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Tyler Sellhorn (00:02):
Hello, everyone. My name is Tyler Sellhorn, and welcome to another episode of The Remote Show, where we discuss everything to do with remote work with the people who know it best. Thanks so much for listening.
Tyler Sellhorn (00:11):
The Remote Show is brought to you by We Work Remotely, the largest community of remote workers in the world. With over 220,000 unique users per month, We Work Remotely is the most effective way to hire.
Tyler Sellhorn (00:21):
Today we have the pleasure of learning out loud with Flo Crivello. Flo is the founder and CEO of Teamflow in Virtual Office for remote teams. Born and raised in France, he immigrated to California at the age of 20, working at a San Francisco based startup as a software engineer. He joined Uber in 2015, where he worked as a product manager until he left in 2022 to found Teamflow.
Tyler Sellhorn (00:41):
Welcome to the Remote Show, Flo. Tell us, what problems are you trying to solve with Teamflow?
Flo Crivello (00:46):
Yeah, thanks for having me, Tyler. The problem I'm trying to solve is broadly speaking, we as huge of a fan of remote work as everybody, right? Like I'm sure your audience is no exception to that. It's just no commute any more. You can live anywhere you want. You have access to so many more opportunities.
Flo Crivello (01:01):
I think that if there is one complaint about remote though, is that it does make it less fun to go to work and to work with your team. Right? Everything feels a lot more formal and transactional than it used to. And I think especially onboarding to a new remote company as a new hire is especially painful. Right? We hear that all the time. You know, I think people underestimate how jarring it is to start as a new hire in a new remote company. Right? Because I think that by and large, the way people used to be onboarded was very informal. It was just hanging around and kind of absorbing informally, the knowledge that was around you in the company.
Flo Crivello (01:34):
And now you're just alone in your room, and you are faced with a list of names on Slack. And I think very few people feel comfortable just clicking on everybody's name on Slack and just being like, "Hey, I have no agenda, but my name is Taylor. My name is Floyd. I just want to introduce myself. I just started here at [inaudible 00:01:48]." At company, right?
Flo Crivello (01:51):
And there's just something that's very easy to do when you're actually sharing the same physical space with someone. Right? Where it's like, you could just go up to them and you're be like, "Hey, you know, like I noticed you were here. I've just started here. This is my first day."
Flo Crivello (02:03):
And so the way we solve that problem is actually by recreating that experience of being physically with someone except remotely. So we build a virtual office. And the way it works is that you see your video in a bubble on a virtual office floor plan that you can customize. So you can furnish it. You can change the textures, the walls, and all of that stuff.
Flo Crivello (02:21):
And you can move that bubble around, a little bit like in a video game. You can use your mouse or your keyboard, and you can only hear and be heard by people who are around you. And so if you want to chat with someone, then all you need to do is drag your bubble over to them and say "Hi." Right? Instead of being on Slack looking for their names, sending them a message, waiting for them to answers or having to find a time on the calendar, sending them a Zoom invite, waiting for the day after, et cetera. It's just really as simple as in the app. It's like drag yourself over to them and say, "Hi." Right? And so basically it creates this environment where teams can hang out again, just like they used to do physically in the office.
Tyler Sellhorn (02:52):
Really cool. One of the things that you mentioned, I want to drill a little deeper on. You mentioned that onboarding is one of the focuses of your product and really making it so that there isn't this wall of names on Slack that might be people that could help you, but instead kind of putting that into a visual interface or into a space that that feels much more social. Here's a face, right? Saying some things. I can hear them. I can see their face right away. That that's my first impression there.
Tyler Sellhorn (03:21):
Zoom out for us on that, like product manager sort of version of like, when you think about, okay, the product is doing these things. It's helping with onboarding. It's helping with communication. It's helping kind of replace the feeling of fun that exists inside of an office. What are the different inputs that you're looking for people to kind of connect to, to really get value out of Teamflow?
Flo Crivello (03:45):
Yeah. Well, by and large, right, it's really exactly the same as in any physical space. Right? People use us just like they would any office where it's like they open each first thing in the morning as they're arriving at work. Right? Just like you would open Slack or your email. So they open Teamflow. They drag themselves in the middle of the open space. Right? There is the rest of your team hanging out there. They can say hi, like, "Hi, everybody. Good morning."
Flo Crivello (04:07):
And then, either you hang out with them in the open space, which by the way, also helps with productivity. You know, we do find and a mountain of research is also finding that people are a lot more productive when they're physically located with the people, working with them on the same thing, even if they're not actually working together on the thing. Right? They're kind of working separately together.
Flo Crivello (04:25):
And so you can either hang out in the common area like that and work on your thing or if you want to be left alone, you can always go perhaps on the couch or in your office, meeting room, and then you basically spend your day there and you work there. If you have a question for someone, you can drag yourself over to them. And if you have a scheduled meeting, you can go to a meeting room for that meeting in which you can lay out your notes, your whiteboards, et cetera.
Tyler Sellhorn (04:48):
Really cool. I do think that's interesting, how much shall we say cultural experiences are informing how we are showing up to work even in a remote environment. Right? You just described to me a way that you might arrive to a physical office, and now you're saying, "Okay, well, we want to give somebody a similar experience or at least give them an idea of how they might show up in a virtual company or a virtual office with similar visual cues, similar auditory cues."
Tyler Sellhorn (05:19):
Can you maybe describe what it is that you think is really key to hold on to from physical locations of offices that really should be a part of virtual offices?
Flo Crivello (05:33):
Yeah. Actually we went back and forth on that inside the Teamflow for a very long time, because the first iteration of Teamflow did not have that kind of heavy skeuomorphic elements, that kind of reproduction of the office with coaches and walls and so forth. It was more like a blank canvas. Right? Imagine something like Figma, if you will. And our top feature request was actually, "I want couches. I want to be able to furnish that space." Right?
Flo Crivello (05:55):
And initially we kind of ignored it. We were all like, "Ah, you know, it's just like people are asking you for a [inaudible 00:05:59] kind of thing." And then the feature requests was so recurring that we actually ran a survey. And so we had two renderings. On the left was the current version of the product with this white background. On the right was a furnished version with a wooden background and furniture and all of that. And we asked people, which one do you prefer? Right? And 97% of people answered the second one. Right?
Flo Crivello (06:21):
And so then we actually asked ourselves like, "Okay, like there is something here. We can't just keep ignoring this feedback anymore." And I think that since then, we've really been exploring this space and what happens when you actually allow people to furnish the office, and I think I our conclusion is that furniture is not merely ornamental. We actually think that furniture is very deeply functioned. Right? For a few reasons. One, is the furniture informs the dynamic of the meeting. Right? A meeting does not feel the same way when you have one chair on the podium facing rows of 50 chairs, right, then it does if you have three couches around a coffee table. Right? So the furniture informs the dynamic of the meeting.
