EP073 - A new way of working remotely with Brian Swartz at Swivvel
About the episode
This episode is showing a new way to work remotely. Some teams are in-office, others are fully remote. But there’s a middle ground with hybrid teams. Still, they have their challenges, such as meaningful connections, on-demand collaboration, and more. Brian Swartz from Swivvel, a new audio-only huddles app, will share some insights on how to address these challenges.
About the guest
Brian Swartz is the co-founder and CEO of Swivvel - the teeny-tiny audio-only huddles app loved by remote teams. Remote work today is limited by tools built for an in-office world. Our overreliance on Zoom and Slack has forced us to compromise how we work, how we talk, how we focus, and how we collaborate. The result is Zoom fatigue, Slack overload, over-scheduled calendars, disconnection and, in some cases, disillusionment. Technology is limiting our potential instead of unlocking what’s possible.
Swivvel is part of a new generation of tools - built by remote teams, for remote teams - here to unlock the full potential of remote work, starting with the simplest thing of all: how we talk to one another.
Connect with Brian on LinkedIn.
About the host
My name is Peter Benei, founder of Anywhere Consulting. My mission is to help and inspire a community of remote leaders who can bring more autonomy, transparency, and leverage to their businesses, ultimately empowering their colleagues to be happier, more independent, and more self-conscious.
Connect with me on LinkedIn.
Want to become a guest on the show? Contact me here.
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Welcome, everyone. Welcome on the Leadership Anywhere podcast. Today we will discuss the challenges of distributed work and what can go wrong with remote work and how can we solve these issues and challenges together, either with products or with together with people through collaboration. To discuss, I have Brian Swartz here, who is the co founder and CEO of Swivel, an up and coming, currently in beta application, serving remote workers a little bit better and be more efficient. Hi, Brian. How are you? Thank you for joining.
Hey Peter, I'm doing well. Thanks. Thanks so much for having me on.
Lovely. Appreciate your time for coming here. Where are you calling from? And what's your journey in remote work? Share a little more about yourself, please.
Absolutely. So I'm calling in from Cambridge, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston. I think my journey to remote is fairly typical. For so many of us remote started in March of 2020. I was squarely in that bucket where prior to March 2020 I had spent 10 years working in offices with startups. At the time I was also CEO of another small 20 person software startup here in Boston. And I like so many remember making the call to say, Hey, we're going to take our laptops home on Thursday and bring an extra monitor with you if you want to. It'll be two weeks to start and we'll see what happens. And obviously we all know the rest is history as they say. And that really was the start of my remote journey. But I think that I, like many spent the first year, maybe even two years from that point largely holding my breath, waiting for it to pass. Remote to me was not something that I embraced. Remote to me was something that we had to do, not something that we wanted. And so it's been an evolution over the last three and a half years now, since then.
So it was a necessity for you. You're pretty much forced to being remote. Although just to give a little bit more context for the listeners, you had a startup company, right? So you had I don't know, five to 10, 10 to more some people with the company and they were all In office around Boston, Massachusetts.
Oh yeah. We were a 20 person team at the time. We were still young. We, the company was only a year and a half old at the time. We had just raised our first round of venture capital a few months prior. We were hiring, we were growing things seemed good.
Nice.
And our startup, the mission of that startup was around childcare. And so we had hundreds of customers who were running childcare operations with children. In programs that day, looking to us for all the guidance on what to do as child care shut down across the state and across the country. And so we had a tremendous amount of work on our plates as we went home that day and that remained the case as things were in flux throughout COVID the following two years. So yeah, again, in terms of our operations, we did everything we could to continue to run as fast as we always had. It was very much the early stage startup world of you move fast, you hire people quickly. You're figuring out how to as they say, you jump off the cliff and you build the plane on the way down.
