RWL223 How Having Fun At Work Builds Trust w/ former Jam CEO, Badri Rajasekhar

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
0:01

Hey, it's Alex from Remote Worker Live here and I'm really happy. Today we have a really good guest, a really great guest. I've got Badri Rajasekhar with me today. He's the CEO of Jam. Now, jam is a tech business and Jam's very different, and the reason I've got a massive smile on my face is because Jam is all about having fun, and you know, when we're as remote workers, especially in this current climate, we not many people are speaking about having fun. But this is what jam is all about, because jam is a lightweight video collaboration app for remote teams. So think about if slack and zoom were to have a baby. This is basically what jam offers. So, like I said, massive swallow my face because we're going to be talking today about having fun with remote teams. So, badri, I just wanted to say a massive thank you for for joining us today thank you so much, alex.

Badri Rajasekhar:
1:01

Super excited to be here and I hope everybody's safe out there, but super, super pumped to be here.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
1:06

No, excellent, I'm so excited to have you. As I said, I can't take the swallow off my face. No, so, badri, like I said, he's the CEO of Jam and he's had a really interesting background and he's overcome some challenges actually, we were talking just before, before we got on air and he's overcome some really tough challenges to really create something that is very much needed, not just in the remote world in general, but, like I said, now in in a sort of this sort of day and age that we're in and the sort of changes that we're going through now, fun is a really important thing. So what I wanted to do really is just, really, badri, just to find out about you and how you progressed in your career, because you've had a very successful career to being where you are now as CEO of Jam.

Badri Rajasekhar:
2:00

Yeah, it's been an interesting journey for me and it's a lot of irrational decision-making, as I was talking to you about. So, at my heart, I'm mostly like a product technologist, right. So I grew up in Chennai, which is like a small city in southern India. Like a lot of kids in my generation, I was super into coding and technology and playing video games and stuff like that, eventually moved to the United States to go to school, studied computer science and then went on to work for Microsoft up in Seattle and had a great time working for Microsoft and sort of being in Seattle. I didn't like the weather in Seattle, of course, but outside of that it was fantastic. Seattle, of course, but outside of that it is fantastic.

Badri Rajasekhar:
2:43

But sometime around 2007, you know, I was into photography and video and stuff like that and that was sort of the big sort of boom of YouTube and I got this bee in my bonnet that video communication. The next step to YouTube is going to be, hey, people are just going to be having these video calls online. Youtube is going to be hey, people are just going to be having these video calls online, almost sort of Jetson style, and so I had that idea. I found extremely sort of intriguing. Obviously, it turned out not to be true. It took more than 10 years for that reality to pan out, but at that point I was super excited about this idea and so in November of 2008, actually, I quit Microsoft, decided to pack up my bags, move back to California, join a small group of people who are building a company called TalkBox, which is a video API platform. September of 2008 is when we had the financial crisis, and November of 2008, I decided to quit my cushy job at Microsoft, move to the Bay Area. Everybody thought I was nuts. I probably was nuts for having done that, but it was mostly driven by this excitement around sort of video and the future of video. Like I said, you know, we spent a bunch of years building our talk box and somewhere along the way we got acquired by Telefonica, which is the Spanish carrier, and all of a sudden we went from having this fairly localized team in California to now being part of a much more globally distributed team that is spread across London, madrid, barcelona, perth, sydney, a whole bunch of locations right. And so I, like a lot of people, got thrust into sort of the remote work, sort of movement, and at the same time, we were also a video API platform. We were also a video company.

Badri Rajasekhar:
4:45

We were trying to do a lot of video conferencing in the early days and what I quickly realized was A. The remote work movement is the future. There's no question about it. Right? There's incredible talent available all over the world. It is a lot of fun to actually sort of work in a remote and distributed team. You have a great deal of flexibility.

Badri Rajasekhar:
5:06

But at the same time, because we came from a video background, we were also thinking about why is why? You know, what can we do to make it much more fun and lightweight? In a way, slack did that to email. If you look at Slack and email, slack just made something stayed like email much more informal, fun, engaging.

