In retrospect, 2019 it seems the last dance of the world of work with spontaneity. The pre-pandemic past is filled with lectures, meetings with colleagues, and post-work happy hours. Now, as companies like Microsoft and Twitter declare remote working as the future, the very existence of physical offices is not clear in the long term.
Yet for a growing number of entrepreneurs in the Valley, when a physical door closes, a virtual one opens. With the aim of making remote working more spontaneous, there are dozens of new startups working to create virtual headquarters for distributed teams. The three who climbed to the top include Branch, created by Gen Z players; Gather, created by engineers who build a gamified Zoom; and Huddle, which is still hidden.
The platforms are all competing to prove that the world is ready to be a part of virtual workspaces. Drawing on the culture of multiplayer gaming, startups are using space technology, animations and productivity tools to create a metaverse dedicated to work.
The biggest challenge to face? Startups need to convince venture capitalists and users alike that they are more than Sims for Enterprise or an always-on Zoom call. Potential success could signal how the future of work will combine play and socialization for distributed teams.
Succulents and space technology
Companies within the virtual HQ world sit on a spectrum. On the one hand there are the productivity companies and on the other hand there are the video game companies. In between is a mix of work and play, which is where Branch hopes to live.
There are more than 500 companies on Branch's waiting list, and among current users, loyalty was 60% after one month of using the platform. So far, it has raised $ 1.5 million from investors including Homebrew, Naval Ravikant, Sahil Lavingia, and Cindy Bi.
Walk through Branch's virtual headquarters and there are all the normal details you might find in an office on Market Street: there are meeting rooms, dining tables, a real water cooler and, yes, succulents on your desk. colleague. Most of the employees log in for 12 hours and by election day, all of them organized a surveillance party with a live stream scheduled in an office area.
The founder tells me he hired people - and fired - all in virtual offices. Doors, he says, make a big difference.
The platform wasn't built as a pandemic, but was actually the result of years of experimentation by the founders, Dayton Mills and Kai Micah Mills. Both founders, since the age of 15, have spent time building Minecraft servers to sell to players, earning thousands of dollars a month. In fact, Kai dropped out of high school to run Minecraft servers full-time, while Dayton tried setting up his own game studio at 13, even hiring an artist to do the illustrations. The video game studio failed due to the fact that he was a "boy, 13 and had no money".
"I spent most of my time online playing with people. So my whole day was playing video games and having people to talk to in the background because I was in constant calls with people," the co-founder said. Dayton Mills. "So it's not difficult for me to use it at all. The question is, can I get other people to think the same way? "
For now, Dayton Mills remains confident his team's platform will do well. After all, work is a non-negotiable place that you have to show up every day. And why not make it a little more fun?
"You can build a space where everyone comes to work," he said. "After that, you can start building the spaces where they go after work. And from there a spiral starts. "
Branch, like other virtual HQ platforms, is forced to find itself at an interesting point of being both relevant enough to be used, but passive enough as an app not to feel like a burden. Dayton Mills says this dynamic meant that the team added features like no mandatory video or audio and a speaking icon per user to give the impression of live interaction. The goal is to keep it informal so that people can actually be online for six hours a day.
"People use Slack to work remotely, but you go to a physical office and people are still using Slack, he said. The co-founder hopes the same for Branch and has started measuring how often people talk to each other in on any given day. It says there are hundreds of chats a day, even if some only last a few seconds.
The key technology Branch and others are using to create spontaneity is the space play infrastructure. Basically, the technology allows users to only hear people in their vicinity and become quieter as they "walk away". Gives the feeling of a bump in the hallway.
Dayton Mills thinks the winning company in this crowded space is the one that can create a space that nurtures and stimulates spontaneity.
"It is not possible to create serendipity directly," he said. "So create that environment."
Gather, arguably the largest virtual headquarters platform available, has built-in features for doing what Mills suggests, such as "shoulder taps" to get a colleague to chat, or pool tables where employees can spin and start a game. virtual swimming pool. The office tour included seeing a corgi on the desk, jack-o-lantern, and this reporter even added some floor plants to the setup.