Flo Crivello (07:01):
And it's actually funny, when we raised our series A, that was led by Battery, they had set up a room on Teamflow for me to pitch them. And so I arrive in a room, and it was kind of a very long table, kind of like a board meeting table. And there was a pupil at the head of the table, and they were expecting me to stay behind the pupil if you will, on Teamflow and pitch them. Right? And that made actually the dynamic of the meeting a bit more intimidatingly. Right?
Flo Crivello (07:24):
And Neeraj, the general partner, when he saw that he was like, "Oh, like Flo. Like I don't know who started this rolling. Just like, come sit with us." You know? And so it's based on like nothing, because at the end of the day it was just all video, and it's print, but it actually did change the tone of the meeting. That I wasn't just talking at them from behind my pupil. I was sitting with them at the table. Right?
Flo Crivello (07:42):
So I think that that seeing of, again, the furniture informing the dynamic of the meeting is involved. The second one is we have developed a ton of codes around what furniture means. Right? And so I don't inform the same thing about my personal state, and with the ideas I have to be interrupted or distracted when I'm sitting at my desk in the open office, then when I'm sitting at a couch in the common area, then if I'm sitting in my personal meeting room with the door closed. You know I signal something different about my availability in these different scenarios.
Flo Crivello (08:13):
And finally, the last thing about furnishing your office is like it's just plain fun. And I think we totally discount that. Everybody complains about Zoom fatigue, and I think it's no wonder we have Zoom fatigue. It's just such a dry environment.
Flo Crivello (08:26):
We don't live in our computers. Right? We get up in the morning. We take the 30 seconds walk from our bed to our office, and then we live on Zoom all day. And it's the driest, saddest office that we've ever seen. I'm sorry. I think Zoom is a good product, but the problem is like, it is a bit of a sad office. Right?
Flo Crivello (08:43):
I don't know if you've seen the TV show Silicon Valley, but there is an episode where they get a new office, and it's like the cheapest office they could find. This like neon lamps all like blinking and making this terrible noise, and there's no window, and it's just like drab, like IBM cubicle kind of thing.
Flo Crivello (08:59):
And I feel like that's where we trapped ourselves digitally. I feel like Zoom is the equivalent of that. And a user actually made that point when we ran that survey with on the left our current version, on the right the version that was furnished and [inaudible 00:09:10]. And they were like, "The left one feels like that office from Silicon valley, which is super sad, you know? And the right one feels like a rich environment where it's fun to hang out in."
Tyler Sellhorn (09:17):
Yeah. I think it is interesting even for myself. You know, I am an elder millennial. Right? And so I can think back to AOL Instant Messenger, and I can think back to Myspace. Right? And some of these other places that were some of the first spaces that were held digitally for people to express themselves personally. And when we talk about a solution like Teamflow or a competitor, right, what is the invitation that you all are presenting to the user? Right? You're saying, "This is your space."
Tyler Sellhorn (09:52):
And when we're talking about a computer code, like it's all arbitrary. Right? You just described the feature request of like, "Okay, well you can furnish it however you like." Well, the fact that there is furniture to furnish it with are not is arbitrary.
Tyler Sellhorn (10:06):
So there's this kind of invitation to say, "Okay, this is your space that you get to work in, right, and if we're not going to be physically located, how are we going to show up together virtually?"
Flo Crivello (10:18):
Yup.
Tyler Sellhorn (10:18):
Right? That's the question that's being asked. Right? And it sounds like you all are answering it with the Teamflow version. And I'm really excited to see that show up for people that like, "Hey, there is a place for you to come, and it's here." Right?
Flo Crivello (10:31):
Oh, no. Exactly. And I think on a deeper level, in hindsight, it's obvious. Right? Again, the problem we're solving is we're making it less formal, less transactional to go to work. Right? We're making it more fun, more informal, more easy to collaborate with your team. Right?
Flo Crivello (10:43):
And I think that this dominant paradigm of "Here's a label. Here's a piece of text, black on white. Here's a text field, right? Here's a button for you to join the meeting," is actually contributing to that super formal dynamic of remote work. It's treating people like robots.
Flo Crivello (10:59):
I think Slack, by the way, is as playful as this category of product gets. Right? And still, it's basically putting you in front of a wall of names, right, with a wall of text. And it's like, "Here's a text box for you to enter information. And here's the area where you consume information." Again, it's treating us like robots, and it's totally ignoring the [inaudible 00:11:18] of collaboration. Right? And so I think it's only natural that our user interface reflects the intention of ours to create a more informal place to build culture and to build relationships with your team.
Tyler Sellhorn (11:30):
Okay. So I want to transition to another concept that I think is interesting to talk in the context of Teamflow. When you think about Teamflow, and there's some thought leaders out there that are kind of suggesting that remote work is a gateway to asynchronous working styles. Right? And I would say that, just this is my impression, is that Teamflow would be more so on the synchronous end of that spectrum. When you think about asynchronous versus synchronous and in the context of Teamflow or not, right, when you think about remote working and how to do that best, where do you see Teamflow being positioned in that spectrum?
Flo Crivello (12:10):
Well, [inaudible 00:12:11] said, this is such a top of mind question for us. The way we think of it is we think of it as a two by two. On one axis there is, "Are you having a text communication or video communication?" Right? And on the other access is, "Are you having a formal type of communication or an informal type of communication." Right?
Flo Crivello (12:28):
And so if you will, a formal text communication is email. Informal text is Slack. Formal video is Zoom. Informal video used to be the office. That is what we lost with remote work. We lost that quadrant, that informal video quadrant that used to be the office. Right?
Flo Crivello (12:48):
We do see certain remote companies argue that it's fine. We don't need that quadrant. You know, everything can be synchronous. Everything can be text. Right? We strongly disagree with that. And by the way, we don't either believe that everything belongs to that quadrant. Just like other people would be, "Ah. Everything is formal video. Everything is informal text or whatever."
Flo Crivello (13:08):
We actually think that each of these four quadrants had a role to play in collaboration. Right? Again, we do think that some interactions squarely belong to that quadrant of informal video, and that with remote work, we're pushing them to other quadrants. Right? And so I think that's why people have some fatigue. It's like a lot of interactions that are meant to be informal video are now formal scheduled meetings on your calendar, back to back to back to back all day. Of course, that's exhausting. Right?
Flo Crivello (13:34):
I think more concretely, what I reproach to asynchronous text communication is twofold. The first one is productivity. And the second one is relationship building. Right? On the productivity side, very likely it's 8X slower type than it is to dock. Right? So that's just a very simple thing. We always joke that an hour on Slack, can save you 10 minutes on Zoom.