Badri Rajasekhar:
5:28

And why does video conferencing imply that we're all sitting in a Zoom call for 60 minutes twiddling our thumbs right Like people put out of the wits? And so the genesis of what we were trying to do with the jam actually came out of this experience of not only working in a remote team but also sort of marinating and thinking about real-time audio and video. And so eventually, that's what got us to sort of thinking about hey, what's the future of video in the workplace look like. And large parts of that we thought was about being intentional about culture, and large parts of building that culture is about enabling that camaraderie and the fun element you spoke about no, it's an interesting story and, like you said, um, it is a, it is a challenge, um, building camaraderie.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
6:15

It's a challenge building a team, even when you're sort of sitting in front of somebody in the same office or next to somebody in a cubicle or wherever it may be. So it does make sense that you, you had those sort of uh, almost like um I guess you could call them um, visionary moments uh, back in 2008. You know, you were right, you were ahead of the game, I guess back then. And now it's come. I mean, you've got so many different, I don't know. There's so many different tools and applications and plugins that are appearing. But I think there's real value in this because, like I said to you before, right now and I said this to you before we got on the call, when I'm speaking to my colleagues, my colleagues, and trying to get that banter and and those sort of uh, really lightweight conversations going, I end up having to look for my phone and getting like a sending a whatsapp audio message.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
7:15

It's not ideal, I mean it works, but you you still? As a remote worker, you still yearn for those conversations, don't you?

Badri Rajasekhar:
7:22

right, that's exactly right, and I think you hit the nail on the head. And if you actually think about what is driving a lot of this as well, as not just the remote work movement is, but also what I call sort of the consumerization of the workplace, our expectations have changed in a way where in our social and consumer lives with our friends, we might be hanging out in Discord, or we might be in house party, or we might be sending Instagram stories, and then, the minute you come into work, the only sort of incarnation of video in the workplace happens to be a conference call, which is incredibly boring, has a whole bunch of issues with it in terms of how it's run, how it's structured, and so it's almost as if we have we have already used all of these expectations in social and consumer apps, and why can't I have the same kind of casual interaction, those micro interactions that banter in the workplace? And so, to some degree, we think it's even more important because of expectations being changed and the fact that we're all moving to an increasingly remote and distributed future. It's enabling these micro interactions getting short form, facetime, the ability to sort of express myself over audio and video, with the tone and context becomes super important.

Badri Rajasekhar:
8:37

And the one thing I would also add is I think there's too much emphasis being placed on sort of productivity. And how do you make teams productive and how do we, you know, drive like more efficiency? And I almost think productivity is sort of an emergent behavior of trust. If you had a team that everybody had like a high degree of trust there's a lot of social bonding, camaraderie and alignment you're naturally going to be more productive. You're going to trust people doing their jobs. You're going to be more productive. You're going to trust people doing their jobs. You're going to be more aligned. So I think there's got to be a shift. And we think there is a shift happening where, you know, we've got to think in terms of sort of social cohesion, we've got to think in terms of trust, we've got to think in terms of alignment and culture. And how do you put in the tools in place, how do you hire for those characteristics, how do you build the team with that as sort of your foundational principle?

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
9:28

and then productivity and efficiency, and all of that has got to be sort of emergent byproducts of building out that organization I love that and I think well-being actually is is another conversation that this, that jam, could get involved in as well, because all those things you just mentioned there, um, badri, you know, when you can have just those spontaneous conversations and spontaneous interactions, then you can just it's easy to have a conversation, isn't it? Because what we find as remote workers is and remote managers, we find that what I often hear, that the expression sort of like you have to be deliberate, so you have to be deliberate about, um, you know your productivity, you have to be deliberate about even create, creating water cooler moments, you know those kinds of things where that shouldn't you, you don't really want that. You just want that sort of spontaneity, but you don't want to have to say let's create this meeting and all get together and talk about something that's fun, that's right, that's right, that's right and that's what's happening in a lot of organizations.

Badri Rajasekhar:
10:35

if you look at it right now, it's like people are scheduling social events and to some degree, that's sort of uh, that's sort of um. You know the opposite of what you want to do. You don't want to say, hey, let's get on a call between 4 and 5 pm and then we're gonna have fun. Right, it's got to be. It's got to be much more natural and it's got to be about how do you enable those spontaneous moments of magic?

