INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Could avatars that show what co-workers are up to save work-from-home teams from constant distraction and loneliness? That the idea behind
Pragli, the Bitmoji for the enterprise
It a virtual office app that makes you actually feel like you&re in the same building.
Pragli uses avatars to signal whether co-workers are
at their desk, away, in a meeting, in the zone while listening to Spotify, taking a break at a digital virtual water coooler or done for the
From there, you&ll know whether to do a quick ad hoc audio call, cooperate via screenshare, schedule a deeper video meeting or a send a chat
message they can respond to later
Essentially, it translates the real-word presence cues we use to coordinate collaboration into an online workplace for distributed
teams.
&What Slack did for email, we want to do for video conferencing,& Pragli co-founder Doug Safreno tells me
&Traditional video conferencing is exclusive by design, whereas Pragli is inclusive
Just like in an office, you can see who is talking to who.& That means less time wasted planning meetings, interrupting colleagues who are
in flow or waiting for critical responses
Pragli offers the focus that makes remote work productive with the togetherness that keeps everyone sane and in sync.
The idea is to solve
the top three problems that Pragli extensive interviews and a Buffer/AngelList study discovered workers hate:
Communication
friction
Loneliness
Lack of boundaries
You never have to worry about whether you&re intruding on someone meeting, or if it&d be quicker to
hash something out on a call instead of vague text
Avatars give remote workers a sense of identity, while the Pragli water cooler provides a temporary place to socialize rather than an
endless Slack flood of GIFs
And because you clock in and out of the Pragli office just like a real one, co-workers understand when you&ll reply quickly versus when
you&ll respond tomorrow unless there an emergency.
&In Pragli, you log into the office in the morning and there a clear sense of when I&m
working and when I&m not working
Slack doesn&t give you astrong sense if they&re online or offline,& Safreno explains
&Everyone stays online and feels pressured to respond at any time of day.&
Pragli co-founder Doug Safreno
Safreno and his co-founder Vivek
Nair know the feeling first-hand
After both graduating in computer science from Stanford, they built StacksWare to help enterprise software customers avoid overpaying by
accurately measuring their usage
But when they sold StacksWare to Avi Networks, they spent two years working remotely for the acquirer
The friction and loneliness quickly crept in.
They&d message someone, not hear back for a while, then go back and forth trying to discuss
the problem before eventually scheduling a call
Jumping into synchronous communicating would have been much more efficient
&The loneliness was more subtle, but it built up after the first few weeks,& Safreno recalls
&We simply didn&t socially bond while working remotely as well as in the office
Being lonely was de-motivating, and it negatively affected our productivity.&
The founders interviewed 100 remote engineers, and discovered
that outside of scheduled meetings, they only had one audio or video call with co-workers per week
That convinced them to start Pragli a year ago to give work-from-home teams a visual, virtual facsimile of a real office
With no other full-time employees, the founders built and released a beta of Pragli last year
Usage grew 6X in March and is up 20X since January 1.
Today Pragli officially launches, and it free until June 1
Then it plans to become freemium, with the full experience reserved for companies that pay per user per month
Pragli is also announcing a small pre-seed round today led by K9 Ventures, inspired by the firm delight using the product itself.
To get
started with Pragi, teammates download the Pragli desktop app and sign in with Google, Microsoft or GitHub
Users then customize their avatar with a wide range of face, hair, skin and clothing options
It can use your mouse and keyboard interaction to show if you&re at your desk or not, or use your webcam to translate occasional snapshots
of your facial expressions to your avatar
You can also connect your Spotify and calendar to show you&re listening to music (and might be concentrating), reveal or hide details of
your meeting and decide whether people can ask to interrupt you or that you&re totally unavailable.
From there, you can by audio, video or
text communicate with any of your available co-workers
Guests can join conversations via the web and mobile too, though the team is working on a full-fledged app for phones and tablets
Tap on someone and you can instantly talk to them, though their mic stays muted until they respond
Alternatively, you can jump into Slack-esque channels for discussing specific topics or holding recurring meetings
And if you need some down time, you can hang out in the water cooler or trivia game channel, or set a manual &away& message.
Pragli has put
a remarkable amount of consideration into how the little office social cues about when to interrupt someone translate online, like if
someone wearing headphones, in a deep convo already or if they&re chilling in the microkitchen
It leagues better than having no idea what someone doing on the other side of Slack or what going on in a Zoom call
It a true virtual office without the clunky VR headset.
&Nothing we&ve tried has delivered the natural, water-cooler-style conversations
that we get from Pragli,& says Storj Labs VP of engineering JT Olio
&The ability to switch between ‘rooms& with screen sharing, video and voice in one app is great
It has really helped us improve transparency across teams
Plus, the avatars are quite charming as well.&
With Microsoft lack of social experience, Zoom consumed with its scaling challenges and Slack
doubling down on text as it prioritizes Zoom integration over its own visual communication features, there plenty of room for Pragli to
Meanwhile, COVID-19 quarantines are turning the whole world toward remote work, and it likely to stick afterwards as companies de-emphasize
office space and hire more abroad.
The biggest challenge will be making comprehensible enough to onboard whole teams such a broad product
encompassing every communication medium and tons of new behaviors
&How do you build a product that doesn&t feel distracting like Slack but where people can still have the spontaneous conversations that are
so important to companies innovating?,& Safreno asks
The Pragli founders are also debating how to encompass mobile without making people feel like the office stalks them after
hours.
&Long-term, [Pragli] should be better than being in the office because you don&t actually have to walk around looking for
[co-workers], and you get to decide how you&re presented,& Safreno concludes
&We won&t quit, because we want to work remotely for the rest of our lives.&
