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00:00:00 - Speaker 1: Everyone gets into a room, you have a brainstorm and out comes the ideas. The reality is so much messier. You have individual to group back again, you’re bouncing around among individuals, you’re bouncing around among different levels of fidelity. The ideas get mutated, even corrupted, if they get passed from person to person. Almost like this pulsating network, right? With all kinds of weird patterns happening is what’s really needed to produce good ideas. So the substrate, the tool needs to embrace that.

00:00:32 - Speaker 2: Hello and welcome to Meta Muse. Muse is a tool for deep work on iPad and Mac, but this podcast isn’t about Muse the product, it’s about the small team and the big ideas behind it. I’m Adam Wiggins here with Mark McGrenigan. Hey, Adam. And Mark, I’m excited to say that we’ve given a name to the next major release of Muse. We’re calling it Muse for Teens, and we’ve got the Alpha program underway right now.

00:00:58 - Speaker 1: Yeah, we’ve had this phase penciled into the master plan for years, and it’s great to see us finally bringing it to fruition.

00:01:05 - Speaker 2: Exactly, yeah, it really is a whole other dimension. I think it’s true of most tools, you know, whether it’s a video editor or a word processor or whatever else that you add some kind of multiplayer collaboration or sharing capability, and it really is a whole new dimension to the tool, but I think that’s doubly so for Muse, which is an ideation space.

So, you know, when I’m gonna start a new project, for example, the first thing I’m gonna do is make a board to sit down and essentially get my thoughts together on it. And so here, doing that with a team, when that team is starting a project, well, we’re finding it to be very powerful indeed and sort of almost a multiplier effect on the value of the rest of the product. So it’s a lot of fun.

We got a little demo video online, I’ll link that in the show notes, and yeah, we have a couple dozen teams in the Alpha program here, really giving the local first sync and sort of the capabilities, the product of solid pummeling here, or we hope it can.

Stand up to everyone’s needs, as well as we continue to just discover what are the most interesting things to add in the collaborative setting. You know, we start with the obvious stuff like comments, for example, but I think there’s a lot of non-obvious stuff that we’ll get to pretty quickly, so.

Very exciting stuff and of course I’ll put all the necessary links for that in the show notes, but I thought it would be a great chance to talk about something we’ve mentioned in passing in a number of episodes, which is remote work. So that’s our topic for today and of course the muse team is all remote and part of the reason it’s so salient, I think, is the muse for teams. product as it’s shaping up for us in our internal use, but also with our customers in this alpha here is really seeing the role it can play for especially for remote first team. So there’s a lot of interplay between how we personally think about remote work, I think, and where we’re going to go with the product.

00:02:48 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and it’s also a very ripe time in the industry with a lot of companies exploring this way of working, basically whether they wanted to or not, because of the pandemic. And you saw a bit of a phase shift over the past few years towards this approach. It’s also notable that you and I have a lot of personal experience with many pieces of the spectrum. We’ve kind of gone, I think, through almost the whole range. And so I’m sure we have a lot of personal things to say about it as well.

00:03:14 - Speaker 2: You know, the timing topic is a funny 11 thing that occurred to me, or if I was a listener of this podcast and I saw it pop up in my feed, I would think, hm, remote work, wasn’t that a hot topic circa 2016? You know, I seem to remember a lot of blog posts and especially medium posts when that was the hot thing. actually right around the same time that I shifted to remote work, which was we started in Switch in 2015, we started that as an all remote research lab, always figured, well, you know, this will work to get started, but once we scale up, you know, we’ll need to get serious or whatever and get an office, and that never happened and I think the remote nature actually unlocked new possibilities for how we could do these research projects and the kinds of people we could bring in. And it turned out to be, in addition to just having these benefits of letting us focus on the business rather than, I don’t know, office leases also seemed to have these other benefits as well.

But at least I remember in that time, the 2015, 2016 window, most of the posts were really from the perspective of individual contributors who were basically saying, hey, I want to reclaim my commuting time, or I want to be able to be home for my kids’ bedtime, or I want to eat healthy, you know, listing out the benefits to an individual contributor. And I think the timing there was probably also not a coincidence that that was probably around the time this kind of first generation stack of tools, that’s Slack, Zoom. Google Docs, Figma, and obviously those are all slightly different age pieces of software, but I feel like there was a critical mass if you could put together some subset of those and get a pretty good working collaboration, not certainly at the same level of bandwidth as working in an office, but maybe you kind of crossed a threshold where the benefits started to exceed the cost or where it was even possible, maybe was one way to put it.