Flo Crivello (13:57):
And so not only is that, but also there is a ton more latency involved in asynchronous communication. Even us at Teamflow, again, we do believe that some collaboration is best good on basic on as texts communication. And sometimes I see these comments on Google docs or Notion, and it's like, "Hey, Allan. Did you take a look at that?"
Flo Crivello (14:17):
Two days later, Allan, "No, I haven't yet."
Flo Crivello (14:19):
Two days later me, "Oh, can you?"
Flo Crivello (14:22):
Two days later, Allan. It's like an eight days interaction that should be literally less than a minute. Right? And we see that all the time. Right? And I think that actually the speed at which we were able to build Teamflow speaks to that. Right? We built Teamflow and our MVP in less than three months with a team of four engineers because we were building Teamflow on Teamflow all day. We were located all day on Teamflow.
Flo Crivello (14:40):
And again, a mountain of research shows. There is that famous paper by [Judy Olsen 00:14:43] from the '90s that shows that people are two X more productive when they're co-working together physically in the same space, and they're within ear shot of each other, and they can ask questions rapidly to each other.
Flo Crivello (14:53):
So again, that's the first dimension I think that's missing with async text communication. It's just productivity. It's slow. Right?
Flo Crivello (14:59):
The second dimension is relationship building. I think one does not build relationships as well over text than they do over video. And I think that we've seen, by the way, disastrous consequences of trying to build relationships over text, for example, on Twitter. Right? Everybody agrees that debates on Twitter are very counterproductive and actually very toxic. Right? Everything devolves immediately into fights because people just assume the worst of each other, and they don't understand each other over text than they do over video.
Flo Crivello (15:26):
And I think that over video now, there is this human instinct that kicks in, and the human empathy that kicks in. It's like, "I see your face. I hear your voice. And I want to understand you, and I want to agree with you." Right? And so I think that that is the [inaudible 00:15:38] with text, and I think it's a catastrophe. I think again, it just makes you feel like a robot. It makes you feel like a contractor at work. You don't build relationships nearly as effectively anymore.
Flo Crivello (15:47):
And so I think that the way, again, even a purely remote companies like GitLab or InVision try to address that is via remote happy hours. Right? Or remote coffees. And again, it's just, it's kind of this awkward dynamic where it's like a time on your calendar. From five to six, everybody go to the Zoom meeting and have fun for 60 minutes. Right? And so I think, again, it suffers from the same formality as the rest of remote collaboration does today.
Tyler Sellhorn (16:12):
That's interesting. I do think that's interesting to think about that two by two grid of the two by two, that you're suggesting that there are different spaces in which this spectrum of asynchronous versus synchronous working kind of fit. I do think that's interesting. I'm also curious to think more. And this is just me thinking out loud here. Just thinking more about what we want to retain from the office as many more are working virtually, and I think that's really interesting.
Tyler Sellhorn (16:39):
Okay. So I want to transition and kind of think about some things that you're doing as a remote hiring manager, right, working at Teamflow and trying to build the team as you're scaling and growing as an organization. What are the things that you say in your company about page or in the ways that you guys are approaching remote working, what are the things that you say to kind of like demonstrate to a candidate, "Yes. This is a place that we really are doing remote work. Here are the reasons why you can know that or here are the benefits we provide," or what's the types of things that you do to position yourself in that recruiting phase of a candidate's journey towards your company? What are the things that you think people need to be saying to really communicate that well?
Flo Crivello (17:24):
Well, I mean to begin with, we have all our interviews with candidates on Teamflow. And so we kind of demonstrates this environment, and so, you know, I chat with candidates or whoever chats with candidates, and then you can see the rest of the team on the side. And sometimes we actually chat about them. For example, when one candidate was from the UK. And I was like, "Oh, like Ian over there is from the UK. Let's walk over there." It's like, "Hey, Ian. You guys are both from London patch and what not."
Flo Crivello (17:47):
And then once we onboard candidates, again, the sheer value of having them hang out with us in the office just makes it so much easier for them to onboard. Economists talk about this idea of spillover knowledge. Right? And they argue that it's how knowledge spreads in economies. And so the obviously they mean this figuratively, but I actually think there is something not figurative about like the knowledge in a way like spilling over from the brain. Right? And I think that you can benefit on this pillars of people's knowledge in the brain when you're sitting with them.
Flo Crivello (18:17):
You know, I was chatting with one of our users on Teamflow. They are an architectural film in San Francisco, and the senior architect was telling me, "You know, the way you learn architecture is by hanging out with the senior architect and overhearing a conversation he has on the phone with a contractor, like yelling at the contractor because he's late or whatever." Right? And again, that is something that you lose with remote work. It's like that spillover knowledge. Now you're just alone in your environment.
Flo Crivello (18:35):
And so I think people underestimate the awful impact of that. We're taking out the first few, the bottom most ladders during [inaudible 00:18:48] because now you're stuck at the bottom because you can't learn from people who almost yelled at you. You don't have access to them anymore.
Flo Crivello (18:53):
And so I think again, people who start at Teamflow, they hangout with us. They see how we work. They benefit from conversations that they overhear in the background. So little by little, they learn like that, how the company operates, and if they have any questions, it's very easy for them to say, "Hey, Brandan, quick question. Like, how does this thing work?" Right? And I think that lowering the friction like that to ask this kind of quick question by a factor of 10 makes such a difference when you onboard these.
Tyler Sellhorn (19:17):
Shout out to Brandon, managing the code there at Teamflow. But seriously, that's really interesting to hear you say that Teamflow, of course, you know, is working inside of Teamflow, but it also recruits on Teamflow. Right? How do you have an onsite interview in a remote space? Right?
Flo Crivello (19:35):
Yeah.
Tyler Sellhorn (19:35):
What does that level of the recruiting process look like for a remote team? Right?
Flo Crivello (19:41):
Right.
Tyler Sellhorn (19:42):
And as you mentioned, how do we make this less transactional? How do we make this more of a invitation into the team, into our space, into the things that we share as a working community, as a workplace? I'm such a huge fan of anybody who is thinking and working in building in this space where we say, "Okay. If we're not going to be co-located anymore, what does it mean to work together?" Right? I think that's really important.
Tyler Sellhorn (20:07):
Let's zoom out way past Teamflow. Let's think at that like remote working, working generally, kind of version of things. And I want to invite you to think about, okay, you left Uber to join Teamflow in 2020. Tell us the origin story of that. Right? Where we're saying, "Okay. I've got this awesome product manager job at Uber, right, but I'm going to choose to do this other thing, and this is why." Tell us the background there, please.
