Musings on: Spontaneous Collaboration in a Remote World

This is a continuation of a series, which last covered Fintech for All.

The “virtualization of the office” was a decade-long shift that COVID-19 is compressing into a year. Companies across the world are having to reconsider the bundle of jobs the physical office provided; there is no existing playbook for culture and process. The toolset that companies relied on previously helped make this change possible – from Slack to Zoom, Figma to Loom – but the market is far from filling the sudden shift in needs. This piece covers synchronous, impromptu collaboration — one aspect of the physical office people seem to miss most.

Why now?

The sudden, forced nature of work from home has led to historic levels of software adoption: Zoom saw daily meeting participants 30x from 10m in December ’19 to 300m in April ’20; Google Hangouts usage exploded from 2m daily meeting participants to 100m, with 3m new users signing up each day.

That trend is here to stay: Nationwide is permanently shuttering all but four campuses, moving 32% of employees remote forever. Big banks like Barclays have publicly discussed a long-term footprint adjustment, with Morgan Stanley’s CEO James Gorman saying “Can I see a future where part of every week, certainly part of every month, a lot of our employees will be at home? Absolutely”. Twitter, Square, Shopify and other tech giants went further, announcing any role could permanently WFH going forward.

While Zoom and Google Hangouts usage numbers reveal a massive land grab to replace analog physical meetings with digital video meetings, the shift is exposing new sub-segments of workstreams. Those products deeply serve the scheduled, synchronous use case — but they feel heavy and formal for the types of spontaneous interactions that made offices so lively. For most video chat tools, the entry point is your calendar. They depend on planning in advance. Contrast that to the colocation aspect of offices, where a tap on the shoulder or a coffee line run-in might spark an idea. Take that scenario further, and the spark will often be fueled by “ambient awareness” — as others around see the interaction taking place and join in. How can a structured, scheduled event allow for that level of fluidity in both agenda and participants?

I believe use cases like that, which were previously viewed as edge cases, are increasingly acute and deeply underserved. Tools that once seemed niche for remote development teams now have mainstream potential when every company is shifting to remote. While existing players may try to subsume these use cases, each represents meaningful innovation in intentionality and access, and thus opportunity for a new entrant.

What if? How might we?

Given the changes above, this section is meant to explore opportunity areas. “What If” extrapolates scenarios that are on the table in some form today. “How might” translates those into potential technological solutions and areas for startups to consider.

What if “Zoom fatigue” becomes a permanent fixture during WFH, and people start to crave lower resolution ways of working together remotely? How might we create this passive, ambient space online, akin to sitting next to each other? It would feel less active, less draining, while potentially helping teams feel more connected while physically apart.

What if the consumer trends around audio as a means of lower fidelity intimacy extend to the workplace? As we spend countless hours of work on staring at screens with video, live audio layers as seen in Clubhouse, Fortnite, Discord and Twitch streams feel increasingly compelling. How might we bring that medium to work?

What if people feel the need to work side-by-side on a problem together when they can’t sit next to each in an office? How might tools people use for real-time co-creation — like Figma, Airable, Notion, Coda, etc.– embed richer audio/visual communication into their products? Or will new services emerge that provide an A/V experience optimized for working together across tools?

More thoughts to come — feedback/comments welcomed. If you are tackling one of these opportunities, we’re eager to learn more! Please reach out to monica@kleinerperkins.com to get the conversation started.