Building Connected Remote Teams with Alexander Embiricos, Remotion

Episode Transcription

Alexander Embiricos:

... what we've realized is now that people are really getting saturated with the number of meetings they have. And so what we're realizing is actually more valuable, what's missing now isn't having a lot of time to talk about work, but having the time to connect socially, just as humans to each other. And often that social time leads to stronger relationships, which lead to better decisions and which leads to more creativity down the line.

Meghan Pfeifer:

This is The Future of Work, an original series from Better Product. I'm Meghan here to give you a quick snapshot into our latest installment, but before we jump in, if you want to get connected to other product experts, join our community, betterproduct.community.

Meghan Pfeifer:

Remotion was born out of necessity. Alexandaer and his co-founder, Charley Ho, were told it was impossible to launch a business without being together in the same room or even the same city, but that wasn't good enough for them. So having a great job and the city where you live don't have to be mutually exclusive. By having the freedom to separate your work community from your life community, you get richer, more diverse perspectives, creating a better output all around.

Alexander Embiricos:

Many people who want to work in tech, they know that maybe at some point they should move to San Francisco or to New York, and then they're going to have to make a whole bunch of new friends. And how are they going to meet friends? Well, they're probably going to meet their friends at work. And so their friend group is going to be a bunch of people who work in the exact same maybe company or same industry as them. And I think that really is damaging to community. And so one of the things I'm really excited about with remote work is the ability for folks to be more flexible in terms of whether or not they have to move to different places. For example, for people to contribute to different industries from wherever they grew up.

Meghan Pfeifer:

Remotion isn't only competing with in-person meetings. They're also competing against the status quo of all communications software. So everything from Slack to text, to email, Zoom, anything else we can think of. We talk about Zoom fatigue, but what we're really talking about there is that scheduled meeting fatigue. So yeah, we're not all used to watching ourselves all day, every day. There's psychology behind that that says that's exhausting, but that scheduled meeting fatigue happens no matter how meetings are conducted, whether those are remote or are in-person. The fundamental problem really starts with the question, when do we need to meet? When do we need to talk live? Or when can you just send a quick message? And Remotion's mimicking that accessibility you get from being in person while removing the hurdles from being remote.

Alexander Embiricos:

The video experience is very important to us, but what we're really focused on is getting you into the video experience at the right times. The way that we think work should be is that people should spend a little less time texting and a little less time in scheduled meetings.

Meghan Pfeifer:

We all know, especially in this remote world, that burnout is a big issue and the causes of burnout vary a ton. So it could be anything from COVID and the restrictions that took so much away from people in their work lives, but also in their personal lives. A lot of people, if you're working from home, don't really think about or know how to separate work and home. So often resulting in people just having no separation and working longer hours than they normally would. When you're remote, you also feel like you have to show that you're working constantly. You have to always be proving that, "Yes, I'm not here sitting watching Netflix. I'm actually working on that presentation you want." And on top of the job you're doing, that proof is also pretty draining.

Meghan Pfeifer:

So what did Remotion do? First and foremost, they took something that we probably all know as, "Oh yeah, I put that Slack emoji up when I need heads down time," or, "I set up a specific calendar block for heads down working time." Instead, Remotion built a feature called Focus that makes it easier to tell your colleagues that you're working, but not responsive. And then also it should be celebrated when people need to take breaks during the day. Finally, burnout can be caused by not having those casual conversations that help you break up the monotonous back-to-back work every day. So it's kind of nice to have that human personal interaction in between the cold corporate business world interactions. Remotion is exploring some exciting new features and Alexander's looking for a co-designer to do some brainstorming. You'll hear him and Christian get into this a bit during this episode. As a listener, we're giving you this insight for the opportunity to work with Alexander and his team. If you're interested, shoot him an email at alexander@remotion.com.

Christian Beck:

Alexander, thank you so much for joining the podcast. It's a pleasure to have you here and learn more about Remotion.

Alexander Embiricos:

Sure. Great to meet you.

