2020-2022: We built https://gather.town, which during COVID blew up across every use-case possible: conferences, birthday parties, weddings, universities. It was a good business during COVID but eventually started to shrink.
2022-2025: We built Gather for remote workers, which was a long grind into in Audio/Video, performance, and making a game-interface that was good for work but replicated the parts of in-person work people enjoyed. It's a decent business, but didn't match our ambitions with how we wanted to change work for the better.
2025+: We have lots of ideas for how we can make work a lot better with AI. The general theme is, "can we make work as fun as a video game?" Idea being: video games are super similar to work at its core, and AI can both 1.) dramatically change how people need to spend their days, and 2.) help you "game design" someone's work day.
The Grapevine system is the first tablestakes layer people need to have for us to build the products we're excited about. Surprisingly, "company context" was not as good as we thought despite it being such an obvious, big business opportunity. So while I agree it's "basic," it does seem necessary, and is also not the full-scale of what we want to achieve still :)
2020-2022: We built https://gather.town, which during COVID blew up across every use-case possible: conferences, birthday parties, weddings, universities. It was a good business during COVID but eventually started to shrink.
2022-2025: We built Gather for remote workers, which was a long grind into in Audio/Video, performance, and making a game-interface that was good for work but replicated the parts of in-person work people enjoyed. It's a decent business, but didn't match our ambitions with how we wanted to change work for the better.
2025+: We have lots of ideas for how we can make work a lot better with AI. The general theme is, "can we make work as fun as a video game?" Idea being: video games are super similar to work at its core, and AI can both 1.) dramatically change how people need to spend their days, and 2.) help you "game design" someone's work day.
The Grapevine system is the first tablestakes layer people need to have for us to build the products we're excited about. Surprisingly, "company context" was not as good as we thought despite it being such an obvious, big business opportunity. So while I agree it's "basic," it does seem necessary, and is also not the full-scale of what we want to achieve still :)