Our mission is to make teamwork the best part of work. Our Series A fundraise will help us get closer to achieving it.
When I started guitar lessons during the early months of the pandemic in 2020, I had visions of being the next Mark Knopfler, not starting a remote-first company.
The idea for Switchboard actually came out of frustration with remote guitar lessons. My teacher and I couldn’t bring the tools we needed into the online lesson: things like a metronome, a PDF viewer for notes and sheet music, a media player for back tracks, a second camera to see fingerpicking.
What I realized was that all our current “collaboration” tools are really just communication tools.
They’re great for talking, but not for doing – especially when you need to use multiple apps. This was a problem not only for music lessons but for remote work. Teams were in dire straits trying to build products, manage projects, and brainstorm new ideas, one shared screen at a time. Zoom saved the economy, but replacing in-person work with video conferencing wasn’t going to work indefinitely.
We wanted to build a platform that helps people work together regardless if they were across a conference room table, across the city, or across the world. It shouldn’t matter whether someone is in-person, hybrid or remote. Our new reality means we’ll always be working with people who aren’t physically in the room.
We spent a lot of time thinking about fatigue and how we’ve gotten used to sitting on video calls all day.
After almost two years of research, user testing, and product development, here’s what we are trying to reclaim from in-person work: