Trees, those deciduous entities that you can occasionally see outdoors when they’re not trapped or strapped to a desktop that chew their cuds during a video call, have long been the inspiration for new ideas. There are many stories of how founders built companies on the foothills of Silicon Valley or in parks in San Francisco, and yet over the past year we’ve managed to get most of the movement out of our remote working lives.
Based in Chicago Spot meetings would like to revive our meetings – and at the same time replace zoom as the standard meeting medium.
The product and company are only a few months old and are still in closed beta (albeit open soon). Today announced $ 5 million in seed capital led by Ilya Fushman at Kleiner Perkins. That follows a $ 1.9 million pre-seed round led by Chapter One earlier this year.
Greg Caplan, CEO and Co-Founder, said the team wants to rebuild the meeting from the ground up for an audio-only environment. “On mobile devices, it has to be very easy to be very functional and understandable for users to actually use it on the go,” he said. In practice, this requires product development over a number of layers.
The most notable feature of the product today is that it has an assistant, aptly named Spot, who listens to the call and to whom attendees can give commands as they speak. For example, if you say “Spot Fetch,” it fetches the last 40 seconds of the conversation, transcribes it, creates a note in the meeting, and saves it for follow-up. This eliminates the multi-hand typing required to save a note or to-do list for keeping track of our current meeting products. You don’t even have to take out your phone, Caplan points out.
The collaboration layer that the company has built into the product is becoming more interesting. Each audio meeting has a text-based notepad available to all attendees so users can copy and paste snippets into the meeting if needed. These notes and any information Spot retrieves are stored in workspaces that can be referenced later. Spot also sends emails to attendees with a follow-up to these notes. If the same participants later join another audio meeting, Spot pulls in the notes from their last meeting so that an ongoing timeline of events is shown.
Spot’s product design emphasizes collaboration within an audio-focused experience. Photo credit: Spot Meetings
Of course, transcription functions are built in, but Spot sees opportunities in offering edited transcripts of long calls that might be worthwhile to specifically follow snippets for just a few minutes. The product is therefore a bit more deliberate when it comes to encouraging users to choose the parts of a conversation that are relevant to their needs rather than delivering an entire bolus of text that no one will ever actually read.
“The collaboration now and in the future will be primarily digital … personal will forever be the exception rather than the rule,” explained Caplan. In the longer term, the company would like to add additional voice commands to the product and continue to create an audio-first (and indeed an audio-only) environment. Audio “uniquely helps people focus on the conversation,” he said, noting that video fatigue is a very real phenomenon for workers today. For this purpose, there are other audio functions such as smarter muting. If a participant does not speak, their background noise automatically disappears.
Prior to Spot Meetings, Caplan was the CEO and co-founder of Remote Year, a startup designing a service for company employees for work trips overseas. I treated it for the first time back in 2015, and it raised some serious risk dollars before the pandemic hit last year and the company laid off 50% of its workforce. Caplan left last April as CEO, and The company was eventually sold to Selina, which will offer co-working spaces for 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 developer for two decades [and was] literally the first person I called, ”said Caplan. The team will continue to grow with the new funding, and the company hopes to open its beta to its 6,000 waiting list users in the next three to four weeks.