More than a year into the coronavirus pandemic, early-stage startups across the world are re-inventing how we work. But founders aren’t flocking to build just another SaaS tool or Airtable copycat — they’re trying to disrupt the only thing possibly more annoying than e-mail: the work meeting.
On an episode of this week’s podcast, Equity hosts Alex Wilhelm, Danny Crichton and Natasha Mascarenhas discussed a flurry of funding rounds related to the future of work.
Rewatch, which makes meetings asynchronous, raised $20 million from Andreessen Horowitz, AnyClip got $47 million in a round led by JVP for video search and analytics technology, Interactio, a remote interpretation platform, landed $30 million from Eight Roads Ventures and Silicon Valley-based Storm Ventures, and Spot Meetings got Kleiner Perkins on board in a $5 million seed.
We connected the dots between these funding rounds to sketch out three perspectives on the future of workplace meetings. Part of our reasoning was the uptick of investment as mentioned above, and the other is that our calendars are full of them. We all agree that the traditional meeting is broken, so below you’ll find each of our arguments on where they go next and what we’d like to see.
- Alex Wilhelm: Faster information throughput, please.
- Natasha Mascarenhas: Meetings should be ongoing, not in calendar invites.
- Danny Crichton: Redesign meetings for flow.
Alex Wilhelm: Faster information throughput, please
I’ve worked for companies that were in love with meetings, and for companies where meetings were more infrequent. I prefer the latter by a wide margin. I’ve also worked in offices full-time, half-time and fully remote. I immensely prefer the final option.
Why? Work meetings are often a waste of time. Mostly you don’t need to align, most folks taking part are superfluous and as accidental team-building exercises they are incredibly expensive in terms of human-hours.
I am not into wasting time. The more remote I’ve been and the less time I’ve spent in less-formal meetings — the usual chit-chat that pollutes productive work time, making the days longer and less useful — the more I’ve managed to get done.
But I’ve been the lucky one, frankly. Most folks were still trapped in offices up until the pandemic shook up the world of work, finally giving more companies a shot at a whole-cloth rebuild of how they toil.
The good news is that CEOs are taking note. Chatting with Sprout Social CEO Justyn Howard this week, he explained how we have a unique, new chance to not live near where we work in 2021, but to instead bring work to where we live. He’s also an introvert, which meant that as a pair we’ve found a number of positives in some of the changes to how tech and media companies operate. Perhaps we’re a little biased.
A number of startups are rushing to fill the gap between the new expectations that Howard noted and our old digital and IRL realities.
Tandem.chat might be one such company. The former Y Combinator launch-day darling has spent its post-halo period building. Its CEO sent me a manifesto of sorts the other day, discussing how his company approaches the future of work meetings. Tandem is building for a world where communication needs to be both real-time and internal; it leaves asynchronous internal communication to Slack, real-time external communications to Zoom and asynchronous external chats to email. I agree, I think.
I have yet to fully immerse myself into what Tandem is building, but what matters more is that it wants to combine the ability to ambiently share what you’re currently working on, your state of focus, along with easy chats. A blend of the accessibility of real-world communications, the power of remote work in a physical sense and the ability to grok-at-a-distance the digital equivalent of someone wearing headphones at their desk when busy? Good.
The end-result of what Tandem, and I presume others are building, should be faster, lower-lift throughput of information inside of teams, while respecting our need to work over meet.
Natasha Mascarenhas: Meetings should be ongoing, not in calendar invites
I miss eavesdropping. As a journalist, one of the best ways for me to learn has been spending time surrounded by co-workers who are conducting high-profile interviews, pushing back on frustrating sources, and playing the game in real time. That sort of spontaneous convergence of ideas without the formality of an agenda or really a reason is more useful than any meeting really ever could be.
And remote work has essentially completely eliminated that entire, spur-of-the-moment knowledge transfer in one fell Zoom.
I’d love for the future of work to feel more like organized chaos — interruptions that don’t require the un-mute of a button — than a Calendar invite. It’s one of the many reasons I’m so interested in the concept of virtual HQs, a growing cluster of companies that want to create digital workspaces for distributed teams to live on, alongside Slack and Zoom. Broadly speaking, most virtual HQs look like Sims for the Enterprise, with different levels of gamification, productivity-plugins and aesthetics.