00:05:00 - Speaker 1: Yeah, at least for the vanguard of individuals and companies. I think it is true that called around 2016, there was a lot of discussion about it, but let’s say it’s probably from a pretty vocal minority, which I don’t mean in any negative way, but if you look at the bulk of economic production in the software industry, it was done by on location firms, and in the past few years, that has turned over in a big way. So you get a whole new swath of data to talk to.

00:05:26 - Speaker 2: Indeed, yeah, well, I guess it was 2020 that it suddenly seemed that every single person I knew became aware of what Zoom was, and of course we’d been using that piece of software along with many others for some time and had developed habits and techniques.

Uh, about social mores and just ways to use them effectively and so the whole world was kind of getting a crash course on that and accelerating the adoption of these tools, and you could argue that there was maybe even an almost an over exuberance, and I don’t exuberance is the right term. I guess it’s just like we were forced into, the whole world was forced into this or as much of the world. feasible to do, which is basically most knowledge workers as well as schools, and that in turn probably caused a lot of Silicon Valley folks and investors and so forth to think, OK, this is a huge market and indeed if you looked at the stock price of Zoom at one point, I mean it was pretty wild in the middle of the pandemic somewhere, its peak, I think I saw some stat that it was something like the Market cap of Zoom was larger than all of the airlines combined in that moment, all the US airlines combined in that moment, and of course their stock was massively down, and you look at many of these companies that did well, e-commerce and so forth in the pandemic, and if you look at the 5 year graph of their stock, they had this huge boom over the pandemic time and essentially they returned a little bit more to earth since then. And so I think in some senses there was almost a boom and investment and new people working on Zoom alternatives and things like that and maybe in some ways here now 2022, 2023 we’re kind of going back to the office and maybe folks are like, OK, maybe that wasn’t as big of a boom as we thought, but I almost feel like this is looking at the hype cycle curve, you know, again, it’s weird to call the hype cycle because it was. necessity, but that peak that we had in the 2020, 2021 period was kind of like that peak in the hype cycle curve and where we are now is maybe a trough where it was overhyped or overdone or something, but actually now we have a lot of data like you said about like what the benefits are, what the downsides are, and we can feed that into how we develop practices and tools.

00:07:36 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and I think it’s a more healthy and honestly more interesting place now during the height of the pandemic, where, you know, you basically weren’t allowed to go outside, you really feel on top of the world if you’re a remote software provider, because people have no choice, right? Or if you’re Uber Eats or something, right, you’re just making money hand over fist cause people don’t have any other option.

But now you have to confront the reality of success can’t just be, you can do it and you enjoy working from home in your pajamas or whatever.

It has to be you successfully produce valuable software for your customers, and some people are gonna try to do that remotely, some people are gonna try to do that from the office, and your proposed mechanism has to be successful in delivering those goods.

00:08:13 - Speaker 2: Yes, well, we’ll get to see kind of how these companies perform in the market, the companies that choose to be co-located in the same place, invest in an office, get all the benefits that come with that high bandwidth, maybe more personal trust and human connections and things like that, but of course there’s a literal and logistical cost there. Maintaining offices and requiring people to be in the same physical place and so forth and so we can compare the teams that do that against the teams that don’t. And I hope there’s room for both possibilities in the world or maybe we’ll discover certain types of products or ventures, sort of demand, co-location and others it’s less important for. So yeah, the grand laboratory of the free market will give us a lot of information.

Maybe we can start with the kind of personal motivations of let’s call them knowledge workers or creative workers.

This would have been some of the contents of those medium post circuit 2016, and I think the lifestyle aspect, the flexibility, being able to control your workspace, reclaiming that commute time is obviously part of it. Are there others either for you personally or you’ve heard others discuss?

00:09:25 - Speaker 1: I think a big one is location flexibility, especially as the lifestyle quality in certain American cities was declining, and also some people just didn’t want to live in America, like, you know, you want to move to Germany, there would have been a time where You would have basically written yourself out of most of the software industry if you did that, but now you’re still very much in the game.

So I do think location flexibilities, but some people wanted to move closer to their kids or to their parents, right? I think that’s a pretty big one because there was a time where there was only really a handful of cities that you had to be in if you wanted to be at the top tier of pure software firms, and that’s no longer the case, which is great.

