I never seem to have enough time. Nobody I know does, really.

We’re are living in a golden age of productivity tools: Slack and Zoom and Figma and Dropbox and Quip and Crew and many more. The combined macro trends of mobile, cloud, modern design, and machine learning have paid huge dividends in our ability to create, collaborate, and build things quickly.

But one of the ironies of the age is that as amazing as these tools are, it’s gotten increasingly tough to find the time to sit down and use them productively. Between meetings, notifications, alerts and on and on, we’ve lost the ability to control our calendars, to have time to think and to work in focused ways.

Which is why I’m really happy to be able (finally!) to talk about our investment in Clockwise! I met the Clockwise founders Matt Martin, Mike Grinolds, and Gary Lerhaupt early in 2018 and was immediately taken with them, their passion for helping us get control of our time, and their new approach to doing it — not by creating a new calendar app, but by using machine learning to make the calendars we already have work better. The approach would take a deep mix of product, UX, machine learning and systems thinking to make work, and that’s precisely what Matt, Mike & Gary demonstrated. This was a team I wanted to be in business with, building a technology that needed to exist in the world.

Clockwise makes a product and supporting technology that actually gives us time back. They’ve been heads down over the past couple of years building their first product — connect it to your own calendar and it figures out how to optimize your days to give you back meaningful chunks of time in whole blocks. For old school nerds (🙋‍♂️) , it will remind you of a disk defragmenter:

You can see from the animation above that Clockwise can figure out which meetings are movable (like weekly 1–1s) and which aren’t (like staff meetings), and can rework your weekly calendar to give you back time to think & time to work. The yellow time is fragmented time; the turquoise is time you can really use to do productive, concentrated work. The before & after difference is huge.

But the real magic happens when you connect it up as an organization. Clockwise can optimize across the whole organization to maximize what they call Focus Time — uninterrupted blocks of time. It’s amazing to see the results — even in the early beta it’s given literally thousands of hours of Focus Time back to folks at some of the world’s most productive companies like Lyft, Asana, Intercom and others.

And maybe it goes without saying, but this is a very tricky problem. It’s one thing to optimize a single individual’s calendar, but when you start to look at options, constraints and optimizations across multiple calendars and organizations, it gets hard fast. NP-hard, in fact, to use a computer science term. Happily, it happens to be the kind of problem that’s well suited for machines and machine learning to tackle, which is part of the secret sauce the team has been building for a couple of years now.

This Clockwise team is a team that nerds out on the details of productivity and Deep Work (to use Cal Newport’s framing). They’re obsessed with thinking about how to get all of us back the time we need to do real work. And they’ve already tackled a similar challenge at RelateIQ (focused on contacts rather than calendar), where they were before starting Clockwise. The team is full of passion, and with backgrounds in UX, machine learning and more — it’s an incredible team that’s laser focused on getting this right.

Getting time back to think and to create — that’s a job worth doing, and I’m really excited to be on the journey with Matt, Mike & Gary, as well as Steve Loughlin from Accel, their former leader at RelateIQ.

Go take a look and see if you can get a little more control over your own time.

Time for Clockwise was originally published in Greylock Perspectives on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

For the past decade, we’ve seen a massive shift in the way we consume, interact with, and share media. We all stream more and more video content online, of course. But we also expect deeper and more meaningful interactions with content creators and streamers. Users want an easy way to watch and interact with their favorite streamers and with their friends at the same time. Streamers want better ways to connect with users without latency, and better tools for monetization. And publishers want to provide both streamers and users with a great content experience in a brand consistent way.

But no great “social theater” platforms exist for video yet. There are ways to watch (increasingly large) broadcasts/streams, but very few great ways to experience things in real time with your friends. It’s an unsatisfying system for streamers, publishers, and users alike.

The team at Caffeine has been heads down on solving this problem. Caffeine is a platform for what its founders call “social broadcasting” — a new way to share live broadcasts of gaming & other entertainment, one that is more immediate and connected than anything I’ve ever seen.

Cofounders Ben Keighran and Sam Roberts started Caffeine more than a year ago, and the product has been in pre-release for a few months now. I’ve been dying to talk about Caffeine since we first backed the team — and they’re uncloaking a little bit today, so I can (finally!) share the news that Greylock led the first round of funding, and I’m on the board.