Of course, make the leap while doing everything you can simultaneously multiple job titles multiple hats, wearing everything, doing everything. There are two types of guests here. Just FYI. One type of guest is that your typical journey when people got forced to work remotely or switched to work remote because of the pandemic or most of the time it's a pandemic some of them a year prior maybe because they had a kid or something. So family issues and that's why they usually switch to working remotely. And there are other type of guests who are like doing this for more than a decade or so. They're already building startups or working as a high profile freelancer consultant or like a classic employee for a remote company or distributed business. And and what I realized speaking with these people, there are really clear distinctions between the two. Those who did that before for more than a, I don't know, more than a decade or so, like myself, we tend to gravitate towards practices tools that can help us to work a little bit more efficiently remotely. And we embrace that. And we never want to switch back. I never waited to pass the storm or something. And then we can finally go back to the office and stuff. And the rest, they usually live through this interregnum period or something when they constantly waiting for something to happen that can go back to the normal and they usually also experienced the challenges a little bit more deeper when it comes to remote work, because they worked in the office before they build it. There's companies before in a coworking offices, whatever office. And now they are forced to work remotely, meaning that most of the challenges that comes with the remote work suddenly surfaced. I think let's start from here. What were the challenges at first, at least during the first year or two that you experienced, because I think those challenges fundamentally shaped the product and the things that you are doing right now with swivel.
A hundred percent. And to skip ahead to the end, and then I'll come back to your question.
Sure.
We realized about a year ago, as we, so we eventually, we sold our last startup and we're just picking our heads up and talking to more founders and more entrepreneurs and more startups and people have found themselves in the exact same place that we found ourselves, which was that during the pandemic as soon as we went remote, we hired a distributed team because the advantage of hiring a distributed team is so enormous. In fact, I would say it is the trump card in why remote is here to stay.
Just elaborate a little bit more on that. Sorry to stop you. But everyone understands what it means in terms of benefits, but still let's say it out loud again. What did you mean by that?
The benefits of hiring a fully distributed team are enormous. And I'm a big believer that the caliber of people that you bring onto your team matters most. And when I say caliber, both their abilities, their experience, but also how invested they are in your startup and your mission and what you build and the people that they want to join and work with. And so to me, the advantages, the number one advantage of being a remote first or distributed team is access to talent sounds very cold and calculating, but it is that. It is that you get to attract people who could live anywhere and be attracted to your company, your way of working, your mission, your stage, you as a leader, as an entrepreneur, you get to bring these people together and you're just, you're casting your net so much wider. You get the chance to meet so many more people. And I think it just clearly raises the caliber of that team. And in early, especially where we play in early stage startups, the caliber of the team matters most. You can do amazing things with a great team. And that really can make or break the success of a company, regardless of what market you set out in or your initial idea or your MVP it's the caliber of the team that matters most. So for us again, skipping ahead to where we were at the end of COVID, if you want to say that summer of 2022, about 12, 16 months ago, us, it became really clear that a lot of teams had hired those distributed. A lot of companies had hired those distributed teams, had these very talented people on staff and we're now at a crossroads where COVID and concerns about COVID and the safety of being in the office that had passed. But their ability to get their team entirely back in office was also long gone because what do you do when the only office you've ever had is in New York, but 60 percent of your team lives beyond a hundred mile radius? What do you do when the best engineers on your core teams are spread across three time zones? And that's when we realized that COVID is over. And even for those of us like myself, even those of us who were trying to hold our breath and waiting for it to pass and waiting to where we could go back to office, even we now had to face the facts that remote was here to stay. And I'll be honest, that is in part sad to me. Like I loved working in an office as crazy as that sounds. I like, I genuinely love the energy. I've jokingly said to people there's two types of people in the world. There are people who have experienced the feeling, the atmosphere of working in a 50, 100, 200 person startup, where everyone just seems like it's clicking, it's firing, everyone's working together. There's an electricity in the air in these offices that I actually don't think is today possible to recreate fully remote. I don't think Slack, I don't think our current tooling could do that. And so part of me still really misses that. And the other part of me realizes that there's an opportunity there and that is the opportunity that swivel that we're stepping into with swivel and I can share a lot more about swivel, but I think for us, we just recognized that so many of our friends and contemporaries and actually so many teams that we look up to are all coming to the realization that cOVID was over, remote was here to stay, and they were going to have to figure this out. And there's different paths that they can go down. Peter we've spoken about the work that you do, the great work that you do with scale ups and helping them embrace asynchronous work, this is why this conversation is going to be so fun is we think that there's a lot of teams that aren't going to embrace asynchronous and that there needs to be alternatives. Because there's not one way of doing, there's not one way of working. There's not going to be one way of doing remote.
