TL;DR: Today, I'm launching Screen (https://screen.so), an app that lets you work together like you’re in the same room. Previously, I was co-founder/CEO of Screenhero (acquired by Slack in 2015), and led the team that built Slack Calls.

Demo Video

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oyxj4rjxsAY??autoplay=1&cc=1&hl=en&cc_load_policy=1&cc_lang_pref=en](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oyxj4rjxsAY??autoplay=1&cc=1&hl=en&cc_load_policy=1&cc_lang_pref=en)

<aside> ❤️ A special thank you to my wife Ashley for helping with the video, and in countless other ways!

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Screenhero & Slack

In 2013, I co-founded a company called Screenhero, which made an app that let pair programmers work together remotely. Through low-latency screen sharing and shared control, it let programmers code together on a Mac or Windows computer. Customers loved us, and voted with their wallets: once we started charging, we reached $1M in annual recurring revenue in 5 months. We had the choice of staying independent, but we opted to join forces with Slack, with the intention of embedding our product inside theirs, to reach more people faster than we could on our own.

In 2015, Slack acquired Screenhero, and I led the team that built Slack Calls: voice, video and screen sharing in Slack. We finally shipped interactive screen sharing almost three years later, but it wasn’t as performant as Screenhero, and was eventually removed in 2019. Given that it was used by a tiny fraction of Slack’s user-base, and had a high maintenance cost, this was the correct decision for Slack.

Lessons Learnt

Through all of this, I learnt a few things:

• Bundling is hard. Embedding one complex piece of software in another imposes a lot more constraints, which makes it more expensive to build. It’s far easier to have a standalone app that just does one thing well.
• Speed matters. The main reason why Screenhero was loved was because it was fast. We did a lot of work to reduce latency and increase responsiveness — which is critical when working remotely. We weren’t able to bring the speed improvements over to Slack (because of the constraints described in the previous point), which made it far less useful.
• Remote work needs new tools. While Screenhero’s users were a niche group (remote pair programmers), they were the first wave of a much larger group: remote workers. Existing video-conferencing tools (aka ”faces in boxes“) are woefully inadequate to the complex needs of knowledge workers that need to work together.
• Screen sharing is key, but view-only is not enough. When working together, everyone needs to have a seat at the table, and view-only screen sharing is not enough. Sometimes, you want to be able to draw to indicate something on the shared screen. In some cases, you may also want to be able to click and type on it.

From Kevin Kwok’s brilliant essay ”The Arc of Collaboration“ (2019):

There is a need for a layer across all the applications. A layer for things that should be shared across the apps as well collaborative functionality across them.

Slack in its current form cannot be this. If you have to switch out of a product to use Slack, then it is not the layer tying them altogether. Instead, the layer needs to exist a layer above. If everything was in browser it’d be a browser extension. But since most apps are not, it needs to be at the OS layer.

There is some mix of presence, collaboration, coordination, and identity that should be ubiquitous across whatever apps are being used. A layer more attached to the people doing work and what they’re trying to accomplish—than which specific app they’re in.

Perhaps one of the closest to this we’ve seen was Screenhero. After all, the idea of screen sharing is inherently about collaboration while working within productivity apps.

It’s clear that existing tools aren’t sufficient for the needs of remote teams. With this in mind, I decided to build a new product, called Screen.

Unveiling Screen

Screen has a simple mission: make remote work simpler, more pleasant, and more productive. It has a few key features, in addition to voice and video-conferencing:

• Fast screen sharing. Screen is 2x-5x faster than other screen sharing tools, and has between 30ms-50ms end-to-end latency. Most other screen sharing tools have between 100ms-150ms.
• Multiplayer. Screen supports both multiplayer drawing and control, where anyone in the meeting can draw on the shared screen and also control it with their own mouse and keyboard, together. And since it’s really fast, it feels like you’re typing on your own computer.