"You don't have to worry about constantly worrying about being seen or not, but you will hear anyone trying to come and talk to you," said Phillip Wang, the founder of Gather.
The office design includes whiteboards and mobile Google Docs to promote announcements and conversations.
Gather has been in business for more than 18 months since Wang and his friends graduated from college. The team first tried to create custom wearables that showed you which of your friends were able to talk so you could tap into a conversation. When that didn't work, they focused on apps, VR, and full-body robotics. Then COVID-19 struck and they saw an opening in the workplace.
Trillions, billions or none of the above?
He raised some money from angel investors, but remained largely away from institutional investors due to the potential of their capitalization table to "skew" the growth and direction of the company.
"You could easily end up in situations where the only options are those that you aren't satisfied with," said Wang, of bringing VCs into this stage. "We always want the way we make money is aligned and incentivized to do good for our users."
Angel investor Josh Elman tells me that a lot of VCs are interested in the product, given the traction and team, but also because virtual headquarters have the potential to be more than just, well, virtual headquarters. While offices are a space that technology can occupy, the same foundation can be applied to schools, events, weddings, and more.
To show the potential, Elman pointed to Hopin, an online events platform that recently raised $ 125 million with a valuation of $ 2.1 billion. It seems that most VCs agree that there will be many winners in the event space, but it's all about the stickiness of the platform.
With the right value proposition, it's not hard for people to understand multiplayer online gaming. For example, Epic Games' Fortnite staged a Travis Scott psychedelic concert, and more than 12.3 million people watched.
Therefore, people are smart enough to understand games, but how about wanting to do it every single day with their colleagues, without music and flashing lights? The total addressable market for professional social games is obscure. What if these platforms were a little more palatable as healthy businesses, instead of betting that newcomers are a sustainable venture capital business that could someday become a $ 100 billion business?
Florent Crivello of Huddle disagrees. He thinks the market opportunity for his company, a remote and invisible headquarters, is in the trillions because it has the potential to disrupt real estate, transportation and, in a macro sense, urban cities.
"I tell my former Uber colleagues that I am still working on transportation," he said. "It's just that the future of transportation isn't transportation."
Huddle has been in private beta for six months and is used by teams from Apple and Uber. There have been tens of thousands of meeting hours on the platform, and Crivello says some customers have stopped using Slack or Zoom altogether.
"The mistake they are making in Slack is that there is a difference between seeing a list of names on the screen and clicking on a name. And there's a difference between seeing someone in the office and saying hello, "he said." I think there's something very human about the latter. "
Sahil Lavingia, the founder of Gumroad, got rid of the Gumroad office in 2016 and says they will never return.
"Offices are too expensive and you don't need 40 hours a week," he said. "I don't think the physical offices will go away, but they will be significantly reduced now that people know that the work can be done quite effectively, remotely. It is also much cheaper. "Lavingia invested in Branch's seed round.
Megan Zengerle, a partner at Sweat Equity who previously had a career in the human resources industry, said companies that are considering virtual headquarters should think about how long-term the solution is.
"Is this really the culture you want to build for the company? Is this something that will serve the company in the long run? Does it make sense to set it this way? "Zengerle said." Culture is living and breathing, it is not a static thing that is set and done.
Zengerle thinks virtual headquarters are largely dependent on the scope and product of the team. Surely, he doesn't think the solution is one size fits all.
"There are a lot of playbooks coming out of the pandemic," he said. "But the way it varies happens between every employee in the organization, much less organization by organization."
These are the obstacles that have limited startups in the past, including the 2011 winner ProWellTech Disrupt Shaker, from attracting a large customer base.
Before the pandemic, the world was not culturally ready for widespread remote work. Then, the COVID-19 offices were closed and the employees adapted. These startups are betting that another cultural shift will come with mass adaptation, which could bring the metaverse into the mainstream.
