The Evolution of Loom with Joe Thomas at Atlassian Team ’24

Hi, I'm Mitch Ashley here at Atlassian, team 24 in Las Vegas, Nevada. You know, we just announced an, an acquisition, us being acquired here at Techstrong. And of course, um, that's something that happens in the business world where you're great big companies or even small companies.

Um, I'm, I'm have the pleasure of being joined by Joe Thomas, who's co-founder and now head of Product Loom at Atlassian. Uh, which what, five months ago? Is that acquisition?

Five months? That's right. Yep.

Wow. Five months or five days. It's kinda hard To tell.

Uh, yeah, exactly. Exactly. It feels like it's been five years in some points, you know?

Right. Well, you know what I'd love to you, we wanna know about Loom if, if somebody doesn't know about that. Yeah.

I want to hear the origin story about too, about how you kind of came up, why you pursued this as a idea for A company ab Absolutely. Well, congratulations on the acquisition, Mitch Tyson. And same to you.

Thank You. Um, so the origin for Loom was, uh, we believed that video was even back in 2016 when we launched. Video was everywhere in the consumer landscapes, but you would show up to work and it wasn't there.

And we quickly realized that it was purely through the amount of effort and friction that there was to record a video and send it out as part of communication. You would, quick time has been around for 25 years, uh, you would record it. You would've a 300 megabyte file.

You'd have to upload that to Dropbox or G Drive. Mm-Hmm. And by the time you shared out that link, it was 15 minutes later, you may as well have just typed up a message.

So we felt like, I don't Want, if I want, I don't want, I, I need to edit it. Right. There's some things I need to tweak or, Exactly.

And so we felt like if we took a lot of friction out of the process of recording and sending video for day-to-Day communication, it would totally unlock the aperture of the people who would use it and the use cases that they would use it for. And so consumerization of video and enterprise was one part of it. Another part that I think is directly related to Atlassian and Team Anywhere is the fact that distributed work, even back in 2016, was on the rise.

Uh, especially in the development world, right. We've been doing distributed development, you know, for A long time. Correct.

And so people adopt work communication tools 'cause it makes them faster, better at their jobs. And when you think about collaborating and communicating, especially across offices or time zones, you need a more effective form of communication. And we felt like asynchronous video, uh, tapped into that as well.

And, and you bring those two things together. We ran our first survey after we launched the products. It was horizontal in usage.

We are used up and down the org chart. Like Atlassian executives, anu, Mike Scott, all use it for company communication. Mm-Hmm.

But it's also used by engineers that are doing bug reports or code docs. There's designers for design walkthroughs. Um, go to market folks, use it for customer outreach.

It's truly horizontal in nature. And that's what we believe the opportunity is, is video is prolific and consumer. It's gonna be massive in the workplace as well.

And we hope Loom is the one that unlocks it for most people. Well, sounds like you're on that path for sure. Some, sometimes entrepreneurs.

I worked at this company, I had this problem, we weren't solving that, but I decided that's my next mission is to solve that. Other, other times it's, we looked at the market, this is happened in video, we think this is gonna be big, let's go. This is the need that's being unmet.

Were one of those two paths, more of the path we took. We were more iterative. And I think that that's actually a vast majority of companies that end up being, I mean, you take Slack for example.

They started out as a video game company and then became the most prolific, I would say The first two years. Are it, it's you're finding out what you're really doing. Yes.

So we did have a core thesis of video is radically underutilized in the workplace, but the initial implementation was a two-sided marketplace of product experts giving feedback to any stage of the product lifecycle. Then we got feedback from companies that they wanted this sort of screen recording with camera overlay from realtime website users. Mm-Hmm.

1%, it had to be a pretty slick and easy to use experience. And so we built it consumer grade in nature and then we started getting feedback. Hey, can I just, can you split out that Chrome extension as a screen recorder and camera bubble so I can just record it myself?

