Agave Weekly Update #2
We had some friends stop by and visit our virtual office this week. Someone described what we’re doing as “Habbo Hotel meets Zoom for startups.” That’s a fun way of describing what we do. The official pitch is “we make it easy to have informal conversations and we help remote teams experience more serendipity.”
This week I’ve had a few very serendipitous moments. I’ve met people I never would have otherwise. For example: I met my cofounder’s sister. My cofounder, Dave, also introduced me to a few of his friends living in Ohio and near Lake Tahoe. These type of introductions and “desk drive-by” interactions would never happen on Slack or any “work/productivity app.” We would never schedule a Zoom call just to informally introduce our friends to each other for a few minutes (even though if it goes longer, that’s great too). In our virtual office, this interaction feels natural.
Here’s a snapshot from this week. This is Dave, Roshan, and me. The three of us co-founded Bloc.io in 2012, which was the first and largest online developer bootcamp. I like to think of what we’re doing to the office as what we did to virtualizing education.
Changelog
What’s new in v0.0.14
🚀 New
We added a new object called a Relic. Relics show you more detail when you walk up to them. Relics can link to any other web site, an image, video, song, etc. If you walk up to Dave’s virtual desk, we show a picture of what his actual desk looks like in real life. You can also walk up to the dog relic, and it shows a picture of his Australian cattle dog, Indy. There’s a relic of a song I love listening to while coding. This gives the space a more personal feel to it and makes visitors interested in exploring.
Added support for multiple simultaneous visitors in proximity video/audio calls (before we only supported 2 participants).
Coordinates are now displayed when pressing “C” on the keyboard. This makes it easier for tenants to place relics.
Office tenants can now see who visited their office.
Any time a video conversation initiates, an audible chime is played. This happens when you walk up next to someone else, or if they walk up next to you, and the video engages.
Added a Do Not Disturb mode that prevents video from automatically activating.
✨ Improved
Video containers are now larger, slightly larger, and responsively react to multiple participants joining or leaving conversations. They also adjust when the window is resized.
Participant video now appears centered horizontally to help eye contact seem more direct during conversations.
Agave.com now links to a live demo of our office, the blog post we first wrote about starting this, and a tenant application form to join the waitlist for getting your own virtual office.
Audio and video quality improvements.
Active app icons have been resized.
🔧 Fixed
Relics and proximity audio/video now work simultaneously (walking up to a relic will not interrupt your video connection).
When video participants disconnect, cleanly remove them from proximity video/audio.
🧹 Cleanup
Removed the “auto-move” functionality where switching to a particular app would update the location of your avatar (e.g. a Zoom call would place you in the phone booth, and opening your code editor would move you to your desk).
Closing notes
One thing I realized this past week is that we’re intentionally avoiding the “events” space. We don’t want to be the app that you open once and then invite a bunch of friends to celebrate your virtual birthday party, even though that’s a problem worth solving. I’m on a Google Calendar invite with 35 other people to join a virtual birthday party that’s going on right now as I’m writing this. I think the event space is a great problem to tackle, but it’s not who we want to be.
We want to be the app that runs in the background for remote teams. It doesn’t even need to be the whole team—it could be a manager or lead in the US office, with a small remote or international team. It could be a founder and his or her close circle of colleagues working on a project. We want to be the app you invite your friends to visit your virtual office, see its culture, and casually introduce them to the people you work with. That’s it. Easy to have informal conversations + more serendipity.
I could see open office happy hours where visitors stop by, but the tenants—the people who work in the office—run the app on their computer in the background, just like they leave Slack or Chrome open.