00:10:04 - Speaker 2: Yeah, completely, and some of that is just preference. We talked about that in our cities episode in our personal decisions, my case to move to Berlin, yours to Seattle, and certainly many folks have chosen to leave a city altogether and live someplace more in nature. In many cases you do want the ability to live near family or I know the For example, we had Tyler from Cam Fund on our podcast and he talked about that he was in Mexico City because that’s where his wife needed to be for her career. And that’s great that you don’t have to necessarily have this conflict between two people who are pursuing careers if one of them is very flexible at their location.

00:10:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and you might put this in flexibility, but I think a big one is just control over your physical work environment, towards the end of the peak of the cycle in San Francisco, it was getting pretty wild with how tightly they were packing people in there, just couldn’t hear yourself think, right? At least I couldn’t. So people would go in with like, you know, earplugs plus noise canceling headphones to try getting your work done. Meanwhile, you’re combating all of the mechanical keyboards anyways. It’s just being able to go to an office that is soundproofed and you know cars driving by all over the place. It was a big win.

00:11:15 - Speaker 2: Yeah, control over your personal space, which includes, yeah, obviously things like desk or chair, noise levels, and honestly, some people like more, right? They got to go to a coffee shop where there’s some hustle and bustle for them to be able to think, whereas, yeah, I’m more of a quiet room kind of person. And then you’ve also got the element of your hardware. So there’s your desk set up, there’s your, again, the mechanical keyboard or not, there’s what kind of headphones do you have that sort of thing, and obviously companies Do potentially give you the option to make purchases, but I think this leads maybe a little bit to the maybe the responsibilities of being a remote worker, which is a lot more self-management. And so that’s something like, yeah, when it comes to hardware, certainly everyone on the Muse team, I don’t know exactly how other teams do it, but we basically say, OK, here’s your budget, basically make sure you have the right hardware to do this job, and sometimes that’s podcasting mics and sometimes it’s iPads and pencils, and sometimes it’s just a really fast computer, but it’s sort of really kind of more up to you and in that sense, you know, close to being a freelancer, you need that ability to make wise decisions about, OK, I’m gonna spend this money for equipment in order to, you know, maximize my productivity as well as my just comfort and enjoyment in the job. And then it’d be remiss if I didn’t mention an idea here that comes from Hilary Maloney, someone we collaborated with a little while back, who had this concept of a work ID list, and she actually discovered this in looking through our customer feedback and kind of some different surveys and things and trying to understand the kind of person that wants to use and purchase Muse, and I found this so interesting. I would not have in any way zoomed. In on this and thinking about our target customer, but she defined it as someone who is not doing the work just for the paycheck if that’s the right way to put it, but they’re driven to be in tech or a creative field of some kind because they feel they can find a lot of meaning there and they want to bring their strategic skills, their creativity, their intellect to the table to work on something they find intellectually interesting, challenging, meaningful. Obviously it’s a great privilege of being in a field where your skills are in demand to be able to kind of go higher up the Maslow’s hierarchy, I guess, in the work you’re doing, but it’s really true. We do have this option and one way you can choose to optimize your career is say, well, I’ve got a set of skills, whether it’s design or software engineering or product manager or whatever, and therefore I’m going to use that to maximize my compensation, which usually is probably going and getting a big comp package from a fang company. But another way to think about it, which of course is the decision I think you and I have made as well as everyone on the Muse team is actually we want a balance of things, we want to be compensated reasonably, but we also want the kind of work life. And meaningful mission in the company and you know, values in the company and frankly started part of that is the flexibility in our day to be able to spend our work time and our creative energy and the time and place of our choosing, if that makes sense, or at least something that finds a balance between the needs of the greater team and the company and what we would like to do personally in terms of how we work best. Another one of the items in her kind of breakdown of this work idealist persona was the concept of actively designing your day, and in particular designing it to maximize your focus work. That could be something like the deep work concept, you need a big block of time, you’re gonna mark that off in your calendar, you’re gonna aggressively defend it from meetings. But that also just connects to the workspace exactly as you said that you have a quiet space at home and you can, unlike in an office, you can turn off distractions by turning off your notifications and choosing to really focus on something and it’s a lot harder to do in an office. There’s some meeting happening, hey, there’s the all hands, hey, we’re going to lunch. And sometimes being connected to that is part of the value of being in an office. You have this ambient energy and this kind of natural background hubbub of activity that you can hook into. But then if you are someone that wants to design your day to be able to spend your precious work hours in the most productive way that you can, that gives you less agency on that front.

00:15:28 - Speaker 1: Yeah, so lots of potential benefits from the staff side. How about looking at it from the point of view of a company going remote? What are the benefits, challenges and considerations there?