Mm-Hmm. They're like, yeah. And so we launched that in June of 2016 and that's when usage and users exploded.

I think that Atlassian one of the reasons why we're so excited about coming into the organization, they were the inventors of product led growth and DLG mm-Hmm. And so we had that same sort of playbook where in order to get value out of a loom video that you recorded for when you're done reporting, it instantly uploads you have a link to share is that you send it to somebody, it brings them into the Loom experience, they sign up. And that has been like our core growth then is PLG.

So anyways, that was the initial kind of iterative approach. Always video at the core. Mm-Hmm.

But pretty different from where we started. It's Amazing. I did a startup company that's thought it was gonna be a web design company, became a systems integration.

Yeah. At the end, You just don't know where you dunno where it's gonna take you. Um, and Loom is so much more the than a screen recording.

You know, there's a lot of screen recording software talk, talk about asynchronous communication and how that fits into both in the lasting context where you've got this work team work graph of what's happening in the organization. You've got different kind of workflows that are happening in J and Confluence and the other tools. So you, you, you've not come from, here's the problem that we solve.

You've come into a less, a, a little bit bigger space. You've come into a kind of real horizontal space where you can play across all of it. Yes.

Am I, am I pontificating too much or am I on track? No, no. Yeah, absolutely.

I mean, we, we say that there's the three E of asynchronous video communication and it ties all to generally asynchronous, which is one is efficient. So when it comes to recording a video, it's so high fidelity in nature. You get voice intonation, you get the screen context with Loom, you have a camera bubble where you know, you're showing your facial expression or excitement.

And that is where biologically evolved to talk to one another. And so it's Just, and those cues that come with voice and visual. Yeah.

So if a picture is worth a thousand words, you know, a video is worth a million. Um, and so we believe it's a really efficient way to get a high fidelity form of communication to somebody else. And it reduces back and forth, right?

The effective side. So the second E is effective, which time zones and distributed teams is trying to get, even I'm in Atlanta, Georgia and Atlassian has a bunch of Sydney-based folks trying to time zone coordinate and get critical information to one another while again, high fidelity, but also solves on the time zone front that you can record a video and send it out. And then the third E that I think is really important, and I think of the X factor for loom is expressive.

That like human connection and communication, especially as the world goes more networked and distributed human connection is really important. And so with asynchronous work, it doesn't have to be, um, just typing away all day. I feel like a robot, it, it can be efficient, it can be effective, and it can be expressive.

And so we believe that asynchronous work is also how you unlock productivity for teams and organizations. So a stat that we had for Loom is that we help companies replace 29% of meetings that are currently on the calendar. Anu talked about it in the keynote today.

Keynote, yeah. And that was, she got some, uh, nobody raised their hands in terms of more meetings. And so for us, we think that you're not sacrificing on knowledge that's exchange or the human connection and you're freeing up time.

And what does that mean? More creativity, more innovation. And so that's what we think asynchronous work ultimately does for individuals is more free time and still doing the same quality work, if not better, easy, Just kind of anecdotally.

Um, we are Loom users at our company. Awesome. The biggest user of both Trello and Loom is our COO and talk about someone who's at the intersection of people working together.

Yes. Right. And it's just constantly a hello sales team, here's the thing we talked about in our meeting today.

Here's how you do it with, you know, pointing to connecting to other content, that kind of thing. It's really great. It's a very effective way.

And in a minute and a half, you know, as long as you don't carry on for 20 minutes and it be, well, it may be time for that, but totally indicate those a little short ideas. Here you go. Here's how it solves it.

And the watch it again, it kind of connects The average length of aloo is two minutes and 45 seconds. Right. Like we're not talking about 15 minute reportings that it's kind of a pain in the butt to watch.

5 x. Um, That's a little hard to follow, but Yes, it is. It is, it is.

Absolutely. Um, but you know, in terms of the average length of a loom and the type of communication, like you said, COOs recording a minute and a half and that's really affected communication and it builds a connection with the team in a powerful way. So talk about some of the announcements.