Of course. And also, I think it's important to note and or highlight or repeat that your context is in Boston, Massachusetts. And I think it's super important to know because a, there are amazing universities around you meaning that you can hire great really great people, really great talent from there to your startup company. Two, it's a big city with a sizable matter meaning that you will have access to a lot of people immediately. You can test, you can hire, you can fire quickly. You can hire quickly. All you can do is really, it's a scalable build because you have the again, I sorry about to say that, but you have the resources the insane access to great people. So you could have said a year ago or so, but yeah, okay. This storm has passed. We can still switch back to office life because we do have, we still do have the people and the access to those people in the local area. So it's not like a smaller remote town in the middle of the US or you are not in Eastern Europe or things or places where you are sometimes, I wouldn't say forced to work remotely. But you don't have that amount of access to that great talent pool that you're building with. So what made you stay still?
So yes and no. I think to push on that a little bit some of the biggest, most famous names in Boston have said Peter, despite the local universities, which obviously Harvard, MIT, Northeastern, Boston, BU, like we have a tremendous number of graduates every year. But even companies like HubSpot, right? One of the biggest software companies in the world headquartered two miles away, they are now a remote first company. And part of that is because they also recognize that every large company eventually becomes a distributed company. They have offices, I believe in Dublin and San Francisco, and I actually don't remember where all their global offices are. So there's been a divide, right? You have companies like HubSpot that have gone remote first. You have companies like Wayfair, on the other hand, also headquartered here, that is bringing people back in office. Three or four days a week now. And I'd say the biggest companies who are actually able to offer the most cash compensation, some are trying to draw people back to the office, but many men, in fact, the vast majority of smaller teams are not even trying because they have to compete. If you're going to hire locally, you have to compete with a Wayfair that's going to just be able to offer more cash than you. Also when you're doing early stage work, like swivel like any number of my friends in the local startup ecosystem, what they do is hard. It's unique. It's niche, attracting talent, attracting people who want to work that hard on something that niche that's that early and that risky, you need to cast a pretty wide net in order to get all those people. And yes, we have a tremendous number of recent graduates here, and there's a millions of people, talented people who live in the Boston area. But I'll say this is both at the entry level. Those people, they can now go work for anybody, anywhere, even if they live in Boston, they can work for a New York or San Francisco startup. Those people who are at my phase of life, I've got two young kids, if they're living outside the city. And they've got young kids. A lot of them are not going to want to commute through Boston's hellish traffic. It's actually terrible to get to downtown jobs and work a shorter day, see less of their kids and sit in traffic for hours. And these are again, all the obvious things, but I think for us...
And sorry, these are the baselines, by the way. So these are the very basic things when, and on top of that, you also have the loyalty issue. So imagine the situation that you are working in a Boston based startup company, you have an office and yada yada, all the goodies. But those people who are working for scaling up early stage startup company, they might stay for half a year, maybe two years. Oh my God, that would be amazing. But pretty much that's it. They usually leave or they're easier to leave to other companies with a little bit more stability, a little bit more cash, bit more options, because they have the options because of a big city with big opportunities. Meanwhile, when you are hiring remotely for example, someone from Central Europe or something or Latin America or something around or from or just a remote location in the U. S. That person will be staying with you a little bit longer because of the loyalty because of the less available resources and opportunities for them, meaning that you as a company, you can build a little bit more stable for a longer term, because you have people on your team for longer period of time, fluctuation is always killer for any kind of scale ups that you have.
I haven't seen that dynamic in either direction. You may be right. I don't know what the data say. I think again the startups that I've worked with previously in office, we actually had great tenure. We had great loyalty. Those were times for three, four, five years. In fact, some people might look back and say they stayed too long because they were too loyal.
You were lucky. You were doing something great.
