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Kleiner spots Spot Meetings $5M to modernize walk-and-talks for the Zoom generation
Trees, those deciduous entities you can occasionally see outdoors when not locked down or strapped down at a desktop ruminating on a video call, have long been the inspiration for fresh new ideas. Stories abound of how founders built companies while walking the foothills in Silicon Valley or around parks in San Francisco, and yet, we’ve managed over the past year to take movement mostly out of our remote work lives.
Chicago-based Spot Meetings wants to reinvigorate our meetings — and displace Zoom as the default meeting medium at the same time.
The product and company are just a few months old and remain in closed beta (albeit opening up a bit shortly here), and today the company is announcing $5 million in seed funding led by Ilya Fushman at Kleiner Perkins. That follows a $1.9 million pre-seed round led by Chapter One earlier this year.
CEO and co-founder Greg Caplan said that the team is looking to rebuild the meeting from the ground up for an audio-only environment. “On mobile, it needs to be abundantly simple to be very functional and understood for users so that they can actually use it on the go,” he described. In practice, that requires product development across a wide range of layers.
The product’s most notable feature today is that it has an assistant, aptly named Spot, which listens in on the call and which participants can direct commands to while speaking. For instance, saying “Spot Fetch” will pull the last 40 seconds of conversation, transcribe it, create a note in the meeting and save it for follow-up. That prevents the multi-hand tapping required to save a note or to-do list for follow-up with our current meeting products. You “don’t even need to take your phone out,” Caplan points out.
What gets more interesting is the collaboration layer the company has built into the product. Every audio meeting has a text-based scratch pad shared with all participants, allowing users to copy and paste snippets into the meeting as needed. Those notes and any information that Spot pulls in are saved into workspaces that can be referenced later. Spot also sends out emails to participants with follow-ups from these notes. If the same participants join another audio meeting later, Spot will pull in the notes from their last meeting so there is a running timeline of what’s been happening.
Spot’s product design emphasizes collaboration within an audio-focused experience. Image Credits: Spot Meetings
Obviously, transcription features are built-in, but Spot sees opportunities in offering edited transcripts of long calls where only a few minutes of snippets might be worth specifically following up on. So the product is a bit more deliberate in encouraging users to select the parts of a conversation that are relevant for their needs, rather than delivering a whole bolus of text that no one is ever actually going to read.
“Collaboration from now and the future is going to be primarily digital … in-person is forever going to be the exception and not the rule,” Caplan explained. Longer term, the company wants to add additional voice commands to the product and continue building an audio-first (and really, an audio-only) environment. Audio “very uniquely helps people focus on the conversation at hand,” he said, noting that video fatigue is a very real phenomenon today for workers. To that end, more audio features like smarter muting are coming. When a participant isn’t talking, their background noise will automatically melt away.
Before Spot Meetings, Caplan was the CEO and co-founder of Remote Year, a startup that was designing a service for company employees to take working trips overseas. I first covered it back in 2015, and it went on to raise some serious venture dollars before the pandemic hit last year and the company laid off 50% of its workforce. Caplan left as CEO in April last year, and the company was ultimately sold to Selina, which offers co-working spaces to travelers, in October.
Caplan’s co-founder who leads product and engineering at Spot Meetings is Hans Petter “HP” Eikemo. The duo met during the very first Remote Year cohort. “He has been a software engineer for two decades [and was] literally the first person I called,” Caplan said. The team will grow further with the new funding, and the company hopes to start opening its beta to its 6,000 waitlist users over the next 3-4 weeks.
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Remote Year, which helps you work while traveling the world, lays off 50% of staff
Remote Year wants to help people travel around the world and keep their job while doing so. The Chicago startup relies on the idea that “great work can be done anywhere.” And to prove it, it brings people to 12 cities in 12 months, all while they’re working full-time jobs. Think co-working spaces in Ljubljana, code from bungalows in Thailand and workshops from rooftops in Istanbul.
Needless to say, Remote Year’s core business relies on wanderlust, disposable income and the ability to travel.
Citing the COVID-19 pandemic, founder Greg Caplan told TechCrunch that Remote Year has laid off 50% of its staff. The layoff impacted roughly 50 roles on the sales, marketing and product side, and comes less than six months after the company raised a $5 million capital investment from LightBank, which brought its total funding to $17 million, according to Crunchbase data.
“The borders sort of froze up with the virus and a lot of our folks decided not to travel and go home,” Caplan told TechCrunch. “Half of our revenue dried off in a couple of days, and there’s no end in sight when this situation may change.”
The startup says it still has runway from its last capital investment. Layoffs are expected to more largely hit the tech travel industry due to the global pandemic and people staying inside. Earlier this week, travel savings startup Service shut down operations, citing the pandemic and economic downturn.
Remote Year charges between $2,000 and $3,000 a month for its travel programs per person. This includes travel to and between destinations, private rooms and activities. Caplan said that Remote Year staff has always been a distributed team, and by nature of industry, it was “monitoring” COVID-19 for over a month before the onslaught of cancellations and news.
“But monitoring it and talking about it was very different [from] what has unfolded in the last seven days,” Caplan said.
To help the employees that were laid off, Caplan looked inward. Remote Year has always had a three-person team that connects people to remote jobs. That team will be helping its former colleagues through 1:1 coaching, resume interviews, interview preparation and contract negotiations. He urges other founders to do whatever they can to “humanize this” global pandemic, and reach out if needed.
“We’ve actually heard from a couple other companies that want our help finding remote jobs for employees,” Caplan said. “We’re not sure what that means for our business, but we’re going to think about how we can help.”
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