Caffeine is one of those products that completely immediately resets and changes your expectations. You can read more about their product, but the TL;DR is this: Caffeine is a simpler, safer, and a more fun live broadcasting platform that puts people first. When you launch Caffeine and jump into one of the many streams, it just feels right. When you use it, the immediacy and liveliness of the application (whether you’re streaming content or watching it via the web or mobile) make you think, “Oh! This is how every product should feel.” It’s easy to find the creators you care about, and immediate and personalized interaction with them just a few taps away — and with a community that feels engaged and non-toxic.

One of the best things about being a VC is getting to work with awesome product people who have a strong point of view on how the world can — and should — work. Ben and Sam are very much innovators in this way; most recently, they both worked at Apple where they designed and shipped market defining products like the new Apple TV interface, iPhoto, iMovie, and Aperture.

I’ve known Ben for about a decade now; he’s one of the people I’ve most wanted to work with. Ben and Sam worked together at Apple, and decided to start Caffeine together after they left. When Ben first introduced me to Sam, it took me about 2 seconds to decide I wanted to work with him, too.

In our first meeting to talk about what they were thinking about building, my initial reaction was that I wasn’t sure the world needed another streaming platform, and that surely the gap between what they had in mind and existing systems wasn’t that glaring.

But Ben & Sam had a plan to build something that feels a lot more intimate and a lot more connected. And their prototype blew me away. What on paper sounded merely interesting, in pixels was something else altogether. And sometimes you just have to try a product to see how good it can feel to use, and what a gap there was before.

Their prototype and vision echoed something I’ve noticed in my own media consumption, and that of my kids and their friends: we’re moving away from “one size fits all” content, and headed towards more content that’s generated by people we care about who are relevant to us. The easiest place to see that is in gaming today — at my own house in any given night we’ll play Minecraft, watch videos on YouTube of other people playing Minecraft, and talk about how to play even more Minecraft informed by our own experiences and the highly relevant content we just watched together. As the kids have gotten older, we’ve moved to more FIFA, but the phenomenon remains the same. We are consuming new kinds of media in new ways. We are expecting more & more from the experience.

Caffeine points the way to that future.

We are just incredibly enthusiastic to work on Caffeine with Ben & Sam and the team they’ve built.

Go try it for yourself at Caffeine.tv. 😀

Our Investment in Caffeine was originally published in Greylock Perspectives on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I’ve been interested (and obsessed, really) with design for my whole career, stretching back to the early nineties when I got to work on early human-computer interaction at Stanford. A lot’s changed since then — the rise and dominance of the Internet; then the absolute ubiquity of phones and other connected devices — because computing has permeated every facet of the way humans live, intentional design has become a necessity for just about every product.

But for all that the orientation towards and understanding of design has changed, the technology we use to design hasn’t really. Despite advancements in cloud computing and graphics processing, most design tools have remained stubbornly stuck in the 90’s. Designers must run them locally on their computers, syncing to file storage services and exporting inert versions to share with collaborators. In other words: in a world of collaboration, design has remained a stubbornly solo activity.

This has never been a great state of affairs, and more than that it just doesn’t work at any scale at all. As technology companies grow, and the reach of the products they make extends, workflows to create those products are getting extremely complicated — it’s generally a mess of hacks to allow basic communication among engineers, marketers, product leaders and designers. Which means that companies like Airbnb are employing entire teams of people to build custom software to make this work.

And so: design becomes the bottleneck to great companies’ growth, instead of what it should be — the driver of their success.

There’s a big opportunity here, which is why in 2015 I was so excited to invest in Figma, the first collaborative design tool that runs in the cloud. From the beginning, Figma had a lot of things going right for it. It broke down barriers to collaboration between teammates because it ran on any operating system, its files are always up-to-date, and multiple people could work together in real-time.

But in the first version of Figma, it fell short on a few key areas — prototyping (for design feedback and user testing) and developer handoff (so engineers could pull the data they needed from design files).

These aren’t optional features — designers need ways to communicate their work quickly to people in other departments and receive their feedback.

