TL;DR:

My Thesis…
- For decades, entrepreneurs have taken queues from the most dominant social technologies of their eras, to create enterprise native equivalents.
- In short: Enterprise Follows Social.
  - AOL Instant Messenger => Gchat
  - Text / iMessage => Slack
  - Skype => Zoom
  - Facebook/Myspace => LinkedIn
  - Youtube => Loom
Why (does this happen)?
- We care deeply about social connection, so we experiment with social tools.
- Companies are bad at evaluating innovative ways to communicate.
- Social communication tools prove the value of new communication methods, and create social conventions around technology. Enterprises jump on the bandwagon.
So what?
- We haven’t seen the enterprise native equivalent of TikTok, Instagram, or Snap (short form / ephemeral video).
- These technologies / social conventions are well suited for solving new communication problems brought on by remote work.
Now what?
- I want to build, invest, and explore in this space.
- Slide into my DMs if you want to talk more about this.

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Enterprise follows social:

I believe there will be multiple billion dollar companies, who bring short form / ephemeral video to the workplace.
I believe this because, over the past few decades, entrepreneurs have created decacorns by re-imagining social tools for the workplace. We communicated socially via asynchronous text (AIM) and synchronous video (Skype). We shared updates on Facebook, and complicated ideas with asynchronous videos (YouTube). These communication styles are now central to workplace communication (via Slack, Linkedin, Zoom, Loom).

This is a predictable pattern that repeats for three reasons.

1. We care deeply about social connection, so we experiment with social tools.

Our primary need is human connection. In Harlow’s famous study he offered baby monkeys a fake mother made of steel wire that dispensed food, or a fake mother that’s soft, but doesn’t dispense food. They chose the mother that mimics comfort and connection over food.

We (like those poor monkeys) value connection. The promise of personal connection is so strong that nascent ideas in this arena have a captive audience.

Furthermore, the costs associated with experimentation for individuals is low. It’s free and fast to try and then jettison social apps. The same goes for entrepreneurs - they can experiment and pivot liberally, because their users are either addicted or disinterested (they’re not paying).

My point: Social tools are like viruses. They will mutate and experiment until they find hosts (entrepreneurs), and paths to growth.

2. Companies, on the other hand, suck at evaluating new ways to communicate:

The communication needs of organizations aren’t as visceral. Costs, security concerns, internal politics, deployment issues, tool bloat… slow down tool adoption. This sucks for entrepreneurs too. They cannot pivot quickly, for fear of upsetting the delicate flowers that are their paying customers.

The result: Corporate America isn’t the birthplace of novel communication ideas. Entrepreneurs intuitively know all of this, and are thus drawn to experiment elsewhere.

So…. How do communication tools bridge this gap?

3. Social tools prove the value of new communication methods, create social conventions, and teach new behavior.

As an early employee at Quip, I found myself comparing Quip’s features to Facebook.

Facebook showed us the ease of using the “like” button to communicate approval. When we sold Quip, we said: “you can click ‘like’ to approve someone’s work!”. If we had to communicate the value of each feature from scratch, we wouldn’t have sold a single license.

Social tools also build social conventions, and comfort (which drive adoption).

The way we communicate in Slack, for example, is deeply informed by the way we text. If you’ve learned to cook on YouTube, learning to do your job via Loom isn’t as scary. If you’ve coordinated dinner over text, coordinating a business trip over slack isn’t scary. If you’ve done a live chat with your family on skype, getting on zoom with your boss is more natural. You get it.

It’s still really, really hard.

I’m not saying it’s easy or obvious who will win. Just because we used AIM / text, doesn’t mean Slack was an obvious slam dunk. But….the ubiquity of text communication (texting, AIM, Yahoo Messanger, MSN Messenger, WhatsApp, etc) was a great clue that a wave of corporate messengers would follow (HipChat, Slack, Teams, Google Chat, Chime, etc).

Within this space (like elsewhere in enterprise software) bottom up software has the best chance of beating the odds.

In our social lives, the best communication tools spread virally without a central decision maker or IT department. When the best communication tools jump to enterprise, they grow in the same way. The closer an enterprise company is to its social counterpart, the more comfortable people will be sharing it, adopting it, and supporting bottom up growth.

This trend leads me to believe that short form video and short form ephemeral video will soon be used to communicate in the workplace.

At first glance, TikTok, Instagram, and Snap are simple, one-way, broadcast tools. They’re useful for sharing where you are, what you’re doing, or content that your followers should see.

But the value comes from the interaction. We tag friends, and share content via DMs. We seek advice via forms and polls. We relish in likes and comments. This interaction connects us to friends and family around the world. It educates and entertains us.

Connection, Context, Education, Entertainment… these are powerful results that certainly could be of use to companies.

Here are three problems this technology may solve in the workplace.

Communicating emotional information, in a remote first environment, is difficult.

Communicating via text (slack, email, text, etc) is great for communicating tactical information, but awful for communicating emotional information, like values, culture, or mission.

Video meetings (synchronous or asynchronous) can be great for communicating emotional information. But they’re infrequent. You might have one all hands a week, one team sync a day, one meeting with your manager per day, etc.

When large meetings are virtual, leaders still struggle to read the room, and engage the audience.

This is creating problems with unmotivated workers, high employee churn, and misalignment. Every day we see examples of CEOs taking grand steps to realign companies, which are fracturing (like Brian Armstrong at Coinbase).

Reading and writing is taxing.

Even though reading is faster than watching videos, it’s more taxing. It requires mental and ocular focus.

Writing is also tiring and slow. Before the pandemic, I often stood up in the middle of a Slack conversation, walked to my coworkers desk, and said “Let me explain in person.”

I know this behavior could be mimicked with a Slack Standup, A Zoom Call, or a Loom. But ephemeral video would better mimic the lightness of stopping by someone’s desk more closely.

It’s hard to make work friends.

This might seem unimportant, but it turns out having a best friend at work is pretty important. A gallup poll (2018) found that if you have a best friend at work you’re twice as likely to be engaged, you produce higher quality work and you’re better at engaging customers.

Short form video could certainly help here. Videos are great at expressing personality, entertaining others, and creating connection. Ephemeral videos are lower stakes, allowing us to be silly, sad, vulnerable, or excited without concern.

Specific Solutions:

I described some really vague problems. But I think the solutions will be really prescriptive and specific.

Video tools will not be for “communicating emotional information,” they’ll be used for “top down communication from execs” or “daily updates from traveling salespeople.”

Objections.

Loom already does this. Kinda. Maybe. It’s desktop based. It’s content focused (default is focusing on your screen, not you). It’s designed for building a database of videos, rather than facilitating light, disposable / ephemeral content. Loom to me feels closer to YouTube, than Tiktok, Snap, and Instagram.
Mobile doesn’t matter, Most people are in front of their desk. To me using mobile video isn’t about communicating on the go. It’s about communicating quickly, from a secondary device we’re already comfortable recording video with.
Tool fatigue. We’re already juggling 12 communication tools. This is a fair point, but it’s part of progress. New tools come in, and old ones fade. In our personal lives, old tools fade quickly (nobody has a fax machine, or even landline). At work, it does take time (offices still have landlines, fax machines, etc).

So what…

This is the future that I see.

I’ve conversed with 30 executives in an effort to understand the problems they’re facing, and how short form / ephemeral video may help them. At a later date I’ll dive deeper into their stories.

There is something here.

I hope you’ll reach out if you believe short form / ephemeral video is the future, or working on something in the space. I’d love to chat, invest, or collaborate.