Christian Beck:

All right. Before we started talking, we talked about a bunch of random things and we got off topic before we even started the show, but we're going to start not at the very beginning. I would love to hear how you got it started with a co-founder. That would be great.

Alexander Embiricos:

Cool. Charley and I actually know each other from college. He studied electrical engineering there and then went to work at a startup called Bebop, and I studied computer science and then I went to work at Dropbox afterwards. We both went through our different journeys and picked up some ideas about the types of companies that we wanted to build. And both of us independently knew that we wanted to start our own company one day and create the exact perfect team culture. And so later, when both of us had decided, like he was done with working for Google and I had left Dropbox, started a completely failed company and then was wandering the desert to try to figure out what I wanted to do next.

Alexander Embiricos:

We met and realized that we wanted to build the same company and it came to, "Okay, we want to build SaaS products. We want to build products that people will pay for as opposed to with an ads model or something. And specifically we want our team culture to be a close knit, highly collaborative culture that's more light on process, more like you put people in a room and stuff just gets done." We really were addicted to this feeling of teams humming.

Alexander Embiricos:

And that was all great. We were working on something that was not Remotion, getting started. And then we realized that Charley was going to have to move to Chicago because his partner was moving to Chicago for med school. And so we were like, "It's 2019. We should be able to make this work. Let's start a fully distributed company." But of course we wanted to be careful, so we started doing all the research, learning about all the best practices and talking to our other founder entrepreneur friends about why they had or had not embraced remote work. And what we heard from everyone was, "Hey, you can build a distributed company, but you should probably not be remote as co-founders. You should probably have an HQ with co-founders."

Alexander Embiricos:

And so we started looking at why and reading what, say, the GitLabs and the Envisions had to say about how to do things more remotely. And what we realized was that the wave of companies that had really thrived when they were remote, before COVID at least, had a very specific type of culture that was very async first and very much more structured. And GitLab likes to say it formalized the informal. And so as we started reading this stuff, we realized, "Wow, we don't want to start this type of company either." And all of a sudden it made sense to us why all our leadership friends didn't want to start that type of company either.

Alexander Embiricos:

And we started thinking about why that was, and we realized that the way that you talk when you're remote is completely different, everything is filtered through text and then scheduled meetings and you can't just look over and talk to someone, which is the most human way to do it. And so we realized, "Okay, the way that we talk is different when we're remote, that means that you have to be super structured and more process oriented and more async." Is there a way to make this work if we have better tooling? And we realized, yes, there is, and that's why we started working on Remotion. So fundamentally, Remotion as a company, our mission is to enable more types of team cultures to thrive, including team cultures that previously might've said they were an in-office culture. So I think of the Dropboxs and Figmas of the world that are now embracing remote work but before COVID would have told you that they were an in-office culture. We believe they can thrive as well remotely.

Christian Beck:

Before the show, Alexander, I was trying to pronounce your name and went with a Spanish spelling. And then you gave me a different pronunciation and I was like, "Oh, you're Greek." So I know I said I want to hear your life story, but I'd love to hear what's your background.

Alexander Embiricos:

For sure. So I have a pretty unusual background, depending on how you might look at it. You might say that I'm a global citizen, or you might say that I'm just very confused. So my dad is Greek. My mother is Malaysian, and even those are approximations. I was born in England, grew up in Asia, Bahamas, Switzerland. I actually came to the States originally because I wanted to build airplanes. And this funny thing happened in my early career-

Christian Beck:

Where did you get off course there? You went from airplanes to Remotion. That's an interesting journey.

Alexander Embiricos:

Well, so here's the thing, right? I came to the States specifically, because I thought America builds great aircraft. And what I didn't know and for some reason I never researched and no one told me when I was 16 looking at college was that you have to be American to work on the cool airplanes. And that's when I realized I had to pivot my career because I wanted to work on the interesting aircraft and I wasn't going to be able to. And so I ended up going through this whole journey of trying a bunch of different things and settling on computer science and becoming a PM at Dropbox. So one of the things that happened after I ended up getting this job at Dropbox and being a PM was I realized just how great the jobs were and the type of work that I could do was, both in terms of how interesting it was, the caliber of teammates and the pay in the Bay Area.