I don't think it was lucky. I think it was teams that built really strong cultures, teams where people strongly identified with their colleagues. They showed up for one another. They believe in the mission of the company. And they genuinely liked going to the office together every day I think there really was this sense of camaraderie that like I said at the start, I think there really are two types of people in the working world, those who have felt that feels and those that never have. And for so many one thing that I say is again you and I, we live and we talk about remote work every day and it's very easy right now to lambast the teams that are every time you see a return to office announcement it becomes fodder for the mob on LinkedIn and people are up in arms and telling and saying how this is and how stupid this is and I actually very sympathetic to the leaders who are announcing, making these announcements because most of these people, they love work. And as crazy as that might sound to some people, they just love work and a lot of their identity, a lot of their what they're passionate about is their life's work might be tied up in the enterprise or the business. And if they see anything that threatens that, and if they have this memory of times when things were better it, to me, it's the most natural inclination in the world to say, let's turn back the clock. Let's go back to 2019 and let's get everybody back in the office. Cause that's, I remember what that felt like. I remember what winning felt like. And so I'm super sympathetic to people who announce that. Now, in reality, I think the challenge is that you have a lot of people who are announcing that they're saying publicly this thing, and then they turn around and the exact same breath, they'll tell their hiring managers. We have to fill these roles with the most talented people in the world. I don't care where they live. I don't care whether or not they can adhere to our in office policies, fill the seats with good people now. And I've got screenshots. Like I we've got real examples of public fortune 500 CEOs saying this to wall street and then turning around and saying this to their VPs and their hiring managers. And so I think there is this a little bit of hypocrisy there. But again I sympathize with their desire because I have lived what really good in office feels like, and I agree with them that fundamentally today, the way that remote works for their companies is probably not as good as if you could wave your magic wand and teleport everybody in back into the office nine to five, I suspect, I believe, in fact, that is a better way to work but the practicality of it, the reality of it breaks down so quickly.
I do believe as well. And I go far beyond that. I do think that, I spent like 10 years in the office, so I do understand this, I don't know how to say it. It's like electrifying community or something. That's camaraderie, right? I do believe that from a team member perspective, so not from the leaders or the owners or the CEO's perspective, from a team member's perspective, like everyone else, you either belong to a community or you want to belong to a community and workplace is a community as well. People are, they're not searching for the work and the satisfaction and the results and the winning. And I don't think that's sorry to say, but I think it's a very American approach to that. I do believe that people instead, they are seeking like membership, validation, more the community is the best word. I think everyone wants to belong to somewhere and they search for a meaning. On what they do if you waste eight freaking hours or nine or whatever you or how much you work I don't care if you waste eight hours from your day in a place which has no meaning for you It means that you don't have a community. You don't have a sense of belonging to that place. You're just collecting a paycheck and pretty much that's it. Nothing else. Even if you're winning in your work, it doesn't really matter. You are just soulless in there for nine hours. And you don't want to do that. You don't want to do that with your marriage as well and your private life, by the way. So it works the very same way like the workplace as well. One more thing, most of the distributed companies and most of the fully distributed teams and those who are operating really well and efficiency with high efficiency, they realize that it's not just about hiring the best people and the best talent or top talent and whatever but how they can build a really great community or sense of belonging online without ever meeting or meeting once a year or two, whatever so online, how can you build a great workplace community online? And those who figure that out, they are highly successful and more successful than those who just build top talent or hiring people from all around. So I think the key goal is to have to make sure that the distributed team is a community. And that's where, that's what everyone is searching for. So how did you find to address these challenges with swivel? Because I think one of the key things that you do at swivel, which you will go into detail a little bit more now is addressing these challenges as well, how to keep.
