The increase in distributed teams in response to the coronavirus has led to more video conferencing meetings for all of us. As offices remain closed, distributed work forces companies to find a better way than Zoom or Google Hangouts to meet employees from time zones and teams.
Rewatch wants to make meetings more efficient and perhaps even shorter. Co-founded by Connor Sears and Scott Goldman, Rewatch creates and organizes private video channels for companies to archive meetings for employees to sift through in their spare time.
And at its core, Rewatch it's a counterintuitive game: the startup thinks it can fight the "zoom fatigue" by offering employees more ways to watch video conference calls.
The product works like this: Businesses can record their meetings, via Google Hangouts or Zoom, then Rewatch stores the meetings in a database. By using tags and notes, videos become more searchable and easier to find. For example, you can tag a colleague in a meeting where they received an unexpected shout. Or you can search for the last time a manager raised the project you are working on.
The video libraries, which the company describes as "YouTube mini channels," also include transcripts of all meetings. Rewatch is turning synchronous meetings into asynchronous newsletters and documents.
"In the past, the only way to scale a meeting was just to have a longer meeting, or multiple meetings," Sears said.
If Rewatch works, the founders hope to see meetings go from squares of muted floating heads to interactive across teams and time zones with text and annotations.
Sears first got the idea for Rewatch when he was a GitHub employee, a space for developers. GitHub, which is fully distributed, has created an internal YouTube channel for employees from time zones to work with each other. Now, the two co-founders are looking to take one of GitHub's beloved features internally and bring it, and more, to the mainstream.
So far, the startup has been able to acquire a number of customers, including GitHub, although it didn't disclose the total numbers. At launch, the company will charge a subscription fee, but Sears and Goldman have not yet revealed pricing.
One of Rewatch's competitors is Google Drive, which has fallen behind in creativity in archiving and structuring video content. The startup competes with the tool by adding more search capabilities for videos like live transcripts. Other competitors include Berlin-based Acapela, which is working on asynchronous meetings, and Storyboard, a podcast company that helps filmmakers publish audio content on demand for their stakeholders. Both companies recently raised millions of dollars.
While innovation on how meetings are held certainly seems important, Rewatch and others are betting that employees will turn to these content repositories on a semi-precious basis and engage with them in a meaningful way. But how many of us watch the standup we missed out on over the holidays? Business depends on that singular consumer habit.
This reality does not mean that innovation is not welcome. It just means that a huge shift in consumer habits must change for this startup, and many others, to be successful. And this too-early-to-know reality makes the fact that investors have invested millions in the startup even more compelling.
Rewatch has convinced many investors of its vision. Startup Tells ProWellTech It Raised $ 2 Million Pre-Seed Round Led by Semil Shah at Haystack with the participation of Kent Goldman in Upside Partnership. Other investors include Gumroad CEO Sahil Lavingia, GitHub CTO Jason Warner, and Zendesk Senior Vice President Jason Smeale.