Before now, they’ve relied on hacked-together systems that are painful. Plugins loaded on top of plugins cause design apps to freeze and crash whenever there’s an update. Presentations go out of date as soon as they’re exported because they’re not tied to the actual design file. And of course everything gets much more complicated as groups and companies grow — the number and type of stakeholders grow, and everything gets slowed down.

That’s why the next chapter of Figma’s business is so significant. Today the company announced Figma 2.0, with prototyping and developer handoff integrated into the design tool itself. That means that for the first time, the entire product team can work together in one live, always up-to-date environment for ideation, design, prototyping, and code delivery. No other design tool today offers this.

It doesn’t take a fortune-teller to see that this is the future. Virtually every other creative activity has moved to the cloud & the collaboration that it offers.

It’s well beyond time for design to follow suit. Computing and interactive devices like phones now power much of the underlying fabric of our society, and so the demands on designers and product teams are become larger and more acute every day. More than that, though, every company that builds digital products today must become a design first company, designing products with intentionality. And so every company needs tools and workflows that let everyone in the process be part of the process.

Figma 2.0 is an awesome new release— go check it out.

Figma 2.0 was originally published in Greylock Perspectives on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

In just a decade since the introduction of the iPhone, our mobile phones have become the dominant technology we all use in our everyday lives. We send messages (text, pictures, video) all day long, every day. It’s no exaggeration to say that the way we communicate with each other has changed fundamentally over the past 10 years.

And so it’s no surprise that the way we work has also changed dramatically. We text and chat with our colleagues and rely less on email and in-person meetings. We work on projects collaboratively and at the same time, not independently and behind closed doors.

But the focus of software innovation for the way we actually work — our core productivity — has been mostly for the benefit of knowledge workers in desk jobs that look a lot like our own in the technology industry. Productivity software is an area that I really love, and over the past few years I’ve invested in software companies like Figma, Quip, and Dropbox that have dramatically advanced how (desktop & laptop) computer-centric workers create, share and collaborate with one another.

What about industries like retail, healthcare and hospitality, where most workers aren’t working on their laptop all day?

Messaging is a behavior that is already happening for most of these teams — but it’s via some awkward mix of text groups and social platforms that aren’t really built to help co-workers be more productive. These approaches are ad hoc, chaotic, and unloved since they blend personal and work lives, and are generally impossible to manage from the employer side of things.

This is why I am so excited to share the news that Greylock has led the Series B in Crew and I have joined the board.

When I met co-founders Danny Leffel and Broc Miramontes, they told me story after story about the people who use Crew to get work done — people on teams who aren’t well served by our traditional computing-centric tools, but still need to communicate and organize with each other to be successful in their own work. Within just a few minutes in that first meeting, I knew we’d found a team we wanted to work with who was on an important mission. Productivity is bigger than helping folks do their desk jobs more efficiency. It’s about everyone, regardless of industry, being on the same page so they can do their jobs better.

The beauty of Crew is that it connects workers in the way they’re already connecting, via messaging. With Crew, everything and everyone is in one app, and colleagues can swap shifts, change schedules, request time-off and coordinate on daily tasks and responsibilities. When you lower friction to participate and communicate — just like our mobile technology has done in the rest of our lives — interactions across team members are simplified, teams stay organized, and people feel more engaged.

High performing teams across the board — from grocery stores to fire departments — are already using Crew to share schedules, cover shifts, and communicate with each other. In just under two years, there are more than 10,000 active organizations sending over 10M work related communications on a weekly basis.

Everyone needs — and deserves — to have technology that can help them work more collaboratively within their teams and do their jobs better. Danny, Broc and the Crew team are building something really important and I’m very happy to be a part of their journey.

Our Investment In Crew was originally published in Greylock Perspectives on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Building for Rhythm & Pacing

Not sure whether I’ve posted about this before, but I’ve been having a great time teaching a class this quarter at the Stanford Business School — HR282: Startup People Operations. I’m teaching it with Huggy Rao and Sujay Jaswa, and we’ve been having a great time — this is the second year we’re teaching it, and I think it’s getting better & better.

The course content is what you’d expect — lots about recruiting, hiring, firing, cash & equity compensation, equity plans, etc. And we’ve been lucky to have a number of amazing guests.

The past couple of classes we’ve been talking about how you build and operationalize culture — one of my favorite things to talk about.