And I'm so glad you called that out. It is and it is about and one of the things that I believe in that we talk about with teams all the time is that when again, the teams that we've seen that were most successful in office. There was this atmosphere, there's, there was this feeling where if you are an individual contributor, or you are a member of a team, the bond within that team were very strong. And as a result when I, and this is true my own lived experience when I was coming up as an individual contributor, and then as a manager, the bonds within a team was really what was the primary source of motivation, not as much because people don't feel like they don't want to feel like they're working just for their boss. They're working just for their manager. They want to feel like they're working as part of a team. And I show up and I work hard because the person who sits on my right and the person who sits on my left, they depend on me and I depend on them and they know that they can turn to me and I know I can turn to them and it's that. And that reciprocity and that commitment to each other and that consistency these are themes and these are elements of community and the fabric of our society that extend way beyond careers in tech. This is so much of what it just means to be human is the fundamental belief that people are there for one another. It's literally the foundation of our relationships in our societies is ideas around reciprocity. And so I, and I actually believe that one of the challenges with remote done poorly, remote done in the hold your breath and wait for this to pass is that those bonds were very much weakened and I think you saw this a lot It was one thing when everybody went remote and the bonds that they already had carried forward. We used to chit chat in the office. We used to turn to each other in office and now we turn to each other on Slack. Now we ping each other and hop on zoom. But when you brought in somebody new and then you brought in and then six months later you'd brought in a lot of new people and they didn't have that social capital, they didn't have those bonds. They were very hard to recreate. And that's where I think teams have met. This fork in the road, and they've had to decide and what they need to decide on and where swivel enters the picture is they need to decide. Are we going to embrace asynchronous? Are we going to try to structure our work in such a way that? People might not need to turn to each other in real time as frequently. Do we want to go down the path of the Git labs and the zap years and the remote. com and these other teams that have done a tremendous job. And I just want to be clear from the get go. I respect those teams. I respect those entrepreneurs. I respect how they do a sync. And so I think every team has to face this moment and ask themselves, honestly, not do we aspirationally do we want to do async, but practically are we willing to put in the work and do we want to hire people and do we want to structure our work in such a way that async is going to work around here or not? And I think today if you are hiring a lot of junior people who need mentorship, like real time mentorship, I think if you're onboarding a lot of people, period, and you're just constantly adding to the organization and there's a lot of new people and there's less people within that long term institutional knowledge, that's going to be hard. I think if you're a pre product market fit. And you need to be experimenting quickly and you're not in a scale up phase, that's going to be hard, right? And really, those are the teams where I think async is not a good fit. And we hear this when we talk to those teams. We hear this when we talk to those frontline managers or those executives and those ICs. And we hear how they're working today and what is working and what is not working. You talk to them about, okay is it better documentation? Is it better process? Is it better SLAs? And they're like, no, it's not. That's not what, that's not what we're missing. That's not what it's going to take for us and our team.
Sorry to step in. I want to add one, one, one more characteristics here. I think it's important then, first of all, obviously, I don't think that we need to talk about extremism or extreme ideas. There is no, not even GitLab, I think, or I don't know they do 100 percent async. And I think everyone has to decide what kind of what would be the percentage of total work that they do, collaboration they do that fits into synchronous or asynchronous, because async is only just a little bit more efficient in some cases. And I was cautious about how I say that. But one of our characteristics is not just when you have the full distributed team, but also, for example, if the company itself as a type of business relies heavily on synchronous work, for example, there are a lot of salesperson and a lot of customer service people. There are a lot of marketers around things like that they, won't be able to work that efficiently as an asynchronous employee. They do need a synchronous workflows. They do need a synchronous collaboration. Meanwhile, on the other hand, if you are a hundred percent product heavy team, engineering developers, most of the people that you have on board are. Engineering teams and developers maybe for them, the asynchronous work is a little bit more better. So it totally depends on the type of the business and the goals of the business. That's what I want to say. Not just the actual setup and preferences.
Yeah Peter, what's interesting about that is that so swivel just want to put a pin on it is a synchronous collaboration tool. It is a real time audio app for teams. Okay. It is literally the ability to unmute and talk with anybody on your immediate team, your scrum team, your sales team, your CS pod, whatever it is the definition of a synchronous communication. And what I'll tell you, which is interesting, is that there is currently no strong pattern, which is to say that sales teams use swivel and engineering teams don't in fact, on some sales teams, certain individuals in certain roles, they don't want to use swivel. It doesn't fit into their workflow. And we have, and we actually have a lot of engineering teams that are using use that do use civil. In fact it's one of our strongest use cases. And I think and I, what's interesting about that is people, I think, have this conception that engineers, they're just going to put on their headphones and don't bother me. And I'm going to code for hours and hours a day. If you actually look at the way that most engineers work they're going to be efficient in maybe one to three hour chunks, right?
Yes.
