With, a virtual office.
When I left Western Digital in 2019, (after the acquisition of Upthere), I suddenly missed the buzzing of a room full of designers. I recall searching around for virtual coffee shops but couldn’t find any.
I started prototyping a solution on a 2D canvas, and it got enough buzz that Chris Bourdon and I decided to start a company and raised money.
We were quickly funded by Urban Innovation Funds, Fusion Fund, and Betaworks Ventures. We launched in 2021.
You can visit an archive of the landing page, or see a lot more about the visual design on Farrah Yoo’s website.
Self-hostable virtual spaces
Some learning from With: the word of 2020 was Serendipity. The idea that things must happen organically in the hallways of an office for communication to be successful. In this framework, a virtual office seemed like a viable solution.
But after a team who was using With every day dropped instantly, I reached out and realized their manager had just quit, and nobody felt the need to come in the room after that. That was the turning point for me.
Those virtual spaces can only work if they are a conscious choice, not a management tool. This is why self-hosting made more sense. Where PopSpace rooms shines are for micro communities of people who want a fun room to play D&D in, a virtual book club, or anything where Zoom is a mood killer.
- PopSpace.io
- Source on GitHub
Bring your online workshops to life
During the whole With experience, there was a group of users that I found fascinating, course creators.
Before the pandemic, their differentiators were: the material, of course, the host, the venue, the catering, the whole experience, but in the Zoom era, the differentiators were blurrier.
Course creators wanted to create a rich virtual experience, mimicking the analog experience:
- Get people “on their feet” to move around a scale or a map
- Easily create a poll, pull a flip chart, share multiple media
- Picture-in-picture and other composite arrangements
- Break-out rooms that feel more like tables in a wider room
Another goal that emerged was analytics. Giving course creators the ability to understand which activity works and which doesn’t. Iterating on teaching material is easier when you can interrogate the data.
Merging with Mystery
At the end of 2022, we got an offer from Mystery, an employee engagement company, to join their team and keep developing PopStage, with an eye towards internal meetups. Their platform was focused on fostering strategic relationships inside companies, identified using machine learning.
For example, a feature called Meetups would automatically create events for matched pairs of employees, with a theme that is shared between the two participants. The meetups would be chosen to strengthen bonds between certain teams, between employees and the exec team, etc.
PopStage was perfect to accommodate the needs of team bonding experiences like making cocktails or learning lettering. PopStage was also great at integrating interactive experiences like a quiz during meetups, and other unmoderated games.
The With team joined Mystery at the beginning of 2023.