Today I gave a talk on cadence — how you build the rhythms and pacing of companies from no structure. (Word nerd quiz: what does the root of “cadence” mean? Answer: comes from the Latin “cadere” which means “to fall” — like a drumstick falling on the beat.)

When companies start, the founders are usually going as fast as they possibly can go. Founders can often finish each other’s sentences, and in the early days they can get huge parts of the product and business created without much coordination with each other at all. As companies add people, this gets harder and harder to do — so you start do create process as a way to help more people lead in the organization. But processes sometimes have natural rhythms, sometimes they don’t. It takes intentionality to get them to line up with each other — and over time, to be able to increase pacing (and overall output of the organization).

That’s what we talked about today in class — the slides I used follow. They’re designed for an interactive session (and the HR282 students had a ton of great material to add) — but you’ll get the gist.

Originally published at johnolilly.com.

Introducing Verst: Publishing With Power

I’ve been blogging since 2004, and have always loved the freedom of expression and the ease of distribution. Blogging has given amazing super powers to anyone anywhere in the world who’s got something to say. But even as it’s gotten more powerful over time, it’s also become more challenging to keep up to date with all the tools and options.

Over the years, in addition to using just about every type of publishing software around, I’ve also invested in different platforms that help people share content in various ways (notably Tumblr & Instagram). In 2015, I invested in DWNLD because of their focus on solving a big problem for professional publishers — with the rise of mobile & social (especially Twitter and Facebook), professional publishers didn’t really know where to put their “home” on the web. DWNLD focused on offering a smart and easy way for publishers to build and maintain connections with their audiences through creating their own dedicated apps. When we first invested in DWNLD, I said:

So much has gotten better with mobile technology. Which makes it all the more painful when you come across the areas that have not yet caught up. It’s not easier or better to read things from our favorite publications or brands.

DWNLD launched during the ascent of apps, but it became very clear during the following year that custom apps aren’t the right solution for most professional publishers. But the pain point for publishers still exists: it’s still very hard for anyone but the largest publishers to build and maintain a smart, dynamic home on the web. Today, publishers need to hack together a chaotic bundle of various plug-ins to help solve for optimization, engagement, SEO, and design. It’s a burdensome process for even the most sophisticated publisher.

The DWNLD team saw these trends very clearly and so over the past year have built on their base technology for easy but powerful publishing (enabled by machine learning on the back end) and built something new. Today, they are introducing Verst (the company and the product name), a new platform that’s purpose built for the unique needs of professional publishers.

I won’t spend a lot of time on the details of the product because CEO AJ Frank does a great job of detailing all the goodness here. Beyond the elegant design, search engine optimization, and dedicated customer support that you’d expect, Verst adds a new layer of integrated machine learning and intelligence that’s simple and intuitive to use — it means that machines can help publishers deal with so much of the complexity that’s painful today. In short, they are delivering on the same vision that initially convinced me to invest:

It incorporates (and hides!) hugely sophisticated technology that analyzes and transforms web content into a first class, high performance native mobile experience, coupled with notifications, easy commerce options, and subscription capabilities built in.

AJ is a talented entrepreneur with unique experience helping build and scale publishing platforms like YouTube and Vine. He brings a critical publisher orientation to the company and he will work hard every day to build and innovate on behalf of professional publishers. I am happy that the Verst team is launching today and sharing what they’ve been up to with the rest of the world. We look forward to continuing our partnership with AJ, Fritz (founder & chairman) and the rest of the team as they continue to build Verst.

P.S. — My blog lives at johnolilly.com now — and you might check out my partner Reid’s new blog at reidhoffman.org as well.

Introducing Verst was originally published in Greylock Perspectives on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

But the real truth is that I’m having a hard time coming to terms with what’s happening in Washington, D.C. and our country more broadly.

Someone asked me the other day how I’m doing — my reply was, “Oh, you know: read crazy Trump tweets first thing in the morning, work it off in a workout, work during the day, rage tweet at night. Normal.”