Some of you, you're now part of the Atlassian family. It sounds like you didn't wait very long to, uh, come out some other great stuff. Well, this is tap on rolling.

Well this is one of the things that I think is so exciting about Atlassian Loom coming together, is that that better together narrative was organic and natural. We had research that told us that we should take a loom video and we provided transcript and closed caption for any loom that is recorded. It's in 52 languages if you want, but how do I take that transcript and then create high fidelity content on the other side of it?

And so we actually ended up building an AI feature set that takes your recorded video and transforms it into any sort of content that you want. So a key use case for Loom is capturing bugs. Uh, you could imagine that you're just talking through it for 45 seconds or so.

And then with one click here is the steps to reproduce. Here is the additional information around network and council logs and one click that ports into Jira. You can assign the individual the priority, et cetera.

Um, another one is on the Confluence side. So write a document. You could imagine that you're doing employee training or onboarding materials or a help center article and you're forwarding a loom walking through that with one click.

We'll take that transcript and provide a structured stylized doc that you copy and paste into Confluence with a loom embedded into it. I forgot to mention that with a Jira ticket as well, is that looms can be played right within that lasting ecosystem. And we, we were gonna build that anyways if it wasn't, uh, the acquisition.

And so there's just so much more opportunity for us to continue to build together. We're just getting started. But that, that is the new Loom AI workflow launch that we just had today.

So Let me ask you, this may be kind of projecting forward, maybe it's not that far away, but it seems like if you have workflows and you have a platform that understands you, if that workflow is, you could say in the context of that I'm recording a loom now is because I'm working on this particular task, you know, that workflow, it knows how to communicate and organize the content from that video? For sure. I mean, I think that this is where what Atlassian announced today with VO is the thing that I personally as a product builder am most excited about.

It makes so much sense that Atlassian has all of this context on an organization. The team graph, the, um, knowledge graph. And if you're recording a loom that's walking through a certain project update, well we can take that transcript, plug it into VO and say, pull out all the tickets or issues or individuals that this is relevant for and then port that information back into the platforms and systems that it should be in.

So like a Confluence doc, they had the blueberry example during Robo, like if I'm giving an update on Blueberry, I shouldn't have to manually go in and update the Confluence docs with this. We should recognize that on the backend and then suggest all the places that you update it. You just click approve and then all that update is ported back in.

Interesting. Yeah. How do you see video?

And that's an understatement of what we're really talking about here, the video with all the context around that. Did you thought a year or two ahead from where how we work today? What might change?

What, what do you see happening? Yeah, I think the biggest thing for people adopting video at work is it's not as natural as you might think of recording a video. Some people are like readings and text work for me.

But it's Async video is so powerful and what we need to do is make it as easy to working with a tech stock as we possibly can. So we do have an edit by transcript experience right now, but it just allows you to trim. What we're gonna do is start pushing into multimodality around ai.

So we have a lot of rich, uh, information on individuals. So we can create a voice avatar, we can create a camera avatar for you such that if you stumble over some words or you miss a important section, you can just type that in and we'll put that in the video for you. And so for us, we think that that's really powerful technology to push more into the multimodality versus just kind of like the text oriented AI offerings that we have today.

Another part that we're kind of taking that voice and camera avatar technology and applying it to is that, as I mentioned, loom is used for go to market personas, sales and success folks. And it actually increases pipeline by 19% as what we've seen just because it makes that human connection if you receive a personalized video. Right.

And so we're gonna use that technology of cam and voice avatar tie into your CRMs and we're gonna launch something called variables that allows you to send personalized videos at scale, which is the number one pain point that we hear from salespeople today. Mm-Hmm. Um, it's just rerecording basically the same 95% is the same is Different name at the front or whatever.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And so I think that that's where our AI offering, but the Loom platform generally is gonna push more into the multimodality of video.

