a16z Podcast - Remote Work and Our New Reality

Episode Date: March 23, 2020

The content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business, tax, or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z fund. For more details, please see A16Z.com slash disclosures. Hi, and welcome to the A16D podcast. I'm Lauren Murrow, and today we're talking about the rise of remote work and virtual networking, especially among knowledge workers amid the spread of the coronavirus. For this quick pulse check, I'm joined, all remotely, of course, by general partners Connie Chan and David Yulovich to talk about the platforms powering this homebound workforce, creative new use cases for video conferencing and streaming from education to therapy,

and whether remote work and online events is the new normal. The conversation begins with Connie describing how, for many of these video conferencing tools, the line between professional and social use is already blurring. People are trying to use existing a new tool. People are trying to use existing and new tools for a variety of things. I mean, even teenagers who want to interact are using Zoom to hang out with each other. So I think the use case is very wildly. If you are having a one-on-one conversation and both people are using Apple products, FaceTime is fantastic. If you are doing a small group setting where it's the same repeat user, Zoom might be more relevant. If you are hosting a large event where a lot of the audience members are trying to look for networking

opportunities around the world has a solution for that. One platform you mentioned, Zoom, has really risen through the ranks. It's the third most popular app in the App Store at the moment. Why do you think Zoom has been so emergent? I think one of the reasons Zoom has sort of broken out is that they have observed all the friction that all video conferencing platforms have had in the past, where it's hard to get an account, it's hard to set up, it's hard to invite people to, people have less patience these days for products that have too much friction to onboarding.

You know, there's always sort of the joke of conference calls of like, hey, who's just joined the line or like, who are you? Or, hey, if you get the right link, Zoom has fixed almost all of those usability issues. And I'd say there's also little moments of user delight, right? I think virtual backgrounds have been one of the ways that people are breaking the ice or making conversations more friendly when they're on Zoom. For those listening, it's a way that you can completely obfuscate your background and make it look as if you're in a green room and put any photo in the back.

And I think people underestimate the amount of technology that's behind the scenes. They're running a global network. They're carrying hundreds of thousands of minutes of calls at any given time. They've built an infrastructure that's scaling to a dramatic degree. And that's really hard to do. And they've spent a lot of time over the last few years as they've grown up as a company to build a reliable, high quality, high fidelity system. That's why they've broken out.

To your point, David, this is new ground as millions of people are flooding these online platforms. We've already seen some outages with tools like Microsoft Team last week. Several gaming platforms have had outages over the past week or so, including Nintendo Switch and Xbox and Discord. So there is some trepidation among people that all of us working and learning from home is straining that underlying infrastructure of the Internet, and that's something that could particularly impact home networks. What are the limitations of some of these collaboration tools?

Well, first, we all owe a debt of gratitude to the network operators that are running the global infrastructure, that are adding capacity, that are making sure that the, quote-unquote, the pipes are not getting too full. That is not an easy job, and these are the people that are working, and they're probably working from home right now, but they're working tirelessly. And as somebody who comes from an infrastructure operation's background, I always think it's good to give a shout out to those people that are generally thankless until there's a problem. Right. I think a lot of people don't recognize their actual people. who are keeping your internet running. Totally, and adding capacity and rerouting things

and reprioritizing traffic where all the beneficiaries of that for all of us who now work from home. Broadly, what you end up seeing, though, is companies that invest in infrastructure are the ones that know how to scale and have planned for sort of elastic capacity. And when you're seeing these platforms,

like how teams had an outage and things like that, these are platforms that have been sort of cut and paste put together over the years from different products, from legacy products. And when you're building on top, of legacy infrastructure or legacy technology stack, legacy video codex. It's very hard to then be able to scale up and deliver the kind of experience people are expecting. So you are seeing new technologies like Run the World and a company called

tandem as well. That's a way to do real-time water cooler like conversations when you're not doing a scheduled meeting. And companies like Zoom that are really taking advantage of this opportunity. So it's one thing to have these tools that help us work in small teams. It's another thing when these events get at a much larger scale. Many, many conferences, festival sporting events have been canceled in response to the pandemic. What are some of the promising alternatives you're seeing to physical events? I think virtual conferences is this brave new world that we're all going to start exploring and realize that there's actually a lot of benefits. In addition to being able to access it from anywhere from your phone or your laptop and not needing to pay

for travel, for hotels, for airfare, and so forth. There's also just a lot more engagement that can happen in an online context that, quite frankly, is easier in many ways than the offline in real life version. So think about when you go to a conference and that awkward moment during cocktail hour and you're not sure who to approach, you're not sure how to break into that conversation or even who you should be meeting with, right? Well, in an online context, now people can be chatting with other folks but have full context of who they are, why they're there, who they're looking to meet, and so forth.

And platforms can do better matching, so you are making sure every minute is a good use of time. Look, you always look for silver linings and moment of crisis or dramatic change. And, you know, as an introvert, I think this is our golden moment. There's a lot of people that don't get an opportunity to speak up, that don't have an opportunity to participate, or that the conversation gets steered into a certain direction just because there's a louder voices in a room. Does somebody who is both often on panels and somebody who's listening to people that are on panels,

I think panels are like the lowest fidelity form of communication. I love the idea that in an online conference, you can maybe suggest questions, do a lot more Q&A. You can help prepare the panel much better and people can better socialize and surface questions so you don't just have a moderator trying to decide what's interesting. There's so many opportunities in an online format through all those different communication mediums

to just cultivate and curate a much better. better experience. The way that you connect with someone can be through video, it can be through audio, it can be through text. And by allowing the various options, you also attract different types of personalities that otherwise would have been too intimidated to go to a conference. And so what's interesting is when you see a lot of these conferences switch into an online format, not only do more people join because quite frankly the bar to attend is much lower, but more people participate because they're not so afraid to chat in an online. chat room, the courage required to do that is a lot lower than it is to go speak to someone in real

life. Not to mention it can be recorded and chronicled so that somebody who maybe can't make it in real time can go catch up later. There's an auto-chronicling and auto-documenting and archiving capability that is inherent that most conferences just opt out of because of the cost or complexity. And I think that's really powerful because it means that, you know, especially when you pair it with where we are with automatic transcription of voice, it allows people to really consume the information in whatever format works best for them. It makes it much more accessible to people. Whatever prevents them from engaging, not just as an introvert, but is somebody who also likes to participate sometimes a little bit more voyeuristically than sort of dive into

a full two-day conference session. It's perfect for people like me. I think there's a lot of people out there that feel the same way. So as the coronavirus has spread, we've seen people get creative with ways to keep connected. What other apps are you seeing on the rise? Are you seeing any particularly creative use cases. Education, I think, is a very big one. Parents not only need to figure out how to entertain and how to occupy the children, but they want to make sure that it's still a good use of time and educational, right? The V1, of course, is you watch a streaming video of your teacher,

and you're basically watching this person on a screen versus seeing them in real life. But I think the V2 of education is going to incorporate a lot more different types of media, such that the actual course content could possibly be even better or more engaging. So imagine, for example, an online coding class that is teaching children how to program, but it's not just showing you the teacher's face and having the feature talk you through your workbook or through your program, but actually recreating something that's half video game, half problem set, and having a teacher talk you through it. So as you go into these different types of verticals of curriculum,

I think the V2 of online education is going to go beyond just video streaming and be really a mixture of video streaming plus animation, AR, or really just interactive ways to learn. So I think there will be a lot of new experiments that happen in distance learning. There are startups out there like out school that allow all kinds of parents to find teachers who are teaching a variety of courses. And I think existing teacher-student relationships are going to. going to use things like Zoom or other new platforms that focus on online education. Now that my own child is at home, I'm seeing that firsthand. I see my own daughter, you know, taking art classes through Zoom, having her piano class through FaceTime. I know that there's an artist in San Francisco Wendy McNaughton, and she's now been doing these free drawing classes for kids using Instagram Live.

And I think yesterday she did a class and there were almost a thousand kids that were in this class doing drawing. It's great for the parents who need to be working. It lets their kid pay attention to somebody who's giving instruction and lets the parent maybe do some work while they're at home with the kids. This online format still is very, very effective. Teachers are still able to see what the kids are doing, give real-time feedback. Another use case I've noticed is online tools that facilitate virtual therapy sessions as well. Right. Yeah, I think there's a lot of really interesting use cases. You know, I wouldn't say I'm a yoga practitioner, but I have many friends who are, and I probably should be. But one of the things that they lament is that classes spill up.

But now these classes have moved to Zoom and you can do it from home on your yoga mat. Now the classes never fill up by definition. And so that's really a transformative shift. One other interesting trend I've seen is third-party video conferencing add-ons. So apps like Crisp, Crisp with a K, which cancels out background noise, like typing or wrappers. There's muzzle which silences pop-up notifications during screen sharing. I think I could use both of them. One thing that's sort of amusing is, you know, I used to work at Cisco, which has a large collaboration business and owns WebEx. And so maybe I'm more used to the always-on video conference call, the constant videoing. But I think for a lot of people, it's a new experience, and they're

learning all kinds of things. You need to be cognizant of when your camera's on. Even if you think your camera's off, it's probably on. You need to be much more aware of whether you're on mute, whether you're connected, and there's a certain sort of video conferencing hygiene that comes along with that. I'm a big believer in leaving the video camera on. I think it keeps you more engaged and paying attention. Isn't that one of the features of tandem in that it shows which apps you're on as you're collaborating with coworkers? Totally. And they do this in a very privacy-aware way. You can disable it. They show you what application you're using and what your coworkers are using. And so what's cool is I can see, oh, hey, if Connie's in a Google Doc, if I have permission to that

Google Doc, I can actually see which file it is. And let's say I want to collaborate with her, I can just click on it and immediately jump into that Google Doc. And because Google Doc's multiplayer by default, we don't have to screen share, we don't have to even have our video on, we're just collaborating and talking. It's sort of like having somebody at the desk next to you and be looking at the same file. Then if you're busy, you can jump into a focus mode, either permanently or for a period of time.

And so they're really focused on the usability to create this virtual office environment that's both not distracting, but also creates a level of close. and intimacy with your coworkers, you can still feel that connection and say, hey, how's your day going or what are you up to or what are eating for lunch? Right. We're experimenting using these platforms to even just hang out with each other, right? Like to David's point, making sure people don't feel lonely during this time of self-quarantine is really important. And so there are teams in our firm, my own team included, where once or twice a week, we will have an hour set aside where we're all online. We're not allowed to talk about work. And we're eating lunch

together. And it's funny, because years ago, I talked about how in China, live streaming for eating was a thing. And everyone used to make fun of me for that. But we are now doing it here, right? We're using video platforms to eat lunch with each other, to hang out with each other. Well, in my team, we've been eating lunch together virtually more than we were when we were actually physically in the office. So it's actually upping our social ability. So in addition to these online collaboration, video conferencing tools, some other categories of companies that are seeing somewhat of a bump as we become increasingly homebound. Some of them are obvious, like streaming services, delivery services like Instacart. But are there other examples of

categories of companies that you're seeing more use cases of? Gaming and entertainment is a very big one. Roblox, I can only imagine how many kids are now wanting to play all the time, because Roblox is not just a one-way game where you're playing against the computer, you're playing with other kids, you're playing with your friends. And so for a lot of children, this is their way of maintaining those relationships. And David, you can speak to that, right? You just installed a Xbox? I did. I never thought of myself as a gamer. I realized I'm going to be home alone. I'm up in the mountains. So I bought an Xbox one. I've played it a little bit.

