Tagging is another organizational feature that is on our roadmap and has always made sense to me. Right now our organizational model is primarily hierarchical which has obvious limitations.

RE: email integration - We have a pretty robust email integration right now. Neville was always insistent that we shouldn't force people into the app to have a conversation, especially for one-off collaborators who get looped into a chat. They can stay blissfully ignorant of the fact that the conversation is actually happening on emdash if it suits them.

Early adopters range in size from 2 people to ~20. As you said, the Catch-22 for larger teams usually have established tool stacks so the (operational) switching cost is prohibitive.

FWIW we are a team of 5 and already find the feature set useful (we're biased, of course). I expect that ~5 is the threshold the organizational and search features become invaluable.

Check it out @ https://emdash.io

We’ve focused on making chat and video work together so distributed teams can stay aligned without drowning in information. You can try it here: https://emdash.io.

It frustrated us how easily important conversations would happen and then disappear. Slack never quite matched how we worked. Channels were too coarse which led to noisy notifications and broken search. Zoom meetings weren’t much better–unless someone took perfect notes (which rarely happened), video calls became black holes of lost knowledge.

We spent too much time trying to find the information we needed to do our jobs.

To address this, we’re testing a few concepts and would appreciate your feedback on the value of the following:

(1) Automatically record, summarize, and transcribe your team’s video chats. We store meeting content directly inside discussions to facilitate search and discovery.

(2) Make it easy to manage & organize conversations of varying scope. A chat between team members can be forked into a dedicated Discussion with its own audience permissions and subscription. Individual messages or entire Discussions can be moved after the fact. Conversations can evolve unpredictably, so having the right tools to keep them organized post-hoc was important to us.

(3) Improve search with AI and hierarchical information retrieval. We use LLMs to uncover insights, summarize content, and connect the dots across related discussions, meetings, and documents. You can ask questions like “What are the team’s priorities this week?” or “What did we decide to do with feature X?” and get back a generative response AND deep links into the original chats and meetings.

Try it out: https://emdash.io and tell us what you think!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43184362

Points: 80

# Comments: 67

Having the context or, better yet, responsibility for the past decisions is great for developing a pragmatic approach to software design AND empathy for other software engineers.

We’re looking for engineers to join our small but mighty team at emdash to build the next generation collaboration stack, starting with chat & video.

This is a very early-stage opportunity, meaning you’ll have a foundational role in shaping our product, technology, and company culture. We already have daily active customers (including ourselves) but we are just starting to scratch the surface of what emdash can be.

Founders have a long history working together and solid engineering & management experience from FB, Square, Slack, and their previous startup Rimeto (acquired by Slack).

Check out what we’ve built so far at http://emdash.io and help us figure out the future.

Job description: https://wellfound.com/company/emdash-io Founders: https://www.linkedin.com/in/pzigoris/, https://www.linkedin.com/in/neville-bowers/

I offered up a response here: http://philztheengineernotthecoffee.tumblr.com/post/33650957...

searchgss and mschaecher pretty much nailed it in their comments: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4650787 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4649243

that said, caltrain is a smoother, cheaper ride.

As I see it I'm building a tool that lets people promote their cause, their business, their band. The fact that they are paying for it is only because there is contention for that space.