I hadn't really thought about the role of avatars in that. Um, overcoming the apprehension of being on camera. Not everybody, you know, sits here in front of a camera every day and you know, natural for you or I to do a Zoom meeting or a recording or whatever it is.

Right. And, uh, for other folks that's just like anything in front of a camera is a, a big step, the apprehension. So it sounds like avatars might actually be a great substitute if you're not the kind of person who could always be, and sometimes there's just know, Hey, I got outta the shower, I'm not ready to sit in front of you.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course. Yeah.

I think that that's where, um, it's a very exciting time to be building in software generally. It's very exciting to be building N Video specifically. And I think when you say two years from now, I think that the ecosystem is evolving so rapidly it's Fast as things are changing.

Yeah. Wow. So it's like six months, like a year is kind of like max where we push our thinking towards.

'cause things are gonna change and we will adapt to that. I Was just thinking about your sales example. CRM I'm a product leader, right?

I want to talk to my customers. Hey, we got some announcements here. You're probably not gonna be one of the people that goes and downloads or watches the announcement from the Alaska.

I just wanna tell you a little bit about some things we did this week and what, how this might be relevant to you. And I'd love to follow up and chat about Exactly. It's extremely high leverage, right?

I think that this is what Atlassian, I think has done this is where Loom is gonna learn a lot through the acquisition, is they've done a really good job of kind of packaging up the marketing messaging around agents. Right? And effectively what Voice and Cam avatars is, is like allowing you to have your own personal niche agent Right.

To do work on your behalf. Mm-Hmm. And I think that the more leverage and more productivity that we can unlock for individuals, again, that goes back to enabling you to have more creative and innovative time, uh, instead of recording those personalized, uh, videos for every single individual.

Let me ask you about the AI equation. I've, I've talked to a couple people about, there's also an apprehension around ai, right? Uh, first I wanna do anything wrong there.

There's a, there's some upsides to it too. Is I could talk to an avatar or to a bot or whatever it is and not feel as judged as I might. If I might gonna go open a ticket and talk to somebody in it or you know, go call up finance and say, what does this mean?

But how, how, how about AI in the context of loom and multimodal, um, how do we make that as accessible as possible so we can address whether it's fear or apprehension about ai? Yeah. I think that it fundamentally boils down to a couple things.

One is that people adopt work communication tools as I mentioned, because it makes them faster, better at their jobs, right? Like that first and foremost, we have to tell them the value that it delivers on their behalf. And the follow up is, well from a security and compliance perspective, what are the sorts of things that we're safeguarding it on the other side where in the loom instance for Cam and voice avatars, we're literally only allowing you to create one associated with your account.

So you can only have Mitch. Right? Okay.

Um, and it has to be content that you recorded with Loom. So you can't upload a video we won't generate based off of that. And so from our perspective, if we deliver on the core value proposition of what we're saying is unlocking more productivity for you and more value and more ROI then on the other side we'll have all the safeguards in place to make sure that you're like, well only Mitch can create a Mitch.

Right. Only a joke. Just knowing that is important.

Actually, I hadn't really thought about it from that perspective, but I don't have to worry about someone uploaded some video 'cause they got a hold their beer Account. Right. Right.

Interesting. Uh, any announcement things you want to talk about that we haven't covered yet? Well, that's a fascinating thing about being at Atlassian right now is that, you know, uh, a new, that's a loaded Question.

Yeah. A new, and Mike and Scott, um, they all kind of took what we're announcing and we're still a relatively ragtag team of 200 people that, uh, they announced pretty much everything that we're building right now. Okay.

Um, I will say that one of the things that we don't have coming out in the near term call, like the next three to six months, but really excited to keep working on is that editor work stream. Like edit it like a text document. But we're also trying to, for that executive communication, we'll build custom branding so you can be on brand for your organization.

So if Anu is sending out a loom to the entire company, is there nice little overlays Right. And things that if she wanted to do a q and a as part of it, you know, and like have people fill out a poll. We're we're building against the editor work stream for more broadcaster use cases.