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
10:59

definitely and well, like I said, it's something that this um, this technology, this, this way of thinking, I suppose, is, I guess, what a lot of these apps are trying to create. But it looks like you've managed to nail it. So what I wanted to know, I mean, there have been challenges getting here for you, haven't they? Because, like you said, you're emerging, or your ideas were emerging, at a time when it was quite um, I guess, quite tough um, with economic downturn right how?

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
11:32

how did you know I mean, I suppose that this was because I guess between 2008 and now it's quite a lot of time has passed there what challenges you face there yeah, it's.

Badri Rajasekhar:
11:44

It's kind of an interesting question you ask. Right like when we first started out, we had this like crazy vision. Right like at that point in 2008, we were like hey, youtube is big, people are uploading videos, the natural next step is people are going to have conversations in the browser. Now that didn't work out for a multitude of reasons back then, because a network connectivity was not as good as it is right now. Right like 10 years ago, like people were on really crappy. There were people who are still using like dial-up modems and stuff like that, in certain ways, cable modems, right?

Badri Rajasekhar:
12:14

Um, I think the, the entire sort of the, the mobile movement has also sort of driven the need for people to have like much more spontaneous conversations, and so the entire smartphone movement also drove a lot of like sort of communication apps and different modalities of communication being explored.

Badri Rajasekhar:
12:37

And, purely from a technology perspective, I think we've come a long way in terms of like just video, audio technology that makes it sort of much more efficient to have these conversations with high quality, with blurred backgrounds. You know, there's a whole bunch of advances that have happened in technology, so almost I almost treat it as sort of a confluence of happy factors which have finally sort of come together and I think finally it's. It's been a cultural shift, um, in terms of people being OK with video, in a way where 10 years ago video was sort of just novelty right, like people would you know, get on a call and just try it out and that's about it. It was not sort of a serious modality of communication. But now I think video has arrived right. It's more than arrived, it's prime time. I think video is has arrived right, it's more than arrived, it's prime time, and I think this entire work from home situation is just going to make that, it's going to normalize video even more. My three-year-old daughter comes up to me and says I want to zoom with my my friends, oh my god so you know, you know, videos arrive and

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
13:41

three-year-olds are using it as a verb tell me about it and it's almost like um, it's like second nature now. It's almost like they've that's all they know as far as, and that's what they've become used to and correct. What I'd say is, as well is, um, you know the, the whole idea of, of, I guess, remote work itself. You, you, you talk about a cultural shift. I think there's a, there's a like a, even within this whole, I guess, crisis. I suppose you could say that we're we're going through at the moment. There's even a new cultural shift, even within that, because, you know, there's those people that, okay, we were already on board with, with remote work, so we've been doing it for such a long time.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
14:22

But then there's certain people, through no fault of their own, have been forced to work remotely, so they're having to get used to even things like Zoom and things like Skype and all that sort of thing. And I think people are still getting used to video. That's my opinion. But even this, now, what we're talking about in terms of Jam, this is even further than that. This is like almost your, it's almost like it's taking the friction almost out of the, the connection you know. So it's, it's new, it's totally new in terms of or totally different in terms of that. That, uh, you know, because with with skype, you have to that, you have to you download it and then you right have to arrange that meeting and all this sort of things. So this is the new, the new cultural shift, I would say that's right and I think it's also.

Badri Rajasekhar:
15:17

It's also driven by the fact, and I think it's to your point. But this crisis, one of the things I have personally observed and I think we were talking about I have a three-year-old daughter and a 12-month-old daughter and one of the one of the things you quickly realize as you're working from home, if you have kids at home, you're a strong compartmentalization of work and not work. Those lines get blurred a little bit when you work remotely, especially with people across these time zones, right. And then you couple that with the fact that not all of us are available at the same time. And I take it one step further and I always say to people availability is not the same as attention. The fact that I'm available doesn't mean you are now entitled to my attention, exactly. And so it becomes all the more important to create tools that adapt to sort of your fluid schedule, rather than the other way around, where you've got to adapt your schedule just so you can be on a meeting or just so you can sort of land up at an 8 pm call, right.

