Agave Weekly Update #4
Someone this week asked me what type of culture we’re building. So I wanted to mention an essay by Brian Armstrong re: their obsession with mission + their relentless focus on building.
Coinbase is a company where some of my smartest friends work, and it's an app I use every day. When I think about building culture and attracting the right talent, I think it’s important to be intentional very early about these things. It can be hard to course correct later. Anecdotally, I'll sometimes hear that my smartest friends leave an org to join another. When they tell me the reasons why, it seems like the culture was unclear or not written down, at a minimum. This leads to surprises later, or a culture that takes on a form of its own. I think about how badly one of those orgs is losing out when that happens.
On the product side, we’ve continued having great meetings and informal conversations this past week at our social virtual office. One piece of feedback I loved hearing is that we noticed everyone was smiling a lot more when having conversations, and we were surprised by that observation because it seems like we don’t do that as much on Zoom. It was also fun and serendipitous meeting some of Dave’s former colleagues who dropped by to say hello.
Changelog
v 1.1.4
🚀 New
Avatars show a speech bubble when they’re engaged in an active conversation
We’ve added support for arrow keys and W,A,S,D to move around
We now show the song you’re playing on Spotify or Apple Music above your avatar’s head when hovering over the music icon
New visitors show up in our shiny new visitor lobby, rather than the middle of the office.
When a visitor enters the lobby, a chime is played for all office tenants
✨ Improved
The size of our office and the desktop app has been adjusted to work better on smaller screen formats (E.g. 13 inch laptops)
Support for more app icons: App Store, Maps, Preview, Photo Booth, Stickies, and Red Alert (of course)
Relics can have descriptions alongside, or in place of, a URL or image
🔧 Fixed
Do Not Disturb indicator is now displayed in real-time rather than requiring an app refresh
Relics are now visible when Do Not Disturb is enabled
Fixed a bug where avatars would not disappear, despite the visitor’s browser window closing
Fixed issue where album name was displayed instead of artist name (E.g. if you have Spotify playing a song)
Fixed issue where avatars were not displaying when a new visitor entered (required a reload)
🧹 Cleanup
Some furniture removed as part of the office layout adjustment to fit on other screen sizes