But I check Twitter a fair amount during the day, and it’s not ever for great reasons. I read a lot of Politico, and Washington Post, and NYT. In the car I’m listening to tons of CNN, MSNBC, NPR, and Fox News (holy shit). I even peek at Breitbart, just to get a glipse of the raging garbage fire going on over there. I read the news at night and want to read every angle. I go to sleep, but wake up every night around 2a or 3a thinking about what’s going on.

So yep. I’m struggling.

I’m functional, and I think making progress at home and work — but I’m so distracted. And clearly not healthy w/r/t my media consumption.

It’s easy to articulate why: I am, and always have been, an American exceptionalist. I believe that for all our increasingly obvious faults, there are many, many things that make the United States, and the American experience, unique in world history, and I’m very proud of who we are and how we work. But I’m also a globalist, and want our whole world to improve — the thing I love about America is how hell bent we’ve been on being so inclusive and diverse. Again, the flaws, including our original sin of slavery, are obvious. But I’m an optimist (even though many people read me as a pessimist), and I’m an American optimist more than anything else.

So it’s hard to watch so many of our core institutions under attack. Every day we can see the work of Jefferson, and Washington, and Madison, and Hamilton, and Lincoln, and Roosevelt, and on and on — trampled on with such disregard by the current occupants of 1600 Pennsylvania.

I’ll write more about all this in the coming days, not that anyone needs any more hot takes on what’s going on. I’ll write about some of the things that I’ve been getting involved with and actually doing to protect and nurture the values of our country.

I’ve decided to write again mostly for myself, though.

It’s been hard not to be snarky or negative or weak or unsure. I’m all those things most every day, and I don’t really want them to reflect in my writing. (My tweets are another matter — snarky is pretty much what I’ve got!)

But for now I’ll end this with a bit of a breakthrough mentally I had last week — and it came from the unlikeliest of people, Mitch McConnell (who I think is probably the worst, most obstructionist and damaging lawmaker of my lifetime.)

It came when Elizabeth Warren was reading Coretta Scott King’s letter and McConnell shut her down with Rule 19, saying “She was warned. She was given an explanation. Nevertheless, she persisted.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about that word: persist.

And how it relates to another word of so many Americans right now: resist.

[Nerd alert!] I love etymology, and was thinking about these two words and their roots. “Resist” comes from the Latin roots “re” (meaning against) and “sistere” (meaning to stand) — so of course means to stand against. And there’s a lot of standing against our goverment that needs doing right now. Persist comes from the same base word meaning stand, but with “per” — meaning through. Stand through. Be steadfast.

For me that simple switch, from thinking about resisting, to thinking about being steadfast — that’s made a huge and positive difference for me. Because instead of just standing against this awful administration and being defined by them — instead of that, it’s about the idea of being steadfast to my own — our own — values, and holding them tight and inviolate. It’s not about bouncing these people out of power, although that needs doing. It’s not about raging against this dumb law or that insane executive order.

Rather it’s about continuing to build our families and communities and businesses and governments, and holding our values steadfastly.

Persist.

I had an opportunity this week to speak on a panel to some newly elected members of Congress about technology policy, and it was an interesting and positive experience.

I won’t go into all the things we discussed (although not difficult to imagine) since it was off the record, but I started off by quoting David Foster Wallace in a commencement address at Kenyon College some years ago. Starts off with a joke:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

I started that way to make this point: technology isn’t a tool or something we use to get a job done anymore. It’s the actual water we are swimming in. It’s the way we talk. It’s the way we work. It’s the way we think.

This isn’t a new idea, of course. Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman figured it out ages ago. The medium is the message, &c.

But the degree to which it’s true now is, I think, is more extreme than ever, and it’s been sneaking up on us for awhile. Facebook & Twitter, Snapchat & Instagram — they’ve all changed the way we think and work. And this will sound insane, but to a significant degree, I think we really don’t understand most of the implications.

In fact, most of the time we don’t even really totally grok that there’s nothing natural or inevitable about these particular communication patterns at all. They’re constructs that flow from how the technology works, and they have strengths and weaknesses just like any other medium does.

Anyway, my more prosaic point was just this: there really isn’t any “technology policy” anymore. It’s all just policy. Technology is so foundational to how we work and how we think that it always has to be considered as part of a broader fabric.

If you have time, go back and read that speech by Wallace. It’s one of the most thoughtful and self aware speeches I’ve ever come across, and I read it myself often. It seems relevant in many, many ways as we gratefully and nervously draw a close to 2016.