Alexander Embiricos:

And although I had come to the States to learn and work on interesting aircraft and then changed my mind about what my career was going to be, basically, I was planning on moving out of the States at some point early in my career. And then I realized, "Oh, I can't. My career in the States in technology is so good." And so I was forced to choose between wanting to continue my global upbringing and provide that for a family of my own eventually versus going down this career path that I was finding so interesting. And ultimately that tension is what made it so easy for me to decide to work on Remotion when we came up with that idea, because I realized, "Hey, there are great people everywhere and it would be awesome if platforms like Facebook and Twitter of tomorrow are built by people in many more places with many more ideas and backgrounds. Let's go make that a reality and enable people to join great teams from everywhere."

Christian Beck:

Yeah, that's cool. You said different backgrounds and different people, which is... I don't know if that's unique, but that's unusual to hear that. I think your product marketing speak on the website says, "Remote work shouldn't feel remote." And I think that makes sense. Everybody's thinking about remote. But the way that you've talked about it so far is diversity in experience and different worldviews, and you've mentioned the word culture. I'd love to hear more about how that provides a foundation that's not just functionally, you can work remotely and now you can collaborate remotely and digitally. That's true, but it seems like your lens is more on enrichment and working with people with different perspectives and almost cross-culturally or something.

Alexander Embiricos:

I think one of the things that struck me from spending time in San Francisco was that I started recognizing that there are many forms of diversity. And in San Francisco, we were really focused on a few that clearly need attention, but no matter how much work we did on those, we would still not have geographic diversity with people working on our products. And one of the things that, say, I love so much about working with my teammates at Remotion today is, say, we have an engineer, Fernando, who's in Uruguay. And he has a very different point of view and a different approach on many things, in sometimes obvious and sometimes subtle ways. And I think that's super interesting.

Alexander Embiricos:

And when I go back to it, yes, it's useful to be able to work from home and I think that is incredibly valuable for many people, but something that I think is even more fundamentally important is thinking about how communities are disrupted by most of the people getting educated, having to move for their education and then having to move again to different urban centers to get their jobs.

Alexander Embiricos:

Or like, many people who want to work in tech, they know that maybe at some point they should move to San Francisco or to New York, and then they're going to have to make a whole bunch of new friends. And how are they going to meet friends? Well, they're probably going to meet their friends at work. And so their friend group is going to be a bunch of people who work in the exact same maybe company or same industry as them. And I think that really is damaging to community. And so one of the things I'm really excited about with remote work is the ability for folks to be more flexible in terms of whether or not they have to move to different places. For example, for people to contribute to different industries from wherever they grew up.

Christian Beck:

That's another perspective I haven't quite heard. So I'm going to share an opinion that I have and I'm curious to hear your thoughts on it, which is, so we're in Indianapolis. You may know this term of flyover country. You've probably flown over Indiana quite a bit in your life. And so since COVID, there was almost this, "Oh, now people can work from anywhere. What's going to happen? Are more people going to move to places like Indianapolis and then have a career?" And what you just said, I've never really seen put that way, that you can almost destroy communities by forcing people to uproot and leave, which is a big problem for Indiana. We have brain drain from our great universities and we just hope people come back.

Christian Beck:

But one of the challenges I've had is that if we hire remotely, the businesses still aren't there in the community itself, so they're spread out. Do you think about it from that level? Are you still part of the community, if your business or the companies you work for are all hosted in one area? Or are you seeing a future where businesses, yes, they might be centralized in the valley, for example, now, but do you start to see that they might start spinning up everywhere? Or maybe nowhere, if your partner's in Chicago and you're in New York, where is Remotion? It's everywhere.

Alexander Embiricos:

It's fun. Like we, for various reasons that I don't even understand to be honest, but I think tax reasons and HR reasons, we have to have a headquarters. And so we just made it a virtual mailbox in San Francisco because I didn't know what else to do. But yeah, it's a great question. I don't really think we truly have an HQ as a company.

Alexander Embiricos:

And going back to your question of what's going to happen with businesses? I think two things to share. The first is I think this is going to happen slowly, and with remote work, I think the first thing we're going to see is people moving, working for businesses that are left where they used to be. So for example, a lot of hub and spoke type models where there's still some hybrid company headquarters is in San Francisco or New York. But as more and more people move, let's say a bunch of really awesome people move or stay in Indy, then maybe one day they'll decide to start a company and then when they decide that they want to be hybrid, they'll just work out of the office in Indy.

Alexander Embiricos:

So I think the moving of the businesses will lag from the moving of the people. But actually I'm very excited about the moving of the people, because I think that... Let's say your company is headquartered in New York, but let's just say you live in Florida or something. If that's where you grew up, you can actually have a group of friends in the community that is unrelated to your work. And I think that if you hang out with a bunch of people who don't work in tech as part of your day to day, then you're going to build better tech products that aren't pure tech mindset, which has some blind spots. So I'm excited about that.

Christian Beck:

So I want to dive into Remotion because I feel so far your perspective on remote work is actually quite different from a lot. So I want to dive back into what the status quo is on remote meeting software. And I don't ever like to bash any software on the show, but we all know Zoom and for Zoom, Zoom to me is a platform. It was a lifesaver for everybody. The fact that it could even keep up with the demand in 2020 was just like, they deserve a congressional medal if you can give something to a company.

Christian Beck:

But as I thought about it, as the year went on, I was like, "I can't wait to see what's next." And it wasn't a dig at Zoom. It was just more like, this is just the bare minimum, really, that we can have. We can talk online and it's magical. But what happens when people start creating startups that are more geared towards the way work is done? And it seems like that's more where Remotion is. So if it makes sense to position against Zoom or just in general, against the traditional status quo of video conferencing software, what is different about Remotion? What's the different approach you're taking?

Alexander Embiricos:

I'd love to talk about it as Remotion versus the status quo, because the status quo isn't just meeting software. The status quo is meeting software and texts software, be it Slack, or maybe you don't use Slack and you just use email or Microsoft Teams. It was super interesting to see some research early in COVID by the National Bureau of Economic Research. What they found is that when COVID started, people started sending 20% more emails, but that didn't last for very long. Clearly there was some communication gap, but it was just too tiring. And so instead what we netted out with, and this is research from last year, the new numbers are even more. We netted out with 13% more meeting load, but meetings being minus 20% in duration. So it was just interesting to see, "Okay, with the tooling that we have, we're missing some communication points. Let's just talk more. Let's spend more time in scheduled meetings."

Alexander Embiricos:

Okay. Now we know how everyone feels about that, where people are Zoom fatigued. It was really funny, I was talking to a perspective large company last week, and they were a Google Meet only shop, but they were also just talking about how Zoom fatigued they were. And I was just laughing because really in my mind, what Zoom fatigue really is, it's scheduled meeting fatigue. And scheduled meetings suck whether or not you're in person. I think they're even worse when you have to use very immersive software that makes everyone's faces feel uncomfortably close, and you can see yourself as well. So you're looking in the mirror and there's all this great research on how we can make that better. So I think there will be a class of software built just to make meetings less fatiguing.

Alexander Embiricos:

But fundamentally I think the actual problem lies at a level deeper. It's like, when do we use video to talk? When do we talk live? And when should we? Because today, we talk live through meetings. That's the default in remote, right? So in an office, what do I if I want to talk to you? I'd probably just look over. And remotely, what do I do? I'd probably text you first and try to talk over text. And if 10 minutes later and many interrupts and alt tabs later, I still haven't answered the question, I have a meta conversation about whether or not we should talk live. And then we decide to talk live, and then we schedule it, because we're in scheduled meetings while we're doing the texting because we don't have any time to do anything else. And then we meet a day later. It's horrible.

Alexander Embiricos:

The video experience is very important to us, but what we're really focused on is getting you into the video experience at the right times. The way that we think work should be is that people should spend a little less time texting and a little less time in scheduled meetings. They should do more of their execution actually asynchronously and documented, but then they should spend time together to be creative together or to connect socially together. And Remotion is a tool that tries to create the conditions so that you feel connected to your team and you get into those casual conversations.

Christian Beck:

When you say that this is getting people back to collaboration and creativity, how does Remotion do that?

Alexander Embiricos:

When you think about when you have ideas or when you have that energy to collaborate, it doesn't happen on a schedule. So what's really important is harnessing the energy. And so I think two things are important about energy: the timing, when do I have it? And also how do I convey that energy? And we know that the timing doesn't happen on a schedule, and we know that the energy is sometimes lost if it's conveyed over text and then to get something back. And so really what we're trying to help people do is talk at the right times for exactly how long they need it in a way that feels natural as though you're in person, rather than having to schedule out that moment of collaboration.

Christian Beck:

It seems to me, just looking at the product itself, it almost feels as if it's not the destination. It seems to co-exist with your workspace. Meaning you don't, "Let's start a Remotion," and you go to Remotion and you click start and then you have the Remotion stage. It's Remotion's sitting there for spontaneous... You've got people's faces there. You can just start chatting, but it's almost like you get to keep your focus on the work.

Alexander Embiricos:

Yeah, that's spot on, actually. We actually use that term destination to describe what we're not building. So Remotion is basically two features. The first is ambient awareness of your team or feeling of presence, and the second is really lightweight video chat. And when we're designing Remotion, we're basically doing some really insane things. We're trying to build the world's first non-immersive desktop app. What we mean by that is we're trying to build the first video app that you're going to interact with, but rather than navigating to the spot and having this tab open or sitting in this thing, it's just a glance away, emulating as though you were sitting next to your teammates.

Alexander Embiricos:

You get to an office, you decide where everyone sits. And the idea is when you're working remotely, you install Remotion, and you decide who your favorites are. And then you can always bounce over to those people whenever you want. And if you want to talk to them, you just click on them and their face turns into video. That's it. There's no thing that starts or thing that distracts you from what you were doing beforehand, but maybe, just like also in an office, you see that two people are talking to each other and you feel, "Oh, that's cool." There's a sense of energy and humans are doing things on my team, which is something that's missing at work today. Maybe you decide you want to join. Those are the types of interactions we try to enable.

Christian Beck:

You've actually mentioned some statistics, the more scheduled meetings that we have, shorter in duration, as an indicator of the problem. When you move forward with Remotion, have you thought about how to tell whether you're succeeding? How do you say, "Oh, they've been using Remotion. It's really helping because of blank." Okay, aside from a great testimonial, but do you have a sense for what would success look like for Remotion? Are we really doing the work that we set out to do for people?

Alexander Embiricos:

That's a really interesting question because actually our opinion on that has changed as COVID has gone along. When we got started, we were basically saying, "Hey, talking live remotely is just completely broken and you should stop using Zoom and you should start using Remotion." And so for us, success is looking at a team and maybe they get started. They try the product for a day or two, and then we slowly see that every single person on the team gets added. And within two weeks we're wall-to-wall, and they've basically replaced all the Google Meet links in their meetings. They don't need links anymore. They just type the word Remo or Remotion into their calendar invite location. And that people are just talking in Remotion nonstop, instead of their scheduled meetings. Maybe they're even canceling some meetings. Some of them are ad hoc, et cetera.

Alexander Embiricos:

But what we've realized is now that people are really getting saturated with the number of meetings they have. And so what we're realizing is actually more valuable, what's missing now isn't having a lot of time to talk about work, but having the time to connect socially, just as humans to each other. And often that social time leads to stronger relationships, which lead to better decisions and which leads to more creativity down the line. And so now when we look at a team and we're trying to see, is this team successful? We typically ask them, "What are you looking for by downloading Remotion?" And typically we actually see that there's more emphasis on this softer stuff. It's not, "We need to talk about work more." It's, "We want to just connect more." And I think if you want to know that people on a team are connecting, it's, are they talking maybe twice a day, or once or twice a day outside of their scheduled meetings? That's the earliest indicator that we look at now. So it's actually a lower bar.