Um, it'll still be recording a loom that ease of use. You'll have all the AI features on the other side, but how do we make the editing a video as consumer grade and seamless as possible so people can start to feel like, oh, I I don't have to be Spielberg to create a relatively polished video at work, 20 shoots to get it, You know? Exactly.

Recordings to get it. Right. Exactly.

I think about, I mean, earlier I called Robo Revo, you know, by the, you know, into it. You're like, okay, what is wrong term? You know, I'd love to like reverse tape and you know, take that out.

No tape involved. Yes. You know, it is that kind of thing.

And you have to just pick a random, if you had to break out Camtasia to go edit a video to fix something and I don't even know how to fix the voice, how do I do an overlay of that? Right. Yep.

You know, those are all the things that if you're, if you're that in that specialized in that area, no problem. But for everyday person, that's not something we know how to do. Exactly.

I mean, our, our goal for Loom, we believe it's inevitable that everybody will use Async video as part of their communication stack. You know, our goal of Loom and Atlassian is press that into the present as quickly as possible and then obviously have as much loom be the provider because we are the market creator. We believe we're best in class as of right now.

There's some statistics that back that up like G two, et cetera. Mm. Um, but you know, our, our goal is to make that as inevitable as possible.

And I think that making people comfortable with video and having the flexibilities of recording and tools around it is what ultimately gets us to that inevitable future as quickly as possible. Sometimes when things are so impactful, they kind of fade into the environment we work in. And we don't call it loom anymore, we just call it multimode video, whatever the term is at the time.

You see that kind of happening for, for the technologies that you've created. Is is that a measure of effectiveness is where we don't have to call it a loom video anymore, it's just a, a thing or whatever it Has. Well, we actually think that there's real branding power in people calling it.

I sure you do. That Was trick. That was kind of a trick place I guess, or maybe a dumb Place.

I was just walking over with a teammate over here and she was telling me that somebody, uh, as a mortgage lender, their friend in Oregon was received a loom that she used that specific term. Okay. So, um, you become the Kleenex Of Yeah.

A down and verb. I think that that's like a really special Or hey, not a bad thing. I think it's a really special opportunity from a brand perspective is that, you know, just send me a loom.

Right. Alright. So we won't, not that we did, but we wouldn't expect loom to fade into the background.

No, no, no. Exactly. Exactly.

Did you loom that? Did you look, did you set up a loom? Okay, I can hear the conversation now.

Alright, Joe, it's been a pleasure talking you, Mitch. Thank you, you so much. Congratulations on the acquisition And you too.

Thank You very much. And, uh, we look forward to great things and I think it's a, a good place to watch, you know, for, uh, people who are following or part of Atlassian because you're, you're, you're part of creating the, the, the future that we're living right now and we'll live in a year or two from now. So it's great stuff.

That is the plan and we'll see you at team next year. Right. Okay.

We'll Be here. Okay, awesome. Alright, Joe, Joe, um, Thomas, I keep wanting say Turner Joe Thomas, in my mind.

Anyway. Joe Thomas, who is, uh, head of product for Loom. Is it SVP?

Is that your title Or you Head of product? Technically. Head Of product.

Okay. Yeah. You know, those things evolve over Time.

Exactly. Head up is a generic, what what level is it? We don't know.

You know, It'll, it'll, that all kind of figured itself, right? Yeah. Okay.

So anyway, Joe Thomas that we've been meeting with, really think about that asynchronous, asynchronous communication. Don't think of it as that, as that term is thinking about how do I share what I'm thinking right now and people can consume it at any time that they want to, and now in multimodal and, uh, how that can be more effective than recording something. And, uh, assuming that that's the static thing, it's only ever gonna be, it's a great way of helping us all communicate better.

So thanks again, Joe. Thanks Mitch. Alright.

We'll be back again with another great interview. Stay tuned.