I read it just to remind myself:

This is water, this is water.

I’ve said many times that deciding to be a section leader was probably my best career decision ever — no exaggeration. It’s been instrumental in creating a ton of great leaders over nearly 3 decades now.

We’ve had a couple of other reunions over the past few years — they’ve been amazing to attend because there are just so many incredible and inspirational people who have gone through the program since its inception.

But this particular reunion was special for another reason: it was also a celebration of Eric Roberts, for many years the faculty sponsor of the program, and a huge driver of so much in the 25 years he’s been at Stanford. He’s retiring soon, and so we got to celebrate his many contributions.

6 of us got to offer a few thoughts on Eric’s time at Stanford — former University President John Hennessey, Wealthfront’s CEO Adam Nash, Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer, UCSD Assistant Professor Lilly Irani, current sponsor and Stanford professor Mehran Sahami, and me.

Anyway, it’s a humbling group to be part of (both the speaker set and the program more generally), and I was grateful and honored to have a chance to offer a few thoughts.

Here’s what I wrote (as per usual, about 50% different than what I actually said…):

—

I was never lucky enough to take a CS class from Eric, but I have to imagine the feeling I’ve got right now is a little bit like I would’ve felt turning in a Karel assignment. Excited & kind of nervous.

But really: this group — Stanford CS, and CS198 in particular — is probably the group of people I am most at home around and most comfortable with in the world. CS198 is the source of many of my longest and best friendships, and the source of my longest and most productive working relationships. And of course an awful lot of that was made possible by Eric. Just in case you think I’m exaggerating, I counted: 2 of my cofounders were section leaders; 5 out of our 7 first employees were section leaders. And 3 out of 12 of the companies I’ve invested in since I’ve been at Greylock. Plus: two of my groomsmen for my wedding. It’s no exaggeration when I say that deciding to be a section leader, and later getting the opportunity to be a coordinator — those are 2 of the most critical turning points of my life.

Looking back on things, I guess I actually got to Stanford in 1989 about a year before Eric came as an Associate Professor, when the also extraordinary Stuart Reges was building the foundations of CS198 — then we all went through the weirdness and dislocation when Stuart left Stanford — but I don’t know if anyone knew then just how lucky we were that Eric was already here, ready to build 198 into something essential and foundational to Stanford Computer Science and to Stanford University itself.

I applied and became a section leader right around the time Eric took over the program — Scott and Astro turned me down the first time I applied but things worked out on my second. Once I was in the program, I really, really loved it, and eventually applied to be coordinator. Didn’t get it — Sandy Nguyen did. Tried again 2 quarters later — nope! Felix got it. Just to be perfectly clear, Eric made the right call both times — Felix and Sandy were both amazing. Still, I loved the program and applied one more time, and still remember when Eric called me to offer me the coordinator job — I was over the moon, and loved every minute of my two quarters with Felix. My two quarters with Bryan Rollins were also fine.

Talking with Mehran, we figure that since Eric has run CS198, more than 25,000 students have gone through the 106s; and that well over a thousand people have been section leaders. And maybe a few dozen of us have been coordinators, although I’m pretty sure we each contributed more than our fair share of Eric’s gray hairs during our terms — or at least I’m pretty sure that Bryan and I did anyway. In a real way, Eric’s work has had an impact on virtually everything and everyone in our industry.

We’ve all learned so much from Eric along the way. About computer science for sure, but also how to find such joy in the science & the engineering, in the learning & teaching & communion of the group. The environment that Eric made possible is one that values students taking leadership and responsibility for the betterment of all. And Eric paid attention to and valued and contributed to diversity long before really anyone else was thinking about it, let alone doing something about it.

Beyond the computer science and beyond the classes, more than anything else, Eric helped create an environment and a community where each of us in it wanted to be as good as we could be, and we wanted everyone around us to be even better. He helped so many of us find our calling and our voice that it’s really hard to even get your head around.

As important as anything else: Eric helped to teach us meaningful, lasting self-efficacy: how to teach each other and learn from each other and value and rely on each other — something that lasts even now.