Christian Beck:

That's interesting. We talked before the show too about this hybrid environment a little bit. And I think in some ways last year was easier, thinking about remote and video, because everybody's remote and it's a level playing field to that degree. As the vaccine comes and people start going back, hybrid is taking over. And you said your designer is there in the Brooklyn area with you. How are you thinking about this new world? Before you had this theory, then COVID happens. Now you have, what's the fallout? Some remote, some in-person. How do you think that factors into what you're planning with Remotion or are you already handling it?

Alexander Embiricos:

It's something that we're thinking about a lot. I think there's sort of two challenges as it pertains to live conversation. The first is a technology challenge, which is just, can you make the conference experience decent, even when you have people who are mixed between various remote locations and in an office? The second challenge is the one that I'm personally most interested in. It's a product design challenge, which is how do you create an environment that keeps the playing field level between the remote employees and the people who are in an office? I was talking to a friend yesterday who's thinking about taking a job with a company that he knows will become hybrid and most of the team will be in an office.

Alexander Embiricos:

And so the thing I asked him is, "Hey, are any of the leaders of your company going to remain remote?" Because if you know that's the case, then you know that company is going to be highly incentivized to get all the habits in place and all the structure in place so that other remote employees will be successful. But that's this temporary place that we're in, I think, where because we don't have the right tooling, there's still a lot of effort that needs to be required to maintain that level playing field. I don't think that'll ever go away, but what we're trying to solve for Remotion is, at least from a live conversation perspective, how do we still fulfill our promise of creating that ambient awareness of who's around on your team and is this a good time to talk? Whether or not they're in an office or not.

Christian Beck:

I think you hit that right on the head. I started my career in 2007 at Autodesk, and we had offices all over the world and none of the people I was physically next to were really on my working team. And I noticed all the time, you could just get a sense for who like was important and who you had to level the playing field for. So I completely understand what you're describing, where, how do you almost create the equity that you might have in person and expand it out there?

Alexander Embiricos:

Yeah, totally. And I think that the challenge is going to be, how do you create an experience that's lightweight enough that the people in an office are still willing to interact with it? For example, let's pretend we're talking about VR solutions. VR is heavy. You've got to wear this headset and then be tethered to a computer. If you're in an office, I don't think you want to be in VR also. But on the other hand, and again, I'm using this as an example, we're not working on VR, I'm just using it as an extreme example. If you're fully remote, maybe you're more willing to use a very immersive software solution while you're doing your work. So I think the thing that we have to design for is a really lightweight experience for the people in the office, and then it can be a little bit of a heavier experience for the folks who are remote. I'm curious, how are you thinking about... You were mentioning that your agency is switching to a hybrid model. What are you planning right now?

Christian Beck:

You're describing the challenges that are unfolding as we move along. A couple of things for me, I really like being in person. We're getting better remote... hybrid, I should say. We try to maintain as much co-location as we have. We opened an office in New York and we're open to some remote employees, but we're worried that okay, during COVID we could hire all over the world, but we knew once we were back in the office, were we really going to be able to handle all the remote employees? And I still think we've learned a lot and it could get better, but that was a fear that we had that drove some of those hiring decisions. But right now it's right where you said, I'm back in the office. I struggle being punctual as it is, but when I was at home on Zoom, a meeting ended and I just started the next one and I was never late. Now that I'm back in the office, I'm back in my old habits. I get stuck talking to somebody and I'm late. But when we were all in person, you could physically see me.

Alexander Embiricos:

Can I interject? Because this is one of my frustrations with the meeting software. I guess I actually didn't really properly answer your question about how are we different than Zoom? Zoom is for meetings. And the way that you get into a Zoom meeting is you click into this link, right? And then you sit in a dark black box for up to seven minutes until the person you meant to talk to doesn't show up, but your camera and mic is on the whole time, so you don't pick your nose. And it's nothing wrong with Zoom. That's just how video meeting software works, it's oppressive. And so that comes back to why at Remotion, we're super focused on this idea of creating that awareness.