Badri Rajasekhar:
16:36

So we are taking almost opposite approach to say the new reality is that schedules are going to be fluid. People are going to be remote, people are going to be working across time zones, people want to feel connected without having to be always on how. How? How would you create the culture? How do you think about tools? How do you think about process? How do you think about your entire organization that accommodates, that accommodates that new reality without introducing a whole bunch of friction? Because I think what we have right now is the opposite. Right like we're to your point, we're all getting used to meetings, but people are having zoom fatigue and they're like I don't want to hop from meeting to meeting. Or you know, calendaring is a pain, you know I I think the tools have not adapted to the reality of what we face well, I think this is going a long way to to sort of bridging that gap.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
17:28

And, like you said again, um, when you, when you're working remotely, you're, you're scheduling everything, aren't you? Everything is is in, is in your calendar, even those, those fun moments. So wouldn't it be great if you could just not have to schedule the fun moments and just do them and that it's, it's done, and then you just carry on with your work and all that's right, you know. So that's right love it.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
17:51

I love it so, but with you. How was your transition to remote work? I know some people take to it easier than others. How did you find it?

Badri Rajasekhar:
18:03

Yeah, it's been sort of an interesting journey for me. In the beginning, when, you know, when I started working with a large, remote and distributed team, it was very difficult for me, like a lot of people, just getting used to the fact that, you know, I was sort of I felt a little bit disconnected in terms of what was happening and, as a lot of like, like a lot of leaders do, I was trying to solve that using process right, how do you make things more efficient? How do you document things you know in a more structured way? And to some degree, my epiphany was things you know in a more structured way, and to some degree, my epiphany was it's not about process, right, culture is process, and I was trying to sort of take a sledgehammer to you know to solve this problem, and then you really can't solve it through process.

Badri Rajasekhar:
18:46

So it was hard until I had that mental shift in terms of how I thought about remote teams and how I thought about working remote teams, and so that, to me, has been sort of the learning moment is you've got to fundamentally shift a little bit, I think, in terms of how you think about the organization and how you think about culture and the other thing I would say is our current team at Jam is pretty crazy in the sense that it's almost as if we we took a world map, we picked the worst possible airplane route and decided to build a little team uh across it. So we're spread across san francisco, sydney, barcelona and perth oh wow how many continents is that?

Badri Rajasekhar:
19:30

that's like three, yeah, uh, yeah, that's three continents, right? And if you actually think about it, the only time we can all get together as a team is a 60-minute window per day, which is 11 pm San Francisco time to midnight San Francisco time. That's the only time we can all get together, right? So to some degree I've gone from one extreme to another, and I'm such a deep believer in sort of remote and hyper remote teams that we sort of both jam across a super asynchronous, super like remote sort of setup, in a way where not everybody can even get on a call at the same time. Right've got to be spontaneous, you've got to be ad hoc.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
20:15

There's no way for you to schedule stuff and I think, um, the other thing is you've got to be able to yeah, you can't be if you're spread across different parts of the world. Yeah, you have to also have people of that, of that mindset as well, that are flexible with that, that way of working. How did you, I suppose, what is the makeup of your team, and how did you go about sort of um, putting that team, um, together?

Badri Rajasekhar:
20:45

yeah, I told my co-founders I've had sort of uh, we worked together for for a long time, so we we have sort of a good prior working relationship, but essentially, one of the things we did very early on was to really hire for people who took a strong degree of sort of accountability and ownership right. I think that's sort of an important trait to have when you're working in a remote and distributed team, followed also by the ability to deal with sort of ambiguous information right To a large degree. A lot of what happens in remote teams is, if people are waiting for instructions or waiting for things to be sort of aligned, it becomes a little bit harder, right, and so I think you've got to think a little bit about, you know, hiring the right personalities in large, remote and distributed teams. But I think, to a large degree, that can also be offset by the fact that you know it's about driving alignment. Let me step back and talk about this a little bit, because I think this is sort of an important point.

Badri Rajasekhar:
21:41

I think we're all drowning in unstructured data. We're all drowning in stream of consciousness data, whether it's Slack conversations, github comments, google Doc comments. We're just drowning in data, and one of the problems I think people have is not the lack of data, it's the opposite. You've got like too much data. It's a problem.

Badri Rajasekhar:
22:05

And so the order of the day in sort of modern remote teams is about how do you quickly drive alignment.