00:15:39 - Speaker 2: The huge thing that I didn’t really realize going into what a big deal it would be, but is the ability to hire from the global talent pool.

So when we started in Code Switch, and it was just a few of us, and we decided to work, you know, together remotely, and I was really thinking of it in that perspective of that as a person on the team, this is just useful for me and how I want to live my life at the moment.

But once I was in the position of staffing up projects and looking for people, particularly in the very, very specific areas we were trying to hire for, I mean, I remember we were going to look for someone to work with on some CRDT projects circa 2016, and, you know, we made a list of everyone who had expertise with that in the world, and the list was like 10 people, right? And they were, of course, spread all over the world as you might expect.

And so being able to potentially have the ability to hire any one of them. And especially on a short term basis.

So this is something I’ve done a lot of in my career, which is, you work hard to recruit someone, but then getting them to relocate can be a huge deal.

I mean, first of all, obviously moving is a big deal for people, it’s expensive, it’s emotionally demanding, but then you often have immigration things, right, where you have folks who are in some cases takes them years to get the visa they need to come work with you.

And then if you do get in the thing where someone comes, works with you for a little while, turns out it’s not a fit and you’ve gone through all this and they’ve uprooted their life, boy, it becomes really hard to consider, you know, for them to think about quitting, especially if it’s tied to their immigration, on the employer side to think about letting them go. Because you just know what a huge deal this was to work together, and with remote, you say, what are you available? Well, next week, great, let’s start working together. And it’s just a much more lightweight operation, and you sort of decoupled all of these other life choices from your employment, and so that’s this huge benefit on the employer side, the team builder side, the company side is that global talent pool and the lightweight hiring process, and I think that single benefit is so big that it basically makes up for a huge number of other downsides of remote work.

00:17:50 - Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s a great point, and I feel like it’s still underappreciated in the market. People have spent their whole careers with this baseline unremarked upon assumption of because it’s so expensive in many different senses to relocate someone in order for it to make sense, it has to be a longer term commitment or at least expectation. And we’ve removed that constraint, but it hasn’t fully propagated through the system, I would say. But while that’s the case, it’s to our advantage for sure.

00:18:20 - Speaker 2: Now there’s a, call it administrative piece of this as well, which is increasingly you can kind of decouple the legal jurisdiction of the entity, the employee location, and yeah, the owner location. Which is quite interesting.

I think Stripe Alas was the first mover on this first base is another company that makes it easy to just incorporate a US legal entity, whether or not you’re located in the US. You also have up and coming services like Wise, which makes it really easy to do currency conversions and sort of international transfers, or you got something like De DEEL, which is kind of like an international HR kind of platform.

And all of these things acknowledge this reality of that I think in some ways probably the legal frameworks that exist haven’t quite caught up to yet, which is, you have what I’ve sometimes heard referred to as micronationals.

The Muse team would fit into that, right? We have some folks from Europe, we have some folks from the United States, and historically, if a company got big enough to have teams in two different countries, let alone two different continents, you would be huge. And so of course you could set up maybe, I don’t know, all kinds of HR process and things like that to kind of manage the. Relationship between the legal entities and the employees and comply with all the local labor laws and things like that. But now it’s quite common, even just a founding team, and just two people who are gonna work together might be from two different countries, and they don’t have any plans to relocate or whatever. Where do you incorporate, where is your bank account? And I think increasingly it’s become possible and even a common practice to think of the jurisdiction where the company lies is, yeah, so completely independent of where the employees may happen to be located.

Now, you still have to deal with lots of complexity potentially moving between them. So as one example, The fluctuating USD to euro currency conversion rates in the later part of 2022 is a challenge for the Muse team, but it really is possible to have a small team where people are located in different countries, and yeah, you can kind of make so much of this virtual and do all that in a way that’s legal and practical.

00:20:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s definitely very doable now and only getting better with these various services that you’ve mentioned. Frankly, it’s a bit of a mess, like currency conversion and tax law and employment law, it’s like it’s kind of all over the place, but just grind through that and it’s very doable.

00:20:45 - Speaker 2: There’s a great article I read a couple of years back called The Legal Implications of Remote, which I think was someone looking at the UK specifically, but I think the general concepts are broadly applicable, which is honestly, it’s not a fully well fleshed out area of law because it is so new and especially if you think of something like workplace.