So most and a good engineer might be highly, like really heads down in code for two hour blocks a day. And it's, it is intense. It takes all their concentration. And in the middle of that if somebody is heads down something for 45 minutes. And the CEO comes over and says Hey Cedric I'd really like to talk to you about the Q4 roadmap and all that is the worst, that is the worst case scenario. You've just completely disrupted Cedric's workflow. It's going to, you're going to blow up that block of time. He's not going to be able to get back and flow 10 minutes later. That's really disruptive. But what is very interesting is that if somebody on Cedric's team asks him a question, Hey, I'm stuck, do you have 30 seconds where you can help me figure out this one thing? In that moment, what we are experiencing, what we're hearing is people actually Love hearing the voice of their colleague not in Slack, right? Hearing the voice of the colleague in the nuance and the respect in the way that people just naturally ask these questions of each other and then Cedric's gets to choose based on the tenor of your voice and how you ask and how much of a distraction it's gonna be. And the magic of swivel and I'll describe the app in its entirety in a second, is that it actually is not distracting. The cross talk that the chatter right for most people most of the time that's actually really motivating and it's again it gets back to the human nature of reciprocity and me or you or anybody we like knowing that we can help each other and that we're there for one another. And that we're not just going to say, Hey, no, sorry, I'm 30 minutes into a two hour block. Can I get back? I'll get back to you in 90 minutes or just ignoring you, right? And sometimes the answer is, Hey not a great time for me. Can you go ask? Can you go ask somebody else? I think this other person might know the answer to this too. And so all that is to circle back to the question of, today, I think we're still so early in this seismic societal level shift towards remote and distributed work. I think we're so early that we don't yet know exactly what teams and what phases and what industries are best suited to synchronous versus async because you're right. Some engineering teams, that's good if you're solving like, I don't know, Nobel level physics, maybe, right? I don't talk to me. Don't talk. Maybe there's that time when it's a don't talk to me moment. But what we actually see when we actually work with and we work with teams of engineers, is that the crosstalk really motivating. It's really motivating. It's really inspiring. It's connecting. It builds that community, that we keep coming back to. Again, Peter, we, I'm not saying that swivel is for everybody right now, but what I am saying is that I don't think we yet can pattern match on exactly what types synchronous work.
And it's so interesting that you said that it's an audio and it's almost we can talk about the features, but also like unscheduled. And I think the biggest Or the greatest challenge with the workplace community is that it's the workplace. So it's most, I wouldn't say mostly transactional most of the relationships, or we think it's more transactional because it's money involved, the results, it's all metrics and everything, it's performance and whatever. But you cannot make a community based on 100 percent transactional interactions, right? So it has to be organic. It has to be unscheduled. It has to be done in a really organic, flowy way. Otherwise, again, we are just collecting a paycheck or contributing to a metric, which is 100 percent what we want to do.
And that's, it's interesting that you said transactional because I actually think one of the things that, and maybe this is really just me, but I hear this when I talk to other people about other people right now, Peter, a lot of people, especially leaders and team leads and VPs. They're recognizing that they're going to be working remote or distributed for the foreseeable future. And when they do go read the best practices, the things that they come to are the great things put out by GitLab and people like them , and they just, the gut level doesn't feel right to them because they don't think that a handbook is going to be the best onboarding tool for the teams that they're bringing on. And one of the words that they use is you can't run my business through SLA is, and these transactional relationships, you need to have conversations. You need to have that community is integral to the way that they're building their business. And so again, I always try to be very sensitive to the fact that I think the way that. The Async, the Champions of Async have done their work and built their teams is truly remarkable. I listen to their interviews. I read their content. I'm a fan of how they work. But I think prior to remote, prior, or sorry, prior to Covid, I would guess that maybe 5%, 2, 3, 4, 5% of people were working remote first, async first prior to Covid, and I think that.
I think even less.
Was it less? Okay.
Yeah.
