(2019-08-15) Kwok The Arc Of Collaboration

Kevin Kwok: The Arc of Collaboration. When Slack.com first started growing, there were many debates over which company would own collaboration-ware, Slack or Dropbox.

what’s striking is that Slack’s victory seems hollow as well. If anything we’ve seen even more new companies building towards owning parts of these workflows and getting traction.

If Slack won the war, and owns collaboration, why doesn’t it feel like the war is over?

A new generation of functional apps have risen, with messaging and collaboration built directly into them as first parties. And with them it becomes increasingly clear that Slack isn’t air traffic control for every app, it’s 911 for when they fail.

Slack is current best solution for filling these cracks (Universal Inbox). But it doesn’t fix the cracks themselves, improved processes and productivity apps are needed for that.

As the ecosystem of specialized SaaS apps and workflows continues to mature, messaging becomes a place of last resort. When things are running smoothly, work happens in the apps built to produce them. And collaboration happens within them. Going to slack is increasingly a channel of last resort, for when there’s no established workflow of what to do.

Separated at Birth: Productivity and Collaboration

Productivity and Collaboration are two sides of the same coin for any team with more than one person. Work is just the iterated output of individuals creating and coordinating together. But the two have been distinct and isolated segments historically, due to how long the feedback loops of both were.

What really began our modern era of how to think about collaboration began with the shift to software. Digital work has significantly faster feedback loops for productivity.

the constraint on work became much more about the speed and lossiness of collaboration

As the industry began to transition to cloud, companies like Dropbox and Box.com rose. Instead of everyone keeping their own local copies of documents, what if everyone had them pooled in the cloud

In a pure cloud world, this atomic unit of documents seems increasingly archaic.

Documents are more a constraint of a pre-cloud world. And once you assume storing them online is table stakes, the question becomes where is actual collaboration happening that then leads people to wherever they need to do work.

Dropbox understands this concern. It’s what’s driven their numerous forays into owning the workflows and communication channels themselves. With Carousel, Mailbox, and their new desktop apps all working to own that.

Slack became the place you messaged your coworkers and sent them links to the work you wanted them to check out. They began to displace Dropbox as the center of gravity for companies.

The dream of Slack is that they become the central nervous system for all of a company’s employees and apps.

This is the view of a clean separation of productivity and collaboration. Have all your apps for productivity and then have a single app for coordinating everyone, with your apps also feeding notifications into this system.

But productivity isn’t separate from collaboration

It’s not that Slack is too distracting and killing individual productivity. It’s that your company’s processes are so dysfunctional you need Slack to be distracting and killing individual productivity.

Slack serves three functions:

Else statement. Slack is the exception handler

Watercooler

Meta-coordination. Slack is the best place for meta-levels of strategy and coordination that don’t have specific productivity apps. This is really a type of ‘else statement’, but one that could persist for a while in unstructured format.

Slack’s importance is inversely tethered to the rate at which functional workflows within companies become legible and systematized. Both at an operational level, and long term at the meta-strategic level.

Functional workflows rule everything around me

As it becomes more clear what are specific functional jobs to be done, we see more specialized apps closely aligned with solving for that specific loop. And increasingly collaboration is built in natively to them

for our purposes, let’s use an example, Figma.

Figma is a collaborative design tool. Unlike Sketch or Photoshop, Figma has collaboration built in natively as a first party.

Figma shows what collaboration means when you understand that collaboration is intimately part of productivity. And always has been.

There’s no more need to send an updated file on Slack. Or type in feedback on Slack.

More and more apps in all categories understand that collaboration should and must be built in as a first party if they want to best serve their customers. Notion, Airtable, etc all understand this. The feedback loops of collaboration get so short that they become part of the productivity loop.

*Over time we see productivity apps eat up the stack. Google docs is a good example of the abstraction layers of coordination.

Google docs is good at line level commenting. So for this low level of coordination it excels. Which when sending word documents was the current state of the art, felt advanced. But increasingly, feels limited for higher abstraction levels of collaboration. As apps like Figma build in deeper collaboration.*

there is a need for a layer across all the applications

Slack in its current form cannot be this. If you have to switch out of a product to use Slack, then it is not the layer tying them altogether. Instead, the layer needs to exist a layer above. If everything was in browser it’d be a browser extension. But since most apps are not, it needs to be at the OS layer.

Perhaps one of the closest to this we’ve seen was Screenhero.

But there is a non-enterprise example of what this layer might look like. That company is Discord.

Discord is actually two products bundled into one. It is a messaging app that looks akin to Slack. But it is also a meta-layer that runs across all games.

Beyond its Slack-like functionality, Discord has functionality like a social graph, seeing what games your friends are playing, voice chat, etc. These have been misunderstood by the market. They aren’t random small features. They are the backbone of a central nervous system.

the most beautiful loop of them all. Progress is a process by which humans compound and improve on our ability to work together better for the things we care about.

An approach like Discord for enterprise will need novel acquisition loops. This type of collaboration has strong intra-company network effects at scale. But lacks trivially obvious inter-company network effects or pre-liquidity loops.