I am more than certain that CS198 has an incredibly bright future with Mehran at the helm — but I know, too, that we will miss Eric greatly. His intellect and enthusiasm and commitment and warmth and humanity are genuinely special. We’ll all miss him a lot, for sure, but this community of excellence that he helped create, and these relationships we all have together will persist for a very long time, and I just can’t really express how grateful I am for that gift.

Eric, thank you, and good luck with your next chapter.

I’m a day late writing about this, but yesterday Figma launched their 1.0, which included multiplayer simultaneous editing. Evan’s got a post that describes what they’ve done in great detail — it’s worth reading every word — Evan’s posts generally are amazing like that.

I’m really excited about this launch (and judging by the responses we got yesterday and today, lots of other people are) — for a couple of different reasons.

First off, I love love love productivity software. We’re in an absolute golden age of software that helps us do things together. For the first time in 25 years, there’s a massive reinvention of how we create things together happening — really the first time since Office solidified into its (rough) current form in 1990 or so. From about 1990 to 2007, Microsoft held an absolute distribution advantage — because Windows was on virtually everyone’s computer (95%!), Office had an almost overwhelming bundling advantage. (Internet Explorer did as well, but for some different reasons, Firefox and then Chrome broke that stranglehold for the web in the 2nd half of the last decade.)

But in 2007 we got iPhones and Androids, and Office no longer had the overwhelming distribution advantage they did before — we were all reading and creating on new screens running iOS & Android.

That move to new platforms also came with a new human behaviors and expectations: real time notifications, messaging, auto-saving to the cloud, focus on content rather than files, and a desire/demand for apps designed to fit the way we were living and working, rather than fitting the way we work to the way apps worked. And so we’ve been the happy beneficiaries of completely new systems like Slack & Quip & many other modern ways to create.

In many ways, this orientation towards messaging and collaboration also mirrored the rise of open source and collaborative development, as more and more developers started using the systems and norms and tools of open source.

I think we’re going to see a long boom in productivity software, including some things that look completely different than we’ve ever seen, truly matched to the capabilities of mobile & cloud.

So of course Figma’s exciting to me as it’s very in line with those trends.

The second reason I’m excited about Figma’s launch is that interaction & interface design is very near & dear to my heart. Learning about design and HCI at Stanford changed my life — it moved me from focusing on computer architectures towards building things that humans wanted to use. And that led me to work at Apple and Mozilla and on many other adventures.

But design has stayed stubbornly isolated — it hasn’t undergone the same collaboration revolutions that software development and office productivity have gone through — it’s remained, basically, single player while the rest of the world has moved towards collaboration.

Some of that is intrinsic — designing, like coding, really, is an act of pure creation and constraints — of figuring out how to get artifact to match intent. And that very often takes place with just one human in the loop, at least for the critical parts of it.

But I think a more fundamental reason that design has been solo is simply that the tools have been solo — they haven’t embraced the concepts of asyncrhonous open source collaboration, or of syncrhonous messaging. A lot of the reason for that is that it’s legitimately difficult to build systems that allow this type of creation from many people who aren’t staring at the same screen. You needed robust cloud technology; you needed something like the web, and you needed something like GPUs that the web could use to make everything sing.

And you needed folks like Evan & Dylan and the Figma team to put it all together in an exceptionally ambitious technology package that builds on the very best design traditions of Adobe (and more recently Sketch), but also opens up new areas for both asynchronous and synchronous collaboration.

To my knowledge, there’s never been a system built quite like Figma.

I think for some people this will be an obviously interesting & exciting cliff to jump off. I think it’ll make other people uncomfortable, with images of design by committee and bosses looking over designers shoulders.

It will definitely mean we need to figure some new things out in terms of how we work together. But we figured it out in other areas — with tools like Slack & Github, with Quip & Google Docs. I have pretty high confidence that we’ll figure it out with Figma and design, too.

Our experience with Figma so far has been exactly that — that it’s shorted design feedback loops, that it’s productively gotten more people in each company understanding and appreciating design, and that it’s just helping make better products faster.

So that’s why I’m excited, and so proud of what the team at Figma has built.

Achievement unlocked: multiplayer design.

Lots and lots of fun days and learning ahead.

Figma, Together was originally published in Greylock Perspectives on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.