You might know the numbers. I don't know, but it's highly unnatural to work that way. I think yet it has some efficiency, but without the added organic values that you are describing these are all just SOPs and metrics put into outcomes and whatever. So the human element whatever we call a human talent is, it's missing. So yeah. And I think there's, I think we just always need to be sensitive to the fact that just look, I think so many of the people who now fully embrace and love remote are some of the people who struggled. In office where an open plan office didn't really work for them. And now the threat of remote being taken away from them and then being forced back to the office, that's a real threat to what they feel like is this new found and a better way for them to work. And I am sensitive to that as well. And look, yes.
Let's not forget that most people, they never struggled in the office. I think the majority of the people I wouldn't say I don't know the numbers but most people valued the stable nine to five most of my relationships, my friendships, again belonging community, intrinsic conversations, organic stuff. I saw a study while back, one of the guests on the show shared it. It said that around 20, 25 percent of total work for total people are able to work remotely, mentally and physically. So it's not just that if everyone would have the opportunity to work remotely, only 20 25 percent of people will be able to work 100 percent remote because the last, most of the other parts of the people, they will be still missing this whole personal relationship matters and stuff, which is again, fine. It's all about choice.
It's an interesting metric. It's all about choice. And I would say, and I would say that today, I think there are a lot of people. In fact I might put myself in the bucket of, I am probably a better employee when I am in an office. My motivation is probably higher throughout the course of the day. I know I feed off the energy of the people around me. I'm probably a better employee if I were to be in office than home, but I'm not willing to do that right now. In part because the people that I want to work with don't live in Greater Boston. In part because I've got two young kids and it's really important to me that I can do drop off in the morning and I can have dinner with them at night. In part because my extended family lives three hours away and it's important to me that my kids get have a relationship with their grandparents, and so I am one of the people who is making some level of professional sacrifice for a remote first career. And I think I'm one of millions of people making that trade off. And so that is part of what I think is probably evident at this point. And I work hard. I love work. It's an important, it's part of my identity. It's not just a, it's not just a paycheck and my, our mission with swivel, why this is such an important mission to us is that for so many people remote today is something that they want but it is also something of a compromise. And I think that it's going to continue to be a compromise until there's a new suite of tools, which are specifically built by remote teams for remote teams. And I think today most people, we actually have I think most people have forgotten that Slack and Zoom, the two tools that we use the most were built by in office teams to augment in office work.
Yes.
Slack. Yeah. I love Slack. I use, I have plenty of gripes with Slack, but it's a tool that you can't live without. It was built by a team that worked together in person and yes, they had a few distributed people early on up in Vancouver when the rest of the team was in San Francisco by and large, they were an in office culture building a chat tool to augment work and what we've asked of Slack in the last three years is largely unfair. And they're stuck in, they're mired in their Salesforce situation now and there's plenty of reasons why Slack hasn't evolved fast enough faster than it has over the last three years. But by and large, I think that it was never a tool. That was designed to do what we ask of it today. And I think there's a suite of tools coming. I think loom we're recording this in October. Loom was acquired by Atlassian, I think two weeks ago. Terrific outcome for that team. There's an example of a tool that really was built for remote and distributed work. And I think you're going to see more and more tools like that from their core at their core, they were built and they were envisioned for remote teams.
I'm intrigued to ask why did you go with the audio as a format for collaboration? Because most distributed teams, when they think about collaboration, they either go with video, like synchronous video or something beyond or along that way. Or something that's a document based or a dashboard based collaboration. It's pretty much everything like Google docs or whatever, but also like mural or Miro or other tools like that, where they can collaborate on a share screen. Yet I also, so which you probably seen as well a new type of tools coming up, which are most dealing with audio in terms of collaboration, but I would love to know why did you pick audio in the first place? Because that's an interesting option.