I think I still am more of a programmer than a gamer, but I certainly have become a gamer as a result of this. And whether that endures, I would say, like, work from home, time will tell. David, have you noticed larger macro trends? Yeah. There are certainly companies that facilitate more collaboration in terms of coordination, so whether it's task management, whether it's OKRs, there's a whole set of tools that I think are going to see a lot more usage in the workplace. It's things like Asana, where people are using more shared task managers across teams

instead of just doing their daily huddle, they're moving some of these team huddles online. and a company called Workboard aligns goals across teams in a very transparent way. And they are seeing a lot more interest in people saying, hey, how do I communicate what's important to people and let them know how we're doing against our goals. And so I think there will be a whole trend of applications that create more organizational transparency so that people understand what they're working on, why they're working on it, and how they're doing against their goals. And one of the other use cases now that's really interesting is telehealth and telemedicine,

which is a video conference call with either a nurse practitioner, a nurse, or a doctor. It's much more efficient. It's much safer for all the practitioners and the emergency medical professionals. I think as a consequence of all this, the telehealth would become a norm instead of just something that was maybe a little overpromised and underdelivered now. I think it'll become totally mainstream. Yeah, and I think the common themes you're seeing here are that when you switch things to this online digital communication format, not only are they cheaper, they save more time, but they also can

in many cases, up the quality of care or teaching that you would otherwise receive. So in the teaching context, when you have one teacher teaching thousands, you can afford to get one of the most amazing teachers there to create that course. And same thing, when it's in medicine, if there are not enough doctors in that particular city, you now can access doctors from all over the world and unlocking a big supply of service providers, whether it's teachers, doctors, therapists, and so forth, what it does is it not only ups the quality of what you can typically access, but it does that simultaneously with lowering the costs.

I want to talk about the longer-term impact of this. This is likely not short-lived. Even before the coronavirus began to spread, our workforce was already becoming more distributed. So as more and more people are likely to go remote in the coming months for work, for school, how do you see this pandemic shaping the workforce, in the future? Do you think that remote work will become the new normal? One thing I would say is certain is that the myth that there's so many jobs that, quote, unquote,

are not possibly done remote. Clearly, it's shattered because people that are doing jobs that when they were hired into it, they were told that it was not possible to successfully do the job remote and proven that that's not true. There's just a tremendous number of jobs that people can do remote. It's an unfortunate but an interesting test case in that, as you noted, most people probably aren't that comfortable video conferencing into work. But with this scenario, many are being forced to. Once people realize that these tools are available and that they're somewhat intuitive and easy to use, I wonder if this is the beginning of a more permanent shift. I think a lot of people like going to an office. They like the separation of home life and work life. And so there's a lot of

people that will be very happy to go back to the office. But there's certainly going to be an enduring trend. I would have to imagine where people want to live. where they want to live and then work at the companies they want to work at, even if those two things are not co-located. And certainly this is showing that that's very possible for the vast majority of professional use cases. Right. It's still too early to call whether or not consumers prefer working at home or in a physical office right next to their colleagues. I think distributed teams, especially teams that have global workforces, are going to realize maybe they don't have to do all of their hiring in a very small radius around their office. You know, all three of us are in three separate

cities and three separate rooms all recording this podcast digitally using digital podcasting software that's delivered as a service. And so, you know, I think people will find that there's a tool for almost every use case that they have. And, you know, I think if I had asked you six months ago, hey, we could start recording podcasts all remote and distributed. You all would have said, no, that's not going to be good. It's not going to work out okay. Right. But of course, it's working out fine. The other thing I would mention is we don't know how long this particular phase is going to last. And as a lot of entrepreneurs are seeing these opportunities, they're seeing also these gaps in existing products. I think there's going to just be more innovation in this

space. Just think about the possibilities when you add things like AR. You know, you can have a fashion show where things are coming to life or you can look at an item and save it for later, right? There's all kinds of things that you can do once you overlay a digital screen in front of a real life event. So inevitably, I think that means you're going to get better products serving this particular use case too. You know, if you think about video streaming as a new browser, what are all the extensions you're going to need? What are all the different destination websites that are going to have to be built? And I think it's an open question for some of these verticals, whether or not it's a horizontal platform that wins or whether it's a vertical platform that wins. Great. Well,

thank you so much for joining us on the A16C podcast. Thank you. Thank you.