Badri Rajasekhar:
22:12

Modern remote teams is about how you quickly drive alignment. How do you quickly get color and context communicated across in a way where people understand sort of the motives and sort of the decision making and the thought process behind some of that information they're presented with. And I think to your question of how you know, we've thought about it we place a lot of emphasis on having these spontaneous conversations, and not just for fun and banter, but because people quickly have color and context and can be aligned Right. So there's not a lot of ambiguity in terms of why decisions got made, how they got made, what's the context behind it. And so I think finding lightweight mechanisms to get people talking to each other very frequently automatically drives alignment, and I think that's that's a hugely overlooked part of of remote and distributed teams. I think a lot of people focusing on information. I don't think it's about more information, it's about it's the second order context around that information for me, when you remove that information, it's like removing sort of like a um.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
23:15

A weight is if you you know off or the you know too much information people get, so inundated with it that's right and lose their focus on, on the mission of what, what they're trying to achieve for the, for the wider team. I would say so. No, I like that, I love that. So you've got, uh, different elements in your team or different what's your team made up of? So you've got marketing. You've got. Talk me through that.

Badri Rajasekhar:
23:41

Yeah, we're a really small team. We're like a seven person team. We've got like five full time people and two part time contractors, and the five full time people are mostly just engineers and like one product person. We just cross these four locations. Our two contractors part-time contractors are marketing folks, but they're based here in san francisco bay area, but our, the five person team, the core team which we have, is actually spread across four, four cities and three continents.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
24:14

Right, okay, great, and let's, let's, let's get a bit more into the detail then about um. How you guys, how do you guys then in your team have um, have those spontaneous moments, how do you and your team have fun then?

Badri Rajasekhar:
24:33

uh, it's, it's a lot of. So we do a couple of things. Obviously we have, just like, a lot of other teams. We we use slack and we have a lot of like banter and giphy and sort of you know fun stuff on slack which I think is sort of important. Um, we also use jam to have a lot of sort of asynchronous sort of. We record like little goofy videos and send it over. We use it to celebrate like interesting moments. You can record little video avatars for yourself. So every time somebody did something crazy, we record, like you know, crazy little video avatars for ourselves to sort of celebrate those moments. But I think it's important for people to sort of get together and do fun things in spontaneous ways. The other day, me and my co-founder, adam, we randomly sort of, you know, we're talking to each other and suddenly we started playing this game called Type Racer. Okay, it's a multiplayer game where both of you start typing at the same time.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
25:30

Type.

Badri Rajasekhar:
25:30

Racer, type Racer, and it basically just shows, you know, who can type faster, and so there's a leaderboard of all the people who are asked this type, you know. So we have a lot of these like really crazy ad hoc sort of situations where we're playing games together and it's it's just banter, right. Sometimes we've got like people get together and play pictionary um. It just sporadically happens, um, and so we we encourage a lot of those sort of spontaneous interactions.

Badri Rajasekhar:
26:00

The other thing I would say is I'm very militant about like sort of not having a background and things like that, and so I want kids to run around in the background of my meeting, I want your pets, I want to see your dog, I want to see your cat, and so just enabling not having those backgrounds for us um introduces a lot of like personal conversations, right, like somebody jumps into the room, you know your cat, comes in the background, and then we start talking about it, and so we try to sort of um have sort of much more informal meetings, even if we were having a meeting in a way where we're encouraging a lot of personal sort of social bonding um yeah, I love that, because I think there's this um, probably a misconception um about remote workers and work from home that you know it's just about putting your feet up or just sort of, uh, sitting at home with your dog.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
27:00

But I think, like you said, it's about creating an environment that you are really comfortable in, your your that suits you and that it puts your mind at ease to the point that you're then so at ease that you can relax and you can do your best work right.