Flo Crivello (20:36):
Yeah. So, I actually didn't exactly leave Uber to build Teamflow. But there was a little bit of an origin story there at Uber where at some point my team went remote, and we had a technical outage. And so we were temporarily remote because we were launching in a bunch of cities at the time, and so I stayed in SF, and we had team members in Austin, some of them in Chicago, some of them in Los Angeles, and there was this technical outage where the product was down. And so, you know, when you have a technical outage, the situation is evolving very rapidly. You have to coordinate product and operations because there are supports design and all of that stuff.
Flo Crivello (21:07):
And something about that outage just made it 10X more painful. And I remember at the end of the day, I was sitting back against my chair, and I was about to cry. And I was like, "This was not my first outage. Why was this one so painful?"
Flo Crivello (21:19):
And then I realized that because we weren't together physically anymore, we couldn't cooperate as fluidly as the situation evolved. And that's what made that outage just painful. And so that's when I realized like, "Oh, what we miss is the office." Right? "That's why we can't work together anymore."
Flo Crivello (21:34):
And so that was kind of in the back of my mind when I left Uber. I left Uber to take a break, and I was traveling. I've been in Europe for six months or so, and then a few things happened. So I had to come back from my travels because COVID hit in March. And I read an article from John Palmer who is an ex-designer from Snap that's called "Spatial Interfaces." And it's basically making the case for basically Teamflow. It's broader than that. It's spatial interfaces generally, but there is almost a call to action there that's like, "I wonder what would the spatial Zoom look like? I wonder what it would look like if we work in a spatial interface all day?"
Flo Crivello (22:06):
And literally from the moment I closed the tab to now, I've been working on Teamflow full-time. And my initial intention was not for Teamflow to be a startup. I was literally just on a break, being a sabbatical if you will, in my bedroom, hanging out, and reading that blog post, and I was like, "That's an interesting idea. I wonder what it would look like."
Flo Crivello (22:24):
And I started hacking something together, and I coded all night, and at 4 AM I had a proof of concept, and then I just got sucked in, you know? And again, initially it was not [inaudible 00:22:32]. It was just me hacking in my bedroom.
Flo Crivello (22:33):
And then a friend of mine, investor told me, "You're out of your mind because if you haven't noticed there is a pandemic going on. Every company is going remote. This is a massive pain point, and this is very obviously a VC fundable business." And again, I just had become so passionate about the problem space that, you know, it just happened very spontaneously like that. I ended up raising money and building a team, and that's how it started.
Tyler Sellhorn (22:54):
Thank you for going deep on the origin story there, Flo. It's really cool to be connecting with others that felt the pain of a distributed team, right, and then use that to generate a new way of showing up to work.
Tyler Sellhorn (23:11):
I guess, maybe that's what I'm curious to think about with you now is to say, okay, you experienced a distributed team, as you described in some major metros here in the States, and you had the painful kind of outage moment that spurred you on to be working on Teamflow. But if you, again, staying zoomed out here to think about the remote working spectrum of things or workplaces in general, what do you think was the 2019 version of distributed work versus the pandemic version? And then what do you think is to come in 2022 and beyond? Can you kind of think through those different epochs of remote work for us?
Flo Crivello (23:51):
Yeah, 100%. I think that the tools that we've been using for remote work were never built exactly for remote work. You know, I think Slack and Zoom were built for remote work. And so I think the funny thing with remote work is that it's basically changed everything about the way we work, but there is a largely that unspoken assumption that we can keep using the exact same tools as before, you know, same Slack, same Zoom, again that were not built for those, you know? And I our core belief is that a new way of working calls for a new set of tooling.
Flo Crivello (24:23):
And so our hypothesis is that just as today we wonder, "How did people ever work before Google Docs? How did they ever work with before Notion, before email?" I think 10 years from now we're going to wonder, "How did people ever work before virtual offices?"
Flo Crivello (24:37):
And the answer will be, "Well, they had virtual offices. They just weren't virtual. They were offices." Right? And now that we work remotely, we need a virtual office, right, to fill the gap that, and to serve the same functions as the physical office was serving which was more free to collaboration, a better medium to build relationships, and also, and that is another part of the Teamflow vision, is that the physical office, people don't think of it this way, but it was a multi-player layer on top of every software that we had. There has been this tradition over the last decade from single player software to multi-player software, you know, from Photoshop to Figma, from Office to Google Docs, et cetera.
Flo Crivello (25:11):
And I think that a lot of single-player software actually becomes multiplayer by virtue of being physically next to someone. You know, Photoshop is single player, but if I'm next to you with my laptop, it is basically multi-player application. And I think that we lost that multiplayer layer on top of everything, and that is another thing that Teamflow aims to be.
Flo Crivello (25:29):
And so what I mean by that is that when you arrive on Teamflow, you have a dock with applications, very similar to what you have on Mac [inaudible 00:25:36] or on the iPhone. And so you can open applications here. And so you can actually open Notion, Figma. You can open Google Docs. You can take notes. You can whiteboard in here. And so when you open one of these applications, you can work on it together with your team, which I think is another big gap in the way we have meetings together remotely today. Because today, the tools we use to meet remotely are really focused on communication, but we think that there is more to collaboration than just communication.
Flo Crivello (26:00):
When you're physically next to someone in the office, you can not only talk to them, but you can also doodle on a scratch pad next to you or you can whiteboard next to you, and you lose all of these modalities when you're meeting with someone on Zoom. And so it makes for this kind of weird experience where on the one hand you're seeing them, and you're talking with them just like you would if you were next to them physically, but on the other hand, you can't do all of these things that you would be able to do if you were next to them physically. So, that's another dimension that we're producing here.
Tyler Sellhorn (26:24):
Excellent. Excellent. Flo, thank you so much for taking this time to share your learnings and be sharing with us. Anything that you'd like to say to our audience here, as we say goodbye?
Flo Crivello (26:35):
No, I think very excited to be part of this. Couldn't hope for something more exciting to work on.
Tyler Sellhorn (26:40):
Awesome, Flo. Well, blessings and looking to seeing what gets built. Really exciting.
Flo Crivello (26:49):
Thank you so much, Tyler.
Tyler Sellhorn (26:50):
Thanks so much again for listening to the show, and be sure to check out weworkremotely.com for the latest remote jobs. And if you're looking to hire a remote worker, We Work Remotely is the fastest and easiest way to do so.
Tyler Sellhorn (27:00):
As always, if you have someone we should talk to, any advice you have, or if you'd like to advertise on the podcast, please reach out to us at podcastatweworkremotely.com. That's [email protected].
Tyler Sellhorn (27:13):
Thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.