Alexander Embiricos:

So I'm late all the time with my team. I don't know. Maybe I'm a bad person, but here's the thing. My team can see that I'm talking to you right now, or they can see that I'm talking to a different teammate. And so they just know that I'm late. It's like they can look through the meeting room. They're not going to wait in the Zoom room alone. They'll just wait until I leave the side conversation, and then we'll talk. And so for example, that thing that you're talking about, I think is really interesting because it's completely unsolved by meeting software by definition. But I think very solvable by other types of software, that's more about being a lightweight office, be it virtual or in person.

Christian Beck:

You also brought up just another example today. Another thing I've been thinking about, and I'm curious your thoughts on this too. You haven't mentioned it in this way, but burnout has been such a big issue. And I've been reflecting on it a lot lately where, really starting in April, Twittersphere and Design Twitter, everybody's, "I'm so much more productive at home." And it was obvious. Part of the reason why is because you've stripped out, not just the commute, ignore the commute, but all of the socialization that happened in between.

Christian Beck:

And today, I just got in the most inane conversation with two of my coworkers, and I'm like, "This is what I love." Because I wouldn't have scheduled a meeting to talk about some inane detail about a new bed that I bought for my kid, but it just emerged out of nowhere and it was great. Was it productive? Absolutely not. It was not productive whatsoever, but that's what I feel is what keeps people from getting burnout with companies is that sort of in between, what's happening in between the work. And so I reflected on that a lot and it seems like that's really what you're trying to do is can you get people back to that almost? You're successful in helping people work, if you're getting them back to those types of conversations.

Alexander Embiricos:

Yeah, that's exactly right, and that's also what we've been learning. Remotion in early 2020 was very much about productive conversations, and our website today, honestly it lags pretty far behind our current... And I'm excited, we're doing a positioning workshop on Monday. But we've realized, "Hey, people have figured out how to be productive remotely better than we thought they would. But what's really missing is actually the type of conversation that you just talked about, like the bed that you bought."

Alexander Embiricos:

When it comes to burnout, I think that there are a few factors worth bearing in mind, three of them. So the first is right now, depending on your risk appetite and your family situation, you can't socialize with your friends after work and so you're stuck at home. Right? And even with remote work, post COVID, that won't be a thing anymore. They'll actually be even more socializing, hopefully, than if we're all stuck in one spot.

Alexander Embiricos:

The second factor is the feeling of being remote. And something that we hear is that when you're remote, no one knows if you're actually working, if you're in IC, and so you want to show that you're working. And the easiest way to show that is to be hyper responsive to all the interactions that you receive, right? Like someone Slacks, you immediately Slack back. And something that we've tried to design for at Remotion, again, is this awareness. And we have a very explicit mode called Focus, which we call it that way because we're trying to celebrate unavailability and frame it in a positive light. And really the goal for us is to help people broadcast that they're not going to be responsive and to reduce the pressure to respond quickly.

Alexander Embiricos:

And we also have a culture on the team where it's perfectly fine to, say, go on a walk in the middle of the day, which I don't know why it wouldn't be. We actually celebrate that. If you go on a walk in the middle of your day, it's on the beach or something, the team will actually post a picture of that in Slack and celebrate the fact that they got out of work. So my second point on burnout is basically, I think as leaders, we need to do a better job of telling people that it's okay to not be working, and it's okay to be working but unresponsive.

Alexander Embiricos:

The third point is basically what you talked about, which is more of a product point of Remotion, which is trying to create those casual conversations. So that's some of where we're taking the product next. What we've learned from the past year is that our product is good at creating those conversations for extroverted, but as we've started meeting more and more types of teams with more and more different types of personalities on those teams, we've realized we can actually take this to a whole nother level in terms of creating the nonproductive, but valuable conversations. And that's what we're working on right now.