Badri Rajasekhar:
27:13

So that's right, I love that that's right and I think you and I think that also builds trust and culture in a way where you don't have this feeling that sometimes happens in remote teams where people are looking over other people's shoulder. You're always, you know some people are thinking about, oh, is work getting done, you know. So building that sort of authenticity as part of your culture and as part of your interactions, I think just frees up is exactly like you said you're, you're at ease and people trust each other to get stuff done. They understand their social context at you know which. They're in the constraints they're working under. I think it just goes a whole way to sort of make everything much better, smoother and more sort of more fun.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
27:55

No, I like that actually and I was speaking to an agency CEO remote CEO agency leader and he was talking about the creativity side of things and when he first started working remotely he had real creativity blocks and he couldn't really figure out why because he was new to it. And then he sort of really started to really put his mind to it and he realized that when he was working in his office he would take his commutes on the train and in a sense that was his moment of sort of thinking and almost like planning what he was going to do in his head.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
28:34

That was his moment of sort of Right Of thinking and, you know, almost like planning what he was going to do in his head. So when you remove that sort of moment, that 30, 40-minute commute or wherever it was, he suddenly found himself at a loss with that. Uh, he was at home with his, with his kids, with his, with his wife and he didn't have any way of sort of uh or he couldn't figure out how.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
28:53

And then one day he just went and he just he sat on his ps4, basically, and he started playing, uh, fifa, and he found he found that that really worked for him. He found that, um, that was the moment for him that really built his creativity and he was at his peak. I mean, his wife was completely bewildered because she was like sitting there thinking to, thinking to herself you're on the ps4, you're supposed to be, you know, building this business here, and she was really wondering what was going on. But he was in his, his best creative moment. You know, for you, that kind of is a long way round of me asking you what, what is the? I suppose. How do you and your teams build that sort of uh, creative spark and get, get you know, to get things, things done with your work?

Badri Rajasekhar:
29:38

yeah, I, I would say like twofold. I think the single most important thing, which I think every everybody's got to be very intentional in a remote team and we tried to do it and we've seen other teams uh do it is actually unplugging. Uh, it's, it's sort of doing the opposite, which is you, you I would almost say, instead of scheduling time to like have fun and stuff like that, you want to schedule time to completely unplug. And so, um, one of our teammates, he loves to bike and and and run. He basically takes a block off in the afternoon, the middle of the day, and he goes running or he goes biking. It's a forced time for him to completely unplug from everything and just do what he loves doing, and then that clears his mind and he can think through things. So I think it's super important to be intentional about unplugging as a mechanism to drive creativity, to be intentional about unplugging as a mechanism to drive creativity.

Badri Rajasekhar:
30:39

The other thing I would say which is sort of work is, again, if you actually think about the creative process, it doesn't happen in one go, it's a series of iterative back and forth where you riff on an idea with somebody, you go, think about it, then you come back the next day, you build a little prototype, you show it to somebody, they give you some feedback, you keep going. So there's a lot of iterative process that actually happens in creativity. It's not like, hey, I'm going to block off five hours and finish this right. I would encourage teams to actually spend a lot of time with small show and tell sessions, and whether you do that synchronously with little here's a 10 minute demo of something cool I built or whether you do it asynchronously by recording a little show and tell video, I think it's important for you to communicate or get teams to communicate.

Badri Rajasekhar:
31:25

Little ideas and little bits doesn't have to be fully fleshed out, it doesn't have to be fully big, but that sort of culture of sharing little snippets of information in high frequency, I think actually drives a lot of creativity, and we've found that super useful when we do hackathons, when people are working on cool ideas. People are even bouncing ideas. Hey, you know thought about a cool idea in the shower this morning. Wouldn't it be cool if we did this and people record a little snippet and send it out? And then people responded and sometimes people forget about it and move on to the next idea. But it's. It's the ability to have those little brainstorming sessions asynchronously, which I think is super important. I think what does not work is getting everybody in a call and saying we're going to take a bunch of sticky notes and do brainstorming right. That works in theory, never in practice.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
32:17

No, I like that when you talk about that and the show and tell side of things. I wish we could just show how Jam could actually make that work, and I think you should have a look at Jam in fact. So you should go across to jamapp and that's jam, with two m's um dot app and that's app, just to have a look. And um madrid, how does that work then with with jam? Because I mean, I described how I sort of do sort of spontaneous conversations with um, with whatsapp, with with my friends or my colleagues and co-workers. How does that work in practice with, with the, with jam?