Hello, everyone. My name is Tyler Sellhorn, and welcome to another episode of The Remote Show, where we discuss everything to do with remote work with the people who know it best. Thanks so much for listening.
Tyler Sellhorn (00:11):
The Remote Show is brought to you by We Work Remotely, the largest community of remote workers in the world. With over 220,000 unique users per month, We Work Remotely is the most effective way to hire.
Tyler Sellhorn (00:21):
Today we have the pleasure of learning out loud with Flo Crivello. Flo is the founder and CEO of Teamflow in Virtual Office for remote teams. Born and raised in France, he immigrated to California at the age of 20, working at a San Francisco based startup as a software engineer. He joined Uber in 2015, where he worked as a product manager until he left in 2022 to found Teamflow.
Tyler Sellhorn (00:41):
Welcome to the Remote Show, Flo. Tell us, what problems are you trying to solve with Teamflow?
Flo Crivello (00:46):
Yeah, thanks for having me, Tyler. The problem I'm trying to solve is broadly speaking, we as huge of a fan of remote work as everybody, right? Like I'm sure your audience is no exception to that. It's just no commute any more. You can live anywhere you want. You have access to so many more opportunities.
Flo Crivello (01:01):
I think that if there is one complaint about remote though, is that it does make it less fun to go to work and to work with your team. Right? Everything feels a lot more formal and transactional than it used to. And I think especially onboarding to a new remote company as a new hire is especially painful. Right? We hear that all the time. You know, I think people underestimate how jarring it is to start as a new hire in a new remote company. Right? Because I think that by and large, the way people used to be onboarded was very informal. It was just hanging around and kind of absorbing informally, the knowledge that was around you in the company.
Flo Crivello (01:34):
And now you're just alone in your room, and you are faced with a list of names on Slack. And I think very few people feel comfortable just clicking on everybody's name on Slack and just being like, "Hey, I have no agenda, but my name is Taylor. My name is Floyd. I just want to introduce myself. I just started here at [inaudible 00:01:48]." At company, right?
Flo Crivello (01:51):
And there's just something that's very easy to do when you're actually sharing the same physical space with someone. Right? Where it's like, you could just go up to them and you're be like, "Hey, you know, like I noticed you were here. I've just started here. This is my first day."
Flo Crivello (02:03):
And so the way we solve that problem is actually by recreating that experience of being physically with someone except remotely. So we build a virtual office. And the way it works is that you see your video in a bubble on a virtual office floor plan that you can customize. So you can furnish it. You can change the textures, the walls, and all of that stuff.
Flo Crivello (02:21):
And you can move that bubble around, a little bit like in a video game. You can use your mouse or your keyboard, and you can only hear and be heard by people who are around you. And so if you want to chat with someone, then all you need to do is drag your bubble over to them and say "Hi." Right? Instead of being on Slack looking for their names, sending them a message, waiting for them to answers or having to find a time on the calendar, sending them a Zoom invite, waiting for the day after, et cetera. It's just really as simple as in the app. It's like drag yourself over to them and say, "Hi." Right? And so basically it creates this environment where teams can hang out again, just like they used to do physically in the office.
Tyler Sellhorn (02:52):
Really cool. One of the things that you mentioned, I want to drill a little deeper on. You mentioned that onboarding is one of the focuses of your product and really making it so that there isn't this wall of names on Slack that might be people that could help you, but instead kind of putting that into a visual interface or into a space that that feels much more social. Here's a face, right? Saying some things. I can hear them. I can see their face right away. That that's my first impression there.
Tyler Sellhorn (03:21):
Zoom out for us on that, like product manager sort of version of like, when you think about, okay, the product is doing these things. It's helping with onboarding. It's helping with communication. It's helping kind of replace the feeling of fun that exists inside of an office. What are the different inputs that you're looking for people to kind of connect to, to really get value out of Teamflow?
Flo Crivello (03:45):
Yeah. Well, by and large, right, it's really exactly the same as in any physical space. Right? People use us just like they would any office where it's like they open each first thing in the morning as they're arriving at work. Right? Just like you would open Slack or your email. So they open Teamflow. They drag themselves in the middle of the open space. Right? There is the rest of your team hanging out there. They can say hi, like, "Hi, everybody. Good morning."
Flo Crivello (04:07):
And then, either you hang out with them in the open space, which by the way, also helps with productivity. You know, we do find and a mountain of research is also finding that people are a lot more productive when they're physically located with the people, working with them on the same thing, even if they're not actually working together on the thing. Right? They're kind of working separately together.
Flo Crivello (04:25):
And so you can either hang out in the common area like that and work on your thing or if you want to be left alone, you can always go perhaps on the couch or in your office, meeting room, and then you basically spend your day there and you work there. If you have a question for someone, you can drag yourself over to them. And if you have a scheduled meeting, you can go to a meeting room for that meeting in which you can lay out your notes, your whiteboards, et cetera.
Tyler Sellhorn (04:48):
Really cool. I do think that's interesting, how much shall we say cultural experiences are informing how we are showing up to work even in a remote environment. Right? You just described to me a way that you might arrive to a physical office, and now you're saying, "Okay, well, we want to give somebody a similar experience or at least give them an idea of how they might show up in a virtual company or a virtual office with similar visual cues, similar auditory cues."
Tyler Sellhorn (05:19):
Can you maybe describe what it is that you think is really key to hold on to from physical locations of offices that really should be a part of virtual offices?
Flo Crivello (05:33):
Yeah. Actually we went back and forth on that inside the Teamflow for a very long time, because the first iteration of Teamflow did not have that kind of heavy skeuomorphic elements, that kind of reproduction of the office with coaches and walls and so forth. It was more like a blank canvas. Right? Imagine something like Figma, if you will. And our top feature request was actually, "I want couches. I want to be able to furnish that space." Right?
Flo Crivello (05:55):
And initially we kind of ignored it. We were all like, "Ah, you know, it's just like people are asking you for a [inaudible 00:05:59] kind of thing." And then the feature requests was so recurring that we actually ran a survey. And so we had two renderings. On the left was the current version of the product with this white background. On the right was a furnished version with a wooden background and furniture and all of that. And we asked people, which one do you prefer? Right? And 97% of people answered the second one. Right?
Flo Crivello (06:21):
And so then we actually asked ourselves like, "Okay, like there is something here. We can't just keep ignoring this feedback anymore." And I think that since then, we've really been exploring this space and what happens when you actually allow people to furnish the office, and I think I our conclusion is that furniture is not merely ornamental. We actually think that furniture is very deeply functioned. Right? For a few reasons. One, is the furniture informs the dynamic of the meeting. Right? A meeting does not feel the same way when you have one chair on the podium facing rows of 50 chairs, right, then it does if you have three couches around a coffee table. Right? So the furniture informs the dynamic of the meeting.