Safety, which isn’t really a huge concern for knowledge workers for the most part, but you know you have someone like our colleague Julia, you know, she’s a German citizen. We’re a US based company. She spends several months of every year in the winter months, usually in some place like Mexico or someplace in Central or South America, and if she has a workplace injury. When she is a citizen of one country employed by a company based in another country while she is physically in a third country, which labor laws apply there. And yeah, it’s a brave new world.

Now one thing we considered when we set up Muse was the compensation question. Gitlab has some nice documents on this where they have their kind of weighted. They have a waiting relative to basically where you live because of course it’s pretty normal to pay rates that are relative to your local market.

So this is a bit of a debate, you know, is it do you just pay everyone the same, or do you wait it according to where you happen to live? Does that create opportunities for people to move somewhere, you even have companies who have paid you to move someplace less expensive. What do you think about that debate?

00:22:10 - Speaker 1: Folks understandably develop very strong opinions about this matter, but a lot of what I’ve seen is a little bit, I think, too shallow and doesn’t address the dynamics. I think you need to understand this is a process that’s playing out over time. So let me use a little economic story example. Let’s say that initially, You have like two markets, you have the high-end software market and the regular software market, and those are strictly geographically co-located, or people on the high end software market get paid twice as much for whatever reason, you know, cost of living, make something out due to where they are, and you can’t work across those boundaries, and then some single individual. Invented a magical technology, let’s call it voom, and they can work on either side. What should their compensation be? Now there’s two kind of legitimate arguments. There’s the argument of, I’m Doing the same work and even though I’m from a moderate cost area, since I’m doing the same work as your highly paid employees in the new area, I should be paid twice as much, or it should be your cost of living or whatever you want to make up is only half of our other employees in this high cost area. Therefore, you should be paid your old wage which corresponded to your old cost of living.

And what this shows that the actual issue is that there’s a lot of surplus generated. That’s an economic term, which is basically a difference between the value that’s being produced and the cost of producing it, right? And the question becomes how do you allocate that surplus? Does it all go to the employer? Does it all go to the employee, or is there some mix? And when you phrase it in that way, you see that the idea that it should be exactly equal to one of those two extremes is, uh, it’s a little bit doubtful to me. So what I expect is Over time, the markets blend. So while you’re in that initial step of the process where there’s very few people who are crossing geographic boundaries, there’s big surpluses that are unlocked, but it’s also very contentious to negotiate the salaries because deciding how to split up that pie. And we’ve seen that play out with, you know, very strongly worded statements about, you know, you should definitely pay full SF rate or you should definitely pay cost of living rate. But what’s gonna happen over time. I this is basically gonna become one market, I would think, where in the fully remote world, your salary is gonna be a function of your effectiveness or your be believed effectiveness, and if it’s really the case, you know, asterisks, if it’s really the case that there’s no difference on your Impact and productivity for the company based on where you live, that will be reflected in salaries. Now, by the way, that goes both ways. It might be the case that it becomes uneconomical to be a software developer in San Francisco because it’s too expensive versus the market rates in the same way it’s uneconomical to be like a textile factory in San Francisco. Now, I think we’re far from that, but I do expect and If it’s true, if the premise is true that we’re moving to a fully remote world and that that’s just as effective as the local world, then I think things will equilibrate and that will have some winners and losers. But it’s not gonna be that everyone in the world gets paid what was formerly the very top rate. I think that’s unlikely. And by the way, this also connects nicely to an element of personal responsibility and it ties into a little bit of how we approach Muse. A company can say, we think kind of a fair global market value for Software engineering services is X and you can choose to live wherever you want with that. You know, if you want to live in Mexico, for example, very low cost of living, and you’re able to work there and it’s in the right time zone, great. If for whatever reason, like say you have family in New York City, you really want to live there, you know, OK, you know, we’re also not obligated to support you and wanting to live closely to your family. Maybe you should find another job. So there’s kind of an element of personal responsibility and finding a good match with the company in the market.

00:25:49 - Speaker 2: Right, so we’ve sort of described here why a knowledge worker or a creative person would be motivated to work remotely, a lot of which has to do with flexibility and autonomy and their lifestyle.

We’ve talked about the company’s motivation, namely around hiring, accessing a global talent pool, perhaps even this compensation.

