(2021-10-06) Crivello Feel Like A Team Again With Teamflow Your Own Virtual Office

Flo Crivello: Feel Like a Team Again With Teamflow, Your Own Virtual Office. Teamflow is a virtual office for remote teams. It recreates the casual, unplanned chats and the seamless collaboration that people miss from physical offices.

Here’s how it works: you see your video in a bubble on a virtual floor plan. You can move that bubble around, and only hear people around you. That means that, to chat with someone, you just drag your bubble over, and start talking.

We think what makes Teamflow work so well is the interplay between three fundamental parts — its:

• Spatial interface
• Integrated apps
• Persistent rooms

Teamflow lets you open apps in the space. For now, these include:

• A scratchpad
• A whiteboard
• A countdown timer
• A universal embed app, letting you open links to your applications like Trello, Figma or Google Docs

Teamflow takes advantage of this infinite real estate. It lets you create one room for each of your projects, and the apps you open in that room persist: they’ll still be there when you come back. Imagine your Google Docs meeting notes, your Figma design, your project’s metrics dashboard — all together in one place.

These three pillars — the spatial interface, integrated apps, and persistent rooms — form a cohesive whole. Apps live in the space, and persist. And together, we think they can make remote work better than being in the office.

Today, Teamflow is coming out of stealth and announcing its $3.9M seed round, led by Menlo Ventures and with the participation of SV Angel, Elad Gil, Balaji Srinivasan, JD Ross, Jack Altman, and many more.

The default way people collaborate with Zoom is by screensharing, something we view as fundamentally uncollaborative — not only can only one person screenshare at a time, they’re also the only ones who can drive. It instantly makes a meeting feel like someone is speaking at you. This stands in contrast with Teamflow apps, which everyone can use at the same time, making for more engaging meetings.

our world domination plan right there. We aim to be the “meta-coordination layer” that Kevin Kwok wrote about in The Arc of Collaboration. ((2019-08-15) Kwok The Arc Of Collaboration)

Remote work is the most underrated generational shift in the world.
It saves everyone one hour per day in commute. It creates the biggest labor market in the world — a city in the cloud with hundreds of millions of people. It unlocks opportunity for everyone, regardless of where they live. It gives people more flexibility in working hours. The list goes on and on.
Remote work would be an unqualified panacea, if it wasn’t for one downside: it makes it harder to work together.

work is less fun than it used to be.

Buffer’s survey of 3,500 remote workers found that the two biggest struggles of remote workers are loneliness and “collaboration and communication.” And that was before the pandemic.