Flo Crivello (07:01):
And it's actually funny, when we raised our series A, that was led by Battery, they had set up a room on Teamflow for me to pitch them. And so I arrive in a room, and it was kind of a very long table, kind of like a board meeting table. And there was a pupil at the head of the table, and they were expecting me to stay behind the pupil if you will, on Teamflow and pitch them. Right? And that made actually the dynamic of the meeting a bit more intimidatingly. Right?
Flo Crivello (07:24):
And Neeraj, the general partner, when he saw that he was like, "Oh, like Flo. Like I don't know who started this rolling. Just like, come sit with us." You know? And so it's based on like nothing, because at the end of the day it was just all video, and it's print, but it actually did change the tone of the meeting. That I wasn't just talking at them from behind my pupil. I was sitting with them at the table. Right?
Flo Crivello (07:42):
So I think that that seeing of, again, the furniture informing the dynamic of the meeting is involved. The second one is we have developed a ton of codes around what furniture means. Right? And so I don't inform the same thing about my personal state, and with the ideas I have to be interrupted or distracted when I'm sitting at my desk in the open office, then when I'm sitting at a couch in the common area, then if I'm sitting in my personal meeting room with the door closed. You know I signal something different about my availability in these different scenarios.
Flo Crivello (08:13):
And finally, the last thing about furnishing your office is like it's just plain fun. And I think we totally discount that. Everybody complains about Zoom fatigue, and I think it's no wonder we have Zoom fatigue. It's just such a dry environment.
Flo Crivello (08:26):
We don't live in our computers. Right? We get up in the morning. We take the 30 seconds walk from our bed to our office, and then we live on Zoom all day. And it's the driest, saddest office that we've ever seen. I'm sorry. I think Zoom is a good product, but the problem is like, it is a bit of a sad office. Right?
Flo Crivello (08:43):
I don't know if you've seen the TV show Silicon Valley, but there is an episode where they get a new office, and it's like the cheapest office they could find. This like neon lamps all like blinking and making this terrible noise, and there's no window, and it's just like drab, like IBM cubicle kind of thing.
Flo Crivello (08:59):
And I feel like that's where we trapped ourselves digitally. I feel like Zoom is the equivalent of that. And a user actually made that point when we ran that survey with on the left our current version, on the right the version that was furnished and [inaudible 00:09:10]. And they were like, "The left one feels like that office from Silicon valley, which is super sad, you know? And the right one feels like a rich environment where it's fun to hang out in."
Tyler Sellhorn (09:17):
Yeah. I think it is interesting even for myself. You know, I am an elder millennial. Right? And so I can think back to AOL Instant Messenger, and I can think back to Myspace. Right? And some of these other places that were some of the first spaces that were held digitally for people to express themselves personally. And when we talk about a solution like Teamflow or a competitor, right, what is the invitation that you all are presenting to the user? Right? You're saying, "This is your space."
Tyler Sellhorn (09:52):
And when we're talking about a computer code, like it's all arbitrary. Right? You just described the feature request of like, "Okay, well you can furnish it however you like." Well, the fact that there is furniture to furnish it with are not is arbitrary.
Tyler Sellhorn (10:06):
So there's this kind of invitation to say, "Okay, this is your space that you get to work in, right, and if we're not going to be physically located, how are we going to show up together virtually?"
Flo Crivello (10:18):
Yup.
Tyler Sellhorn (10:18):
Right? That's the question that's being asked. Right? And it sounds like you all are answering it with the Teamflow version. And I'm really excited to see that show up for people that like, "Hey, there is a place for you to come, and it's here." Right?
Flo Crivello (10:31):
Oh, no. Exactly. And I think on a deeper level, in hindsight, it's obvious. Right? Again, the problem we're solving is we're making it less formal, less transactional to go to work. Right? We're making it more fun, more informal, more easy to collaborate with your team. Right?
Flo Crivello (10:43):
And I think that this dominant paradigm of "Here's a label. Here's a piece of text, black on white. Here's a text field, right? Here's a button for you to join the meeting," is actually contributing to that super formal dynamic of remote work. It's treating people like robots.
Flo Crivello (10:59):
I think Slack, by the way, is as playful as this category of product gets. Right? And still, it's basically putting you in front of a wall of names, right, with a wall of text. And it's like, "Here's a text box for you to enter information. And here's the area where you consume information." Again, it's treating us like robots, and it's totally ignoring the [inaudible 00:11:18] of collaboration. Right? And so I think it's only natural that our user interface reflects the intention of ours to create a more informal place to build culture and to build relationships with your team.
Tyler Sellhorn (11:30):
Okay. So I want to transition to another concept that I think is interesting to talk in the context of Teamflow. When you think about Teamflow, and there's some thought leaders out there that are kind of suggesting that remote work is a gateway to asynchronous working styles. Right? And I would say that, just this is my impression, is that Teamflow would be more so on the synchronous end of that spectrum. When you think about asynchronous versus synchronous and in the context of Teamflow or not, right, when you think about remote working and how to do that best, where do you see Teamflow being positioned in that spectrum?
Flo Crivello (12:10):
Well, [inaudible 00:12:11] said, this is such a top of mind question for us. The way we think of it is we think of it as a two by two. On one axis there is, "Are you having a text communication or video communication?" Right? And on the other access is, "Are you having a formal type of communication or an informal type of communication." Right?
Flo Crivello (12:28):
And so if you will, a formal text communication is email. Informal text is Slack. Formal video is Zoom. Informal video used to be the office. That is what we lost with remote work. We lost that quadrant, that informal video quadrant that used to be the office. Right?
Flo Crivello (12:48):
We do see certain remote companies argue that it's fine. We don't need that quadrant. You know, everything can be synchronous. Everything can be text. Right? We strongly disagree with that. And by the way, we don't either believe that everything belongs to that quadrant. Just like other people would be, "Ah. Everything is formal video. Everything is informal text or whatever."
Flo Crivello (13:08):
We actually think that each of these four quadrants had a role to play in collaboration. Right? Again, we do think that some interactions squarely belong to that quadrant of informal video, and that with remote work, we're pushing them to other quadrants. Right? And so I think that's why people have some fatigue. It's like a lot of interactions that are meant to be informal video are now formal scheduled meetings on your calendar, back to back to back to back all day. Of course, that's exhausting. Right?
Flo Crivello (13:34):
I think more concretely, what I reproach to asynchronous text communication is twofold. The first one is productivity. And the second one is relationship building. Right? On the productivity side, very likely it's 8X slower type than it is to dock. Right? So that's just a very simple thing. We always joke that an hour on Slack, can save you 10 minutes on Zoom.
