was a long time ago. Well, CES 2020 was our last... It was kind of the last hurrah for events, although going to Vegas always has its potential infection rates of all sorts of things going on there, but... Not in that case, but... Cool, yeah, no, it's good to see you again, and we've known each other for a little while and worked on some interesting projects, so it was great to have you on the show, and obviously very timely with the DevSummit coming up and some recent news that we'll talk about as well. But maybe you can give us and the listeners a little background on your journey to where you're at as President of Arm IP.

02:07 RENE HAAS: So my role at Arm is I run the IP products group. Our acronym is IPG, Intellectual Property Products Group, and that's the sales marketing development of all of our products, GPUs, CPUs, NPUs for the markets that we serve, the client market, infrastructure market, automotive autonomous and IoT. I am in the Bay Area now, but I've had a fun journey at Arm. I have spent seven years at Arm, but only a few years in the Bay Area. I was in Shanghai, China for two years, and I was in the UK for three, living in London, commuting to Cambridge. And I just came back to the Bay Area at the beginning of 2020, and...

02:50 PETE BERNARD: Are you an original California person or what's your... Where is your home base?

02:54 RENE HAAS: I'm originally from Upstate New York. Yeah, I'm, originally from Upstate New York.

02:58 PETE BERNARD: Wow, cool.

02:58 RENE HAAS: My dad was a Xerox guy, so I was a son of a Xerox guy working in... He was working in Rochester, New York, which is where I grew up. And then I came out to California in the mid-1990s, and I've been here ever since.

03:12 PETE BERNARD: I'm a New Jersey person myself, so that's something we have in common, the Tri-state area. Although Rochester is pretty far up state there.

03:21 RENE HAAS: Serious snow country.

03:22 PETE BERNARD: Serious, yes. Good, good. Excellent. So you've been at Arm for a while then, and you also spent a little bit of time at Nvidia.

03:31 RENE HAAS: I did, I did. I'm gonna pre-fetch probably your next set of questions, but before I spent...

03:37 PETE BERNARD: No pun intended.

03:38 RENE HAAS: Seven years at Arm I was with Nvidia for seven years doing a number of different roles there, but primarily in the notebook graphics space, GPUs, as well as Arm-based CPUs that went into all different types of laptops including the very first Surface that was running Windows 8 on Arm.

04:00 PETE BERNARD: Yes, those were the days. I had one of those. A lot of us up in Redmond had one of those. [chuckle] Unfortunately, not a lot of the other people had them. That was the problem. [chuckle] But, so cool. So now sort of full circle, just to touch upon that topic, Nvidia and Arm. For you, it's kind of break out the old badge, I guess...

04:20 RENE HAAS: Yeah. It's something that came live last Monday. Obviously, the rumors had been out for a number of weeks, so some people were surprised, but some people were not so surprised when it finally was announced to everyone actually last Sunday. It was supposed to be on Monday, and then we pulled it forward to Sunday. We're actually very excited about it at Arm, we think it's a really, really amazing opportunity. Nvidia is an amazing company, has done some fantastic things over the years obviously. And Arm efforts around client and data center, autonomous and such. When we think about what's going on in the next wave of computing where everything is gonna be touching something that is around artificial intelligence, I think the opportunities for the two companies to be a combined entity in this new area of computing, the opportunities are somewhat limitless.

05:17 RENE HAAS: So we're quite excited. Me, on a personal level, sometimes when these M&A things [05:21] ____ talking to the company on either side, there's a lot of questions of, "Do I know these folks? And can we really und...