Piece of the puzzle, but we’re sort of talking about it as if, well, obviously this is something that can and should be really broadly distributed, but in some ways we’ve seen a quite a retraction in recent time from the peak of remote work. People are going back to the office, so to speak, and we mentioned kind of towards the beginning that part of what made this start to become possible indeed what made us founding and switches and a remote first team, what made us found Muse’s remote first team was the tool chain. That Zoom plus Slack plus GitHub plus Figma plus Notion plus a few other of these products, you put those together in the right combination and with the right set of practices, and you have something where you can get to 60, 70, 80% of the productivity of an in-person team, but with all these other benefits and that sort of cross some threshold of like, OK, this is the cost exceed the benefits.

But that brings us to Muse for Teams, so we’re working on this product here now, and we always knew we wanted a multiplayer component of Muse, but in the process of actually starting to roll it out to our first users and customers and using it for ourselves and realizing how much, how we think about remote work and how much we work as a company is baked into the Product vision is too concrete a word, more like our set of problems that we want to work on and the territory that we want to operate in, I think is really a lot about saying, hey, we think we have something we can contribute to the remote work tool chain, something that is missing right now.

00:27:42 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and in particular we see Muse as a tool to help you and now your team have better ideas to idea, and there’s good remote tools for more transactional and production oriented work. You can have collaborative databases and spreadsheets, and you can produce things like presentations and UI designs together. Obviously you can convey transactional messages in something like email or Slack, but what replaces The work that used to be done over the whiteboard, around the punch table, as you’re taking a walk outside with your colleague, that’s a place where we see music video.

00:28:21 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I think one thing that’s missed in the discussion of two office or not to office is the fact that different parts of the work benefit from being a person quite differently. And there’s a lot of intangible things about like culture transmission and so forth, but putting that aside for just a moment, I do think that just looking at the, I had the first spark of an idea to, I shipped it to customers or to a client.

There are certain parts that are more production oriented and heads down and individual that probably are just as good to go, for example, go back and forth on a pull request in GitHub, whereas there’s other parts that are more loose, sketchy, still trying to figure it out, you need the high bandwidth of being together and kind of gesturing, and we often talk about being in front of a whiteboard and partially that’s about the whiteboard, but I think we use it as a stand-in for that kind of meeting where You’re trying to get together with your collaborators and figure out what you’re even, but even there’s a problem or you know, really trying to develop an idea, and that’s the sort of thing that I think is very hard to do in these tools, which as you said, are typically designed to be transactional. You send the email, you send the slack message.

I think people tend to use, or certainly we’ve seen this from our customer interviews and so forth, they use a Google Docs notion to some extent, kind of write up. Ideas and then they go back and forth in the comments, but it’s all just very structured and it’s all very kind of flat in a way, and yeah, I think that is sort of the big gap in the tool chain right now.

00:29:57 - Speaker 1: Yeah, and we’ll talk more about this when we turn to how well and whether remote works, but importantly this ideation thing, you can get away for a while without doing it, or in particular having coasted on your previous ideas.

So if you’re in an office together and you’re coming up with all these great ideas, high level designs, directions, then you can go and produce and transact for, I don’t know, a year or two, basically in this direction and it can work quite well.

But it’s only when you’re 2 or 3 years in that you realize, wait, we need better ideas, but we can’t do it because we don’t have the appropriate medium and tools.

So I think part of the reason why we’re as an industry, only slowly starting to realize the gap here is that it actually takes a while for it to become a parent.

00:30:40 - Speaker 2: So mentioning whiteboards naturally leads one to talk about another category of software, which is the infinite canvas kind of collaborative whiteboards. I feel like there’s quite a few of these, some of which have been really successful in the last few years.

Miro is probably one of the biggest ones. FigMA launched Fig Jam a couple of years ago, and there’s numbers of others as well. So one question would be, we still feel the need to build Muse.

And obviously we can talk about the personal tool and what we do there, but I guess the question would be, why doesn’t Miro scratch the itch? If we’re saying we need to have good ideas in front of a whiteboard, Miro gives you a virtual whiteboard, case closed.

00:31:18 - Speaker 1: Well, I certainly think there’s something there with tools like Miro.

I had also used Mylonote in the past, but I found myself using those more for visual presentation of multimedia ideas and collecting multimedia data, like mood boards and doing almost like PowerPoint type presentations where you had something you wanted to share, but it wasn’t appropriate for something like a linear notion document.

But it’s also quite polished and rectilinear and high fidelity, and we’ve talked about how that isn’t always conducive to ideation. It’s also a very focused on the desktop, doesn’t really have a strong iPad presence. So I think there’s something there, and there’s a lot of overlapping elements that we share, but I think there’s a slightly different focus and emphasis.