Flo Crivello (13:57):
And so not only is that, but also there is a ton more latency involved in asynchronous communication. Even us at Teamflow, again, we do believe that some collaboration is best good on basic on as texts communication. And sometimes I see these comments on Google docs or Notion, and it's like, "Hey, Allan. Did you take a look at that?"
Flo Crivello (14:17):
Two days later, Allan, "No, I haven't yet."
Flo Crivello (14:19):
Two days later me, "Oh, can you?"
Flo Crivello (14:22):
Two days later, Allan. It's like an eight days interaction that should be literally less than a minute. Right? And we see that all the time. Right? And I think that actually the speed at which we were able to build Teamflow speaks to that. Right? We built Teamflow and our MVP in less than three months with a team of four engineers because we were building Teamflow on Teamflow all day. We were located all day on Teamflow.
Flo Crivello (14:40):
And again, a mountain of research shows. There is that famous paper by [Judy Olsen 00:14:43] from the '90s that shows that people are two X more productive when they're co-working together physically in the same space, and they're within ear shot of each other, and they can ask questions rapidly to each other.
Flo Crivello (14:53):
So again, that's the first dimension I think that's missing with async text communication. It's just productivity. It's slow. Right?
Flo Crivello (14:59):
The second dimension is relationship building. I think one does not build relationships as well over text than they do over video. And I think that we've seen, by the way, disastrous consequences of trying to build relationships over text, for example, on Twitter. Right? Everybody agrees that debates on Twitter are very counterproductive and actually very toxic. Right? Everything devolves immediately into fights because people just assume the worst of each other, and they don't understand each other over text than they do over video.
Flo Crivello (15:26):
And I think that over video now, there is this human instinct that kicks in, and the human empathy that kicks in. It's like, "I see your face. I hear your voice. And I want to understand you, and I want to agree with you." Right? And so I think that that is the [inaudible 00:15:38] with text, and I think it's a catastrophe. I think again, it just makes you feel like a robot. It makes you feel like a contractor at work. You don't build relationships nearly as effectively anymore.
Flo Crivello (15:47):
And so I think that the way, again, even a purely remote companies like GitLab or InVision try to address that is via remote happy hours. Right? Or remote coffees. And again, it's just, it's kind of this awkward dynamic where it's like a time on your calendar. From five to six, everybody go to the Zoom meeting and have fun for 60 minutes. Right? And so I think, again, it suffers from the same formality as the rest of remote collaboration does today.
Tyler Sellhorn (16:12):
That's interesting. I do think that's interesting to think about that two by two grid of the two by two, that you're suggesting that there are different spaces in which this spectrum of asynchronous versus synchronous working kind of fit. I do think that's interesting. I'm also curious to think more. And this is just me thinking out loud here. Just thinking more about what we want to retain from the office as many more are working virtually, and I think that's really interesting.
Tyler Sellhorn (16:39):
Okay. So I want to transition and kind of think about some things that you're doing as a remote hiring manager, right, working at Teamflow and trying to build the team as you're scaling and growing as an organization. What are the things that you say in your company about page or in the ways that you guys are approaching remote working, what are the things that you say to kind of like demonstrate to a candidate, "Yes. This is a place that we really are doing remote work. Here are the reasons why you can know that or here are the benefits we provide," or what's the types of things that you do to position yourself in that recruiting phase of a candidate's journey towards your company? What are the things that you think people need to be saying to really communicate that well?
Flo Crivello (17:24):
Well, I mean to begin with, we have all our interviews with candidates on Teamflow. And so we kind of demonstrates this environment, and so, you know, I chat with candidates or whoever chats with candidates, and then you can see the rest of the team on the side. And sometimes we actually chat about them. For example, when one candidate was from the UK. And I was like, "Oh, like Ian over there is from the UK. Let's walk over there." It's like, "Hey, Ian. You guys are both from London patch and what not."
Flo Crivello (17:47):
And then once we onboard candidates, again, the sheer value of having them hang out with us in the office just makes it so much easier for them to onboard. Economists talk about this idea of spillover knowledge. Right? And they argue that it's how knowledge spreads in economies. And so the obviously they mean this figuratively, but I actually think there is something not figurative about like the knowledge in a way like spilling over from the brain. Right? And I think that you can benefit on this pillars of people's knowledge in the brain when you're sitting with them.
Flo Crivello (18:17):
You know, I was chatting with one of our users on Teamflow. They are an architectural film in San Francisco, and the senior architect was telling me, "You know, the way you learn architecture is by hanging out with the senior architect and overhearing a conversation he has on the phone with a contractor, like yelling at the contractor because he's late or whatever." Right? And again, that is something that you lose with remote work. It's like that spillover knowledge. Now you're just alone in your environment.
Flo Crivello (18:35):
And so I think people underestimate the awful impact of that. We're taking out the first few, the bottom most ladders during [inaudible 00:18:48] because now you're stuck at the bottom because you can't learn from people who almost yelled at you. You don't have access to them anymore.
Flo Crivello (18:53):
And so I think again, people who start at Teamflow, they hangout with us. They see how we work. They benefit from conversations that they overhear in the background. So little by little, they learn like that, how the company operates, and if they have any questions, it's very easy for them to say, "Hey, Brandan, quick question. Like, how does this thing work?" Right? And I think that lowering the friction like that to ask this kind of quick question by a factor of 10 makes such a difference when you onboard these.
Tyler Sellhorn (19:17):
Shout out to Brandon, managing the code there at Teamflow. But seriously, that's really interesting to hear you say that Teamflow, of course, you know, is working inside of Teamflow, but it also recruits on Teamflow. Right? How do you have an onsite interview in a remote space? Right?
Flo Crivello (19:35):
Yeah.
Tyler Sellhorn (19:35):
What does that level of the recruiting process look like for a remote team? Right?
Flo Crivello (19:41):
Right.
Tyler Sellhorn (19:42):
And as you mentioned, how do we make this less transactional? How do we make this more of a invitation into the team, into our space, into the things that we share as a working community, as a workplace? I'm such a huge fan of anybody who is thinking and working in building in this space where we say, "Okay. If we're not going to be co-located anymore, what does it mean to work together?" Right? I think that's really important.
Tyler Sellhorn (20:07):
Let's zoom out way past Teamflow. Let's think at that like remote working, working generally, kind of version of things. And I want to invite you to think about, okay, you left Uber to join Teamflow in 2020. Tell us the origin story of that. Right? Where we're saying, "Okay. I've got this awesome product manager job at Uber, right, but I'm going to choose to do this other thing, and this is why." Tell us the background there, please.
