Why we built Align
The only extensible video chat platform.
As quarantines and indefinite WFH set in six months ago, video chats very quickly became a huge part of our day to day work lives. Participating in our first all hands meetings, something stood out: there was no way to raise your hand or signal that you wanted to speak. This almost trivial restriction highlighted something interesting about the way video call platforms have traditionally been designed.
At first glance, the value of a video call platform seems to lie exclusively in how well it connects people, i.e. how clear the video looks and how crisp the audio sounds. While important, there’s something missing here. When we meet in person, we don’t just look and talk at each other. We make notes, we write on whiteboards, we set timers, we raise our hands. Broadly speaking, we can effortlessly utilize our environments in order to more easily transmit ideas brain-to-brain. Unfortunately, video chat platforms have historically killed that flexibility.
Yes, there are ways to raise a hand over video chat. You could physically raise your hand on camera (but it’s hard to pick these out in large meetings where not everyone is on screen) or you could post in a text chat, a feature most platforms support (but posts can be buried by other comments). And in fact, in the past few months, many platforms have rolled out functionality to let people digitally raise their hands with the click of a button. With all that said, the point still remains: most chat video platforms put us in straitjackets when it comes to running our meetings.
That’s where Align comes in. Align is the only extensible video chat platform. Platforms like Zoom have done a great job removing the friction of scheduling, starting, and joining meetings. But there is still the question of what actually happens in the meeting. We don’t want to answer that question, we want to help you answer it instead. We made Align so that anyone with an idea of how to make their virtual meetings even just a little more useful can build an app to bring their idea to life. And best of all, apps can be easily shared with the meeting-goers of the world.
As work becomes increasingly remote there is a big opportunity to use technology to enhance human communication, rather than just facilitate it. Instead of solving all the problems ourselves, we want to make it easy for millions of people to build tools for the next phase of human interaction.
Our SDK is currently in private beta, if you’re interested in developing a meeting app, sign up for the wait list on our website.