00:32:10 - Speaker 2: Yeah, I posed this question to myself over the last couple of years we’ve been working on Muse whenever I think about when we get to that stage of multiplayer, which again was always the kind of step 3 in our master plan, and we’ve tried using these products ourselves internally for yeah, team planning and things like that, including, yeah, exactly Millinode, Myro, fig Jam.

Apple’s got free form now, yeah, there’s a long tail of these that we’ve tried out, and yeah, they never really, in some cases, I’m like, oh, that’s pretty neat, but they don’t really stick. I don’t find myself wanting to come back to them or reference it again.

You certainly can’t use them, in some cases literally can’t use them, but perhaps you just see they aren’t built for personal thinking. So I’m never sure what to think when I try out a product like this, but it doesn’t really stick for me. Does that make me go, huh, maybe this whole idea of an infinite canvas with multiplayer capability is not as useful as I would have thought. Maybe we shouldn’t bother to build it.

But the other interpretation is more the now famous story of what the Dropbox founder told investors when they asked him why are you building this? There’s hundreds of products that purport to do this exact same thing in the market. And he basically says, well, do you use any of them? And they say no, and he says, well, that’s cause no one’s done it right yet. I’m gonna do it right, and indeed he did.

So whether Muse can be as useful and successful as Dropbox is remains to be seen, but one of my takeaways from me is like, OK, there’s something there with those products, and indeed I have used some of them somewhat extensively, but in the end, I feel like they don’t quite hit the mark for me, and so, yeah, we’re gonna take our swing at what it could be.

Now, the vision of what use for teams will be, what actually happens when you have multiplayer capability to this previously, more kind of private ideation space is something that we’re discovering as we go.

But I think already based on what we talked about here and ideas we’ve developed on the team generally, you can see there’s already some kind of principles that are emerging, right? We talked about the benefit of an office and being in an office for those early ideation. Stages, well, one thing that we’re finding ourselves thinking of Muse as is kind of like a virtual office where it’s this place you can go where you can get ambient awareness of what everyone’s working on, for example. And once we have that frame, it leads us to implementing features like for example, the fact that the avatars for your colleagues are always visible no matter where they are in the workspace, so it has this kind of one continuous world feeling.

Whether that’s the right thing or not, you know, we’re actually gonna find that out, obviously through real world usage, but I think that’s an example of something where we can take what we’ve learned from those first generation tools. For example, FIMA, I think one of the reasons it does so well or struck such a chord is it has the sense of place, you feel like you’re gathering with your colleagues on this document, but of course that’s within the document, it’s within that one document. If you go to a different document, you’ve lost track of them. And so with the muse kind of world, you are able to have ambient sense of where people are and what they’re doing, you see where they are, and you kind of peek in if you want, but that’s sort of rude a little bit, and yeah, it actually gives me a lot of energy to see y’all’s avatars just kind of move around on this big kind of space of like nested whiteboards, if you want to think of it that way. And yeah, it’s kind of like a fun way to meet. It feels like a place to meet and You know, how much can that be a replacement for what we get out of offices? I’m not sure, but that’s what we’re gonna find out through this process.

00:35:43 - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think it’s really important to dial in carefully to why and how ideation works.

I think the high level answer for why not tool X in the past has been, it doesn’t quite resonate with how ideation really works, and importantly, the reality of that has no obligation to You know, basically makes sense to you or to be fair, or to be simple, or to be straightforward. It might be, for example, that seeing little circles with your friends’ faces on them next to a document makes you much more inclined to go there and look at it, you know.

And that regardless of the document itself, and that’s just the way people are, people are messy. And there’s all kinds of weird stuff like that with ideation.

Another one of my favorites is, maybe you have better ideas when you’re sitting down in a couch than when you’re at your desk, you know. Maybe not, but you gotta be open to weird stuff like that.

And what we try to do with Muse is really tune into those weird principles of ideation that maybe been lost to the rectangles in the screen focused that is traditional for software, and I think we’ve had some good success with it, but like you said, the proof is really in the market, so we’ll see.

00:36:47 - Speaker 2: Another potentially counterintuitive piece of how ideation works, particularly ideation across a set of people, is what I would call the asynchronous component.

I think when you naturally think of group ideation, you think of live brainstorming, a very real-time aspect, and indeed a lot of when we think of collaborative tools like a Google Docs, we are thinking of that very real-time nature you’re seeing someone typing in the document.

But I think for sure a big part of having good ideas and developing them over time is that like you said, the taking a walk and that has this asynchronous or spread out across time.