Flo Crivello (20:36):
Yeah. So, I actually didn't exactly leave Uber to build Teamflow. But there was a little bit of an origin story there at Uber where at some point my team went remote, and we had a technical outage. And so we were temporarily remote because we were launching in a bunch of cities at the time, and so I stayed in SF, and we had team members in Austin, some of them in Chicago, some of them in Los Angeles, and there was this technical outage where the product was down. And so, you know, when you have a technical outage, the situation is evolving very rapidly. You have to coordinate product and operations because there are supports design and all of that stuff.
Flo Crivello (21:07):
And something about that outage just made it 10X more painful. And I remember at the end of the day, I was sitting back against my chair, and I was about to cry. And I was like, "This was not my first outage. Why was this one so painful?"
Flo Crivello (21:19):
And then I realized that because we weren't together physically anymore, we couldn't cooperate as fluidly as the situation evolved. And that's what made that outage just painful. And so that's when I realized like, "Oh, what we miss is the office." Right? "That's why we can't work together anymore."
Flo Crivello (21:34):
And so that was kind of in the back of my mind when I left Uber. I left Uber to take a break, and I was traveling. I've been in Europe for six months or so, and then a few things happened. So I had to come back from my travels because COVID hit in March. And I read an article from John Palmer who is an ex-designer from Snap that's called "Spatial Interfaces." And it's basically making the case for basically Teamflow. It's broader than that. It's spatial interfaces generally, but there is almost a call to action there that's like, "I wonder what would the spatial Zoom look like? I wonder what it would look like if we work in a spatial interface all day?"
Flo Crivello (22:06):
And literally from the moment I closed the tab to now, I've been working on Teamflow full-time. And my initial intention was not for Teamflow to be a startup. I was literally just on a break, being a sabbatical if you will, in my bedroom, hanging out, and reading that blog post, and I was like, "That's an interesting idea. I wonder what it would look like."
Flo Crivello (22:24):
And I started hacking something together, and I coded all night, and at 4 AM I had a proof of concept, and then I just got sucked in, you know? And again, initially it was not [inaudible 00:22:32]. It was just me hacking in my bedroom.
Flo Crivello (22:33):
And then a friend of mine, investor told me, "You're out of your mind because if you haven't noticed there is a pandemic going on. Every company is going remote. This is a massive pain point, and this is very obviously a VC fundable business." And again, I just had become so passionate about the problem space that, you know, it just happened very spontaneously like that. I ended up raising money and building a team, and that's how it started.
Tyler Sellhorn (22:54):
Thank you for going deep on the origin story there, Flo. It's really cool to be connecting with others that felt the pain of a distributed team, right, and then use that to generate a new way of showing up to work.
Tyler Sellhorn (23:11):
I guess, maybe that's what I'm curious to think about with you now is to say, okay, you experienced a distributed team, as you described in some major metros here in the States, and you had the painful kind of outage moment that spurred you on to be working on Teamflow. But if you, again, staying zoomed out here to think about the remote working spectrum of things or workplaces in general, what do you think was the 2019 version of distributed work versus the pandemic version? And then what do you think is to come in 2022 and beyond? Can you kind of think through those different epochs of remote work for us?
Flo Crivello (23:51):
Yeah, 100%. I think that the tools that we've been using for remote work were never built exactly for remote work. You know, I think Slack and Zoom were built for remote work. And so I think the funny thing with remote work is that it's basically changed everything about the way we work, but there is a largely that unspoken assumption that we can keep using the exact same tools as before, you know, same Slack, same Zoom, again that were not built for those, you know? And I our core belief is that a new way of working calls for a new set of tooling.
Flo Crivello (24:23):
And so our hypothesis is that just as today we wonder, "How did people ever work before Google Docs? How did they ever work with before Notion, before email?" I think 10 years from now we're going to wonder, "How did people ever work before virtual offices?"
Flo Crivello (24:37):
And the answer will be, "Well, they had virtual offices. They just weren't virtual. They were offices." Right? And now that we work remotely, we need a virtual office, right, to fill the gap that, and to serve the same functions as the physical office was serving which was more free to collaboration, a better medium to build relationships, and also, and that is another part of the Teamflow vision, is that the physical office, people don't think of it this way, but it was a multi-player layer on top of every software that we had. There has been this tradition over the last decade from single player software to multi-player software, you know, from Photoshop to Figma, from Office to Google Docs, et cetera.
Flo Crivello (25:11):
And I think that a lot of single-player software actually becomes multiplayer by virtue of being physically next to someone. You know, Photoshop is single player, but if I'm next to you with my laptop, it is basically multi-player application. And I think that we lost that multiplayer layer on top of everything, and that is another thing that Teamflow aims to be.
Flo Crivello (25:29):
And so what I mean by that is that when you arrive on Teamflow, you have a dock with applications, very similar to what you have on Mac [inaudible 00:25:36] or on the iPhone. And so you can open applications here. And so you can actually open Notion, Figma. You can open Google Docs. You can take notes. You can whiteboard in here. And so when you open one of these applications, you can work on it together with your team, which I think is another big gap in the way we have meetings together remotely today. Because today, the tools we use to meet remotely are really focused on communication, but we think that there is more to collaboration than just communication.
Flo Crivello (26:00):
When you're physically next to someone in the office, you can not only talk to them, but you can also doodle on a scratch pad next to you or you can whiteboard next to you, and you lose all of these modalities when you're meeting with someone on Zoom. And so it makes for this kind of weird experience where on the one hand you're seeing them, and you're talking with them just like you would if you were next to them physically, but on the other hand, you can't do all of these things that you would be able to do if you were next to them physically. So, that's another dimension that we're producing here.
Tyler Sellhorn (26:24):
Excellent. Excellent. Flo, thank you so much for taking this time to share your learnings and be sharing with us. Anything that you'd like to say to our audience here, as we say goodbye?
Flo Crivello (26:35):
No, I think very excited to be part of this. Couldn't hope for something more exciting to work on.
Tyler Sellhorn (26:40):
Awesome, Flo. Well, blessings and looking to seeing what gets built. Really exciting.
Flo Crivello (26:49):
Thank you so much, Tyler.
Tyler Sellhorn (26:50):
Thanks so much again for listening to the show, and be sure to check out weworkremotely.com for the latest remote jobs. And if you're looking to hire a remote worker, We Work Remotely is the fastest and easiest way to do so.
Tyler Sellhorn (27:00):
As always, if you have someone we should talk to, any advice you have, or if you'd like to advertise on the podcast, please reach out to us at podcastatweworkremotely.com. That's [email protected].
Tyler Sellhorn (27:13):
Thanks so much for listening, and we'll talk to you next time.
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