Yeah. Great question. All right very quickly, what swivel is. It's a real time audio app for teams. So if you think about the two to 10 people that you collaborate with most closely so it takes those people and we have what I jokingly refer to as the world's smallest desktop app. I think it's 37 pixels wide. It sits in your bottom of your screen. It's like this and at a glance, you can see who is in the audio room with you and who is not, and anybody who's in the audio room with you at that moment, I can click unmute and I can speak and it is as simple as unmute to talk. And the magic of that is that I can very quickly ask somebody on my team I can get off this podcast interview with you, Peter, and I can say, Hey, Cedric our Monday morning meeting is in 30 minutes. Can we sync up real quick? I want to talk about this and this before the meeting and Cedric can hear me. But also there's crosstalk. So other people in the room can hear me ask Cedric this question. Now, if Cedric and I are going to have a longer conversation that doesn't pertain to them we just move ourselves to a breakout room. Very simple. It really recreates the feeling of us sitting together at a plot of desks in an office and me turning to Cedric and saying, Hey, can we sync up before our 10th before our Monday morning meeting? In which case, Eric and John might hear me say that. So you get that feeling of being together, the presence it recreates. It's shockingly powerful, I'd say change to the feeling of remote. So why audio only? There's really a few reasons. One is that nobody wants their video running all day long. Nobody wants to feel like they're in zoom all day long. Peter, the way that this, where this idea came about was talking to teams who were trying to recreate things like this experiences like this, but they were using zoom or slack huddles or Google meet and those all felt like the wrong medium. It felt like the wrong mode. And it was very incongruent and it fell apart over time because it wasn't the right tool for the job.
And most of them are not organic also. I think that's also, that's super important to jump in but that's super important that most of these tools that you mentioned, Zoom, Huddle, all the stuff, they weren't organic tools. They, you either have to schedule someone to have a zoom call. None, no one has a zoom call on scheduled almost literally. But you can have a huddle, but first is it a good time to talk? Things that like that happen with that huddle as well, or any other tool.
So there's a, again, why audio is natural enough that we pay a lot of attention to the details here with the right amount of warning. We play a small chime when somebody unmutes to talk. So there's no, with all of this work it becomes, it starts to just feel very natural. And the key, one of the other things that swivel does is it integrates in with the other tools that you use. So if you use zoom as your video conferencing tool. We integrate in with zoom. Okay. So when you do want to move to video, it's one click and the breakout room becomes a zoom meeting, right? And so we have a deep integration and relationship with zoom, with slack, with google meet. And so what we found is that People are not looking for a new video conferencing tool. Zoom is a terrific you and I are speaking over Zoom today. People have plenty of gripes with Zoom. Again, can't live with it, can't live without it. It's a great tool. But we don't see it as a platform for remote work. We see it as a video conferencing tool. Sure. Swivel's presence on your screen, the organic nature of real time audio, it becomes this starting point for when I think of my team, I think about swivel. That's where they are, I can, at a glance, I can see who's there right now. And I, and at a glance with some other of our integrations with your calendar and whatnot, I can see, Oh Peter's on a podcast interview until four. He'll probably be back after that and so I get to choose now, do I want to wait? For you to come back on to swivel, in which case I can talk to you, or do I want to send you a slack? And swivel does not kill slack. It's not designed to kill slack. It's designed to sit next to slack in the same way that again, pre pandemic when we were in office, we all use slack. And we use it to augment our conversations. And so the best way to think about swivel is it brings back the conversations that happened in the office and you continue to augment that with your Google docs, with your notion, with your confluence, whatever it is that you use for documentation and with your chat tools. Like a Slack or Teams.
That's amazing. I'm intrigued to try, if I would love to try, where can I go? Bear in mind that we are recording this episode on, when is it? It's 23rd of October, so like end of October. So where can people find you and and the tool?
People can find us at svivel. io. That's swivel with two V's dot IO. And there you'll find an early access signup. What we ask actually, if you're signing up through early access, just write us a one liner, tell us your use case, describe the team that you want to use swivel with, and you'll hear from one of the founders within a day. And we are working with teams anywhere from five people all the way up to 300 people now. And we are really looking for design partners who understand that they're still early in their remote journey and we're still looking for ways to dramatically improve collaboration. We'd love to chat and that's where you'll find us.
Perfect. All of these links will be linked in the show notes later when the episodes airs, Brian, thank you very much. I think it was really great that finally hear a voice was not a hundred percent async, was also questioning most of the things that are prevalent in remote work right now. And I would love to see where we go what kind of scale you will have in the future and how would your collaboration can contribute to the future of work.
Peter, thanks so much for having me on. It's been a lot of fun to get to know you and I look forward to hearing this episode come out.
And thanks for your time. I appreciate for being here.
Thanks so much.