These platforms use spatial technology to get at the spontaneity dynamic I was referring to earlier. The technology allows users to only hear people within their nearby proximity, and get quieter as they “walk” away. This gives the feeling of a hallway bump-in and a quick eavesdrop.
The key tension here is how to become an app that is relevant enough to be used, but passive enough of an app to not feel like a burden. In the best-case scenarios, virtual HQs feel like the culture we have been missing through the pandemic. In the worst-case scenarios, virtual HQs feel like yet another information channel that you have to pay attention to. It’s imperative that any future work company that wants to take a slice of an employee’s workday figures out a way to keep it casual enough so people can actually be on the app for an entire workday without getting burnt out.
So far, teams from Uber, Apple, Stripe and Shopify use these workspaces to connect with each other (if you’re into the name-dropping game), as well as event organizers hosting one-off conferences or virtual meetups. Investors such as Sequoia, Battery Ventures and Menlo Ventures have poured millions into these bets, hoping one strikes gold.
But beyond this sector specifically, I think virtual HQs point toward a future of finding ways to limit the necessity and formality of meetings. Because, let’s face it: a big part of the point of meetings is that they bring you face to face with people you owe deliverables to, or vice versa. A successful conclusion to a meeting, beyond updates, is often more rapport and understanding between individuals. If that’s the truth, let’s not pretend otherwise and just make that camaraderie building an ongoing bit of the day, instead of a regularly scheduled small-talk scenario.
We don’t need to replace meetings — I’m not that inventive — but I do think we need to find ways to get the best parts of meetings out of talking boxes, and embed them throughout the day. Alright, all hands?
Danny Crichton: Redesign meetings for flow
When it comes to Silicon Valley disruption, no one seems focused on disrupting the very phenomenon that prevents the spark of innovative disruption in the first place: disruptions. I’m talking about the meetings, random calls, f’ing “desksides” and every other interaction with colleagues, hangers-on and ne’er-do-wells that break the flow and concentration of the modern knowledge worker, preventing them from actually doing work in the workplace.
Flow is the lifeblood of quality work, and yet, flow remains one of the lowest business priorities for most companies to cultivate. Meetings show up haphazardly on calendars, with no thought as to how a 30-minute call in the middle of the afternoon might actually disrupt almost all the depth work that needs to transpire in that period. It’s only gotten worse after the pandemic, with Zoom calls somehow being seen as some sort of lighter-weight substitute for in-person meetings. They’re not, and I am as uncreative and unproductive after a Zoom meeting as I was after huddling in a Huddle Room.
It’s time to rethink the concept of collaboration entirely. Alex is talking about asynchronous meetings and how to empower them, and Natasha is talking about hybrid workplaces, but let me be clear: The right angle to look at this situation is how to optimize meeting schedules for individual worker productivity.
Call it the “liquid meeting,” or something else, but I’d like my calendar to actually adapt based on my mood, what I am working on and what’s blocking me. When I am heads-down on a multi-hour work product to meet a deadline, I don’t want to have — much less be notified — that there are three meeting requests for 30 minutes from now. Instead, I want my calendar to intelligently adapt itself, pinning down moments to place these meetings when I don’t need to have deep concentration.
In my current setup, I just shut off Slack, email, texting and basically unplug to get work done since quite literally everything is a distraction from quality. A smarter product could analyze incoming requests, triage them and begin to comprehend the cost of forcing me to calendarize a meeting upfront versus moving it to a more optimal time.
The pandemic showed that many of the models for workplace collaboration were deeply flawed. We don’t need to commute to far-flung offices to sit in IKEA-painted co-working facilities in order to transmit basic information that could have been written up in an email (how on Earth could we possibly have known that before a global pandemic!). Thankfully, we have broken some of our worst habits, but there are more habits that deserve to be broken when we are already trying to revolutionize our work experience.
Helping every person find flow in their work is the step function growth to productivity we all need, but we need better tools to get there. Disrupting disruption. Build that, and we’ll get you on the Disrupt stage.