Christian Beck:

Yeah. Let's dive into that. I was going to ask, because I know y'all just raised some funding and I'd like to end this conversation with just helping talk about what's next for you. What's on the horizon for you? So you've been great for extroverted teams, but now you want to take that another level. What does that look like? What other things are you working on?

Alexander Embiricos:

So the main thing for us is creating the context for that conversation. You're back in the office and all of a sudden you have that conversation, right? So we're thinking about how do we create the context? And there's two main ways that we're thinking about that. The first is how can we create some spaces that, say, a company leader or someone who's sort of the social chair of the team can create and curate and organize such that other people feel welcomed into that space and feel like this is a space for nonproductive conversation? So shared spaces, in a nutshell. Right now Remotion is free for anyone to sign up for. And as we start working on this, hopefully next week or the week after, we're going to be a closed weightless model, which is a technique that I love so that I can get on the phone with everyone who's signing up before they use the product.

Alexander Embiricos:

The second thing we're looking at is figuring out what are the signals that exist remotely that can help give someone an idea that this is a good time to talk. Or to nudge you, "Hey, someone else is free," whatever, "why don't you have a casual conversation?" And that's new for us because we've taken a very privacy forward view of status in Remotion where everything is manual. You decide when you're focused. You decide when you're open. Because we were very concerned with creating this view that your manager is spying on you and wants to know whether you're working, so we took the opposite approach. You can decide what you show to your team. And I think what we're realizing is that we need a more nuanced point of view there. And so we're going to start building certain automations and certain integrations that help others know that this is a good time to talk.

Christian Beck:

I don't mean to start co-designing this right now...

Alexander Embiricos:

Oh, go for it. I'd love to hear what you think.

Christian Beck:

See, I'm thinking about that, and I was thinking too about this whole idea that people are more productive for different types of tasks at different points in the day. Like even myself, I'd never reflected on when I'm fresher for certain type of work until COVID. So I'm like, "I need to schedule any of my sales calls for earlier in the day." Or if I haven't gotten to the blog post by 2:00 PM, it's just not going to happen. So I'd be curious if you can weave some of that into behavioral preferences. Can we look at Figma or Illustrator and see you spend most of your time in between 10:00 and 12:00? Or something ridiculous, like, "You have 70 more artboards created before noon than you do after. You should consider creative..." So it's almost like helping people learn about themselves to schedule the right sort of times themselves. So anyway, that's either something you've thought of or just a free live idea.

Alexander Embiricos:

I love that idea. Are we allowed to just jam for a moment?

Christian Beck:

Yeah. Dude, this is my podcast, man. We can do whatever.

Alexander Embiricos:

So here's my question for you then. Let's say we lean into this idea and we have a lot of automated tracking of the tools that you're using and when. I think you're probably more manager persona than individual contributor [crosstalk 00:33:04]. Is that right?

Christian Beck:

Oh, please. I'm just going to pretend you never said that. Sure.

Alexander Embiricos:

My question is, how do we make sure that the other people on the team who are not managers, but who are individual contributors and who don't want to feel like they're being spied on, how do we frame that in a way that makes people comfortable with it or makes people want that feature?

Christian Beck:

That's a good point. If there's a way to just make it amongst the individual contributors and maybe you could almost set the privacy for who's even allowed to see that. Where if you're a designer on a team of, say, three other designers, and maybe you've got a product manager and some engineers or something like that, you could almost set the privacy levels to be set to a certain thing, almost invert the power controls. Whereas rather than a top-down admin setting, it's actually bottoms up where you actually get to control upward or whatever that looks like. But it could also just be personal. You could start personal where you watch and listen, and only share that with the individual, like it's a teaching tool. Say, "Hey, we're noticing this. You should consider scheduling Focus..." Nobody else is going to see that.

Alexander Embiricos:

I like that.

Christian Beck:

Thanks for joining us. And if you haven't yet, be sure to join the Better Product community. We've got all sorts of content and resources for you. And if you want more audio, don't forget The Business of Product is our latest show to join the Better Product network. And you can find that and more at betterproduct.community.