Badri Rajasekhar:
32:57

yeah and jam. You can almost think of like three sort of core elements to that, uh, to the application itself. You have a very simple contact list that that's always on top, and we have a whole bunch of presence and conversational discovery. If, if jane and joe are talking to each other, you know that they're having a conversation and you can quickly jump in if you want it. So there's there's spontaneous conversational discovery built into it, and once you get into a conversation, uh, video doesn't become front and center. You just have a bunch of floating heads that float around and so you can have off in a corner as you're doing something else. And then you could also record little instagram stories like snippets of video, talk through stuff and just blast it out to your team. Hey, you know, yeah, I was thinking about this idea this morning. Look what I built and that's it, and that automatically gets aggregated. So it's this super simple mixture of presence, live conversations and recorded messaging, sort of bundled into one lightweight experience.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
33:57

So everybody, just have a look at jamapp. That's J-A-M-M dot app and okay. So it sounds like. I mean Jam is very good for Different kinds of teams, obviously different kinds of remote teams. You've got product teams, engineering teams, leadership teams, sales, marketing, customer experience Lots of different applications for it. I mean and I'm looking here now it says huddle with your team. Is that what you were just describing then, the huddle side of things, or is that a different sort of module?

Badri Rajasekhar:
34:33

No, that's right. It's all part of the same application where you can quickly jump into like a huddle with somebody, you can do a one-click sort of conversation with them, you could use whiteboarding and collaborate with them, or you could send recorded messages, right. So it's all sort of bundled into one lightweight experience where we're saying, um, let's say, you use slack, you don't really think about am I going to text you synchronously or am I going to text you asynchronously? Right, I'm just going to text you. If you happen to respond, you respond, if you don't, you don't. And so we're trying to bring that same sort of modality in a very lightweight audio visual experience. And, like one of our users said, real work happens in between meetings, so it's about enabling those conversations in between meetings. We're not we're not about, like making more efficient meetings or driving a better meeting experience like we want you to have less meetings. We want you to be talking more and meeting less.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
35:28

Essentially, I like that, I that I like that idea. So what are the plans, then, for Jam? Where do you stand at the moment and what are your plans for the foreseeable? Yeah, it's difficult right now, obviously, with what's going on, but what do you foresee for Jam in the coming months?

Badri Rajasekhar:
35:45

Yeah, we're just excited to play a part in sort of the remote work ecosystem. Right, we really think that the entire remote work ecosystem is undergoing like a really good renaissance in terms of people thinking about process, culture, tools, the entire ecosystem. And we just want to play a small part in sort of enabling that ecosystem. And so we're excited about sort of evolving Jam with all of our features in our product roadmap to enable much more lighter-weight conversations, public links, much more shatterable external sort of content. But just generally excited about the space and generally excited about what's happening with the entire remote work ecosystem.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
36:25

And finally, what about you? What are you? I mean, I know you recently. Well, you're your father. What are your plans, or any anything? Uh, personally, I know again it's, it's not. It's not an easy time to sort of make too many plans for ahead. But what about you?

Badri Rajasekhar:
36:41

no, I'm just eager to like, once this is all over, we can't wait to take a vacation somewhere. You know I've been like, stuck at home for a long time. Um, you know it's it's hopefully the dust settles soon for everybody's sake and we can all go out there and, you know, uh, do something fun. So I'm just balancing. I think I was telling you when, when I started jam my um, my 12 month old second daughter was just born, and so, you know, we've been like wrangling, both trying to build a company and have a newborn baby at home, which has been sort of an interesting, interesting challenge. So I'm looking forward to once the dust settles, you know, and taking a couple of days off and, you know, traveling somewhere you and me both.

Alex Wilson-Campbell:
37:25

Well, we will certainly be keeping our eye, uh, on jam, and you as well, badry, just to see your progress and um, what I will do is I will put the, the url to jam, in the show notes, um, and a link to your profile as well, so people can learn a bit more. So that is um. You can find jam at j, a double m dot app. That's a a sorry app, so that's jam dot app. So, badri, I just wanted to say a massive thank you to you for joining me today on the remote work life podcast and all the best with jam, and we'll keep in touch to see how you're getting on with the in the future thank you so much, alex.

Badri Rajasekhar:
38:05

It's been like incredible sort of being the podcast, so thank you so much for having me and stay safe out there thank you anytime.