You often have talked about things like letting stuff stew or feeding your sleeping mind and you literally sleep on the problem and come up with another idea, and I think there’s a version of that within a group as well. bouncing ideas back and forth in a kind of virtual sense, and that’s a very interesting overlap with something that I think is a big part of the emerging best practices around remote work, which is embracing asynchronous and some of that comes from this practical aspect of like, hey, you’ve got people across time zones, so if everything has to happen in synchronous meetings, then it makes it real tough for people.

And so there’s a practical element of it, but I actually think that when it does come to many types of the work pipeline and that early stage of ideation is one piece of it.

There are parts that really benefit from real time live, energy, and there’s other parts that actually suffer from that, that if you don’t have the time and space to go off and have your own thoughts separate from the group, the combined group idea is going to be worse than it could be.

00:38:31 - Speaker 1: Yeah, this to me is very important, especially as we get into muse for teams, again this is very caricatured model of ideation, which is everyone gets into a room, you have a brainstorm and out comes the ideas.

The reality is so much messier. You have individual to group and back again, you’re bouncing around among individuals, you’re bouncing around among different levels of fidelity. The ideas get mutated, even corrupted, if they get passed from person to person.

Sometimes they bounce like all the way around the circle and come back to you in a different form.

Style, there’s all kinds of wild stuff that happens and that full process, almost like this pulsating network, right? With all kinds of weird patterns happening is what’s really needed to produce good ideas.

So the substrate, the tool needs to embrace that. And that’s one thing that I think is doing pretty well.

00:39:18 - Speaker 2: Now it’s no secret that we’re gonna have a lot of these kind of big ideas or counterintuitive insights or philosophies behind what we’re building here with the collaborative product. That’s also true, of course, with the personal tool in that element.

Many of those same ideas are obviously gonna come across like ideation being a little bit being freeform or even messy, but one question that came from someone on our Discord, that’s Antoine RJ Wright.

In his question he asked about tools, but I think the underlying thing is that if you have a group working together and they have different styles or different approaches, how do you resolve that? And so, for example, we think that spatial visual, this nested board approach is a great way to explore. is, but if you’re someone that prefers plain text, top to bottom, don’t give me a bunch of fancy pictures. I’m confused or overwhelmed by this kind of big open space, which is very reasonable.

Different people’s brains work different ways.

OK, well, for a personal tool that’s fine because of course you can just pick the one that fits your brain, but once you’re on a team, you kind of all need to agree. about a tool but also working practices. So to answer Antoine’s question, how do we see about trying to have a team come together around tools if indeed when it comes to something like thinking tools, it’s so personal and so about what fits with your mind?

00:40:47 - Speaker 1: This is such a fascinating question, and I’m not surprised that it’s come from Antoine, one of our earliest and best customers. I almost challenged the kind of framing that you had of how do we get people who are currently using disparate tools to use a more unified approach, which, you know, I’m sure is probably one personally likes and approves. So the question could actually mean different things. It could mean, how do we help the group converge on a tool or set of tools, or it could be how do you manage the chaos and complexity of people using different tools, and I think there’s different answers to both of those, maybe we can take the framing of how do we get some convergence. I have a couple of thoughts here.

One is a very powerful truism that I heard about management is people don’t show up to work to do a bad job. It’s one of those that sounds so simple when you say it, but it’s very easy to catch yourself basically making that implicit assumption.

And so why are these people coming in to work using old tools and there’s some reason, so you gotta have some curiosity about what their context is, what their personal history is, why they think this is the best way for them to do a good job. So a counsel curiosity there, which is hard to take much further without additional context on the team, but that’s one idea.

Another sort of management pattern that I might advise here is starting with a single person. So often people present these leadership challenges of, there’s this group, and I want the group to do something different, I can’t group X. The thing is groups don’t do things, people do things. So the way to start is to find one individual human being and to convince them and help them have success with a new path. And this actually has several important benefits. One is it forces you to confront concrete details cause it’s easy to speak in abstractions when you’re talking about the group.

You know, the group is using old tools, the group is using too many tools. The group is using tools like, well, when you talk about what Alice specifically is using and why, again, you’re getting grounded in the details.

Another thing is that it’s much easier to convince a group when there’s already one person convinced they become a sort of lieutenant who could help you advocate for the tool and affect the roll out when there’s often a lot of mechanical stuff that needs to happen. I don’t know how well that actually answers his questions, but those were some of the things that came to mind for me.

00:42:55 - Speaker 2: Well, I think this i