Joining oVice as VP of Engineering
And Extending Communication Options While at it
September 3rd, 2021 was my last day at Cloudflare. It was an exciting 2 years, being in the front seat of a fast-growing company.
I was part of an SWE/SRE team within the Infrastructure organization that builds out automation for data center and hardware operations, helping the company to handle its ever-growing numbers of servers. The work was fun and fulfilling, and the team is great - people you can truly trust and know that they will have your back is not an environment you often find.
Also, it was an eye-opening experience being able to see how certain things get done from the inside. For example, Cloudflare’s blog is a well-known and highly rated content in the industry. One of the main reasons is its transparency and the sophistication of the content itself. A lot of folks will agree that they’ve learned a lot just by reading through Cloudflare’s technical blogs. If there’s an incident or something went wrong, you’ll also be able to know what exactly went wrong and how does Cloudflare makes sure it doesn’t happen again. This creates trust for customers and eventually led to better business.
During my final executive interview with Matthew (CEO), I asked him, “what does trust mean to you?”. To this day, his answer still sticks with me.
There are 3 types of trust:
Trust from customers
Letting them know you have their backs and will always be there for them. Making sure issues are transparently communicated and how they’re handled to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
Trust from your team (employees)
A corporation is ultimately just a group of people. Without them, you can’t operate. As a company, we should all be heading to the same direction, so making sure that there’s trust within the company will result in more happy people, which will ultimately lead to having more happy customers.
Trust from society (and communities)
A company with happy employees can’t operate on it’s own. It’s built on top of layers of infrastructure and communities. While making money is a priority for a profit organization, we need to make sure we fulfill our share of responsibilities and give back to the communities we build our business on. Without them, there’s no us, so having that trust between Cloudflare and our communities is also very important.
Pretty insightful, right? His answer was the ultimate push for me to decide to join Cloudflare 2 years ago and I can tell you he has been true to his words even by observing from afar.
While the company is doing extremely well with a 600%+ value growth for the past 2 years, I’m pretty sure it won’t stop there and it will continue to do well in the coming years.
You can tell how much I like being at Cloudflare, so leaving was a very hard decision to make, including the financial incentives. But having said that, I’m quite excited about my next opportunity.
Why oVice?
The title pretty much speaks for itself. I’ll be joining oVice (headquartered in Japan) as the VP of Engineering starting September 27th, 2021.
So what is oVice and why I made the jump from a successful public company to a startup?
Obviously, it’s the Metaverse!!
That’s going to be next big thing!!!
Jokes aside, the actual reasons for me to join oVice are,
- Being to be able to provide options for a more flexible work-life balance
- Solving the technical challenges to provide for #1
The offline/online hybrid work style
After we all went into lockdown with COVID-19, I’ve got nothing much to do after work so I started helping out other companies as a technical advisor. oVice was one of them.
The product was extremely interesting. The company positions itself as a service provider for virtual real estate. Meaning you can sign up for spaces with oVice, customize it to your liking and then network and connect with people there, or do whatever you want to do like how you would with a piece of land in the real world.
While I love the idea of being able to work remotely and not having to commute to the office — the traffic around San Francisco is just pure horror and on top of that, you might get your car’s window smashed. Why in the world would someone want to go pay for parking in the city for 8 hours and head home with a $500 bill? Just doesn’t make sense —, one of the major pain points has been the loss of human interactions when people are present in a physical space.
Replicating human interactions online
There are numerous times we’ve overheard some other interesting conversations happening nearby, jumping in, and then lead to ideas and cross-team collaboration efforts you wouldn’t have come up with if you’ve just been sitting by your own in a little box.
Being all by yourself in an isolated space 24/7 can be pretty lonely as well. Humans are social animals so being able to chit-chat and talk with people can be good for one’s mental health. Zoom and Google Meet are not helping in that sense, and they are not designed to be used that way so you really can’t blame them for it.
oVice tries to solve that problem digitally. The avatar that represents you can move around freely within each space, and there’s a concept of direction and distance built into the app. Meaning, there’s only so far your voice can travel. So if you’re too far away from one another, you’ll no longer be able to hear what other people are saying, which is pretty close to what you’ll expect in the real world.
This means that you can virtually sneak up to a group of people and start eavesdropping on them, like how you’ll do it in the real world!!
I mean, that’s how you network with other folks, right? :P
As time passes, it can get harder to keep in touch with folks that were once part of our lives, due to physical reasons or maybe other responsibilities. While most existing customers use oVice for work or school, it can be also used for all kinds of other gatherings, like one-time events and class reunions, etc.
How will work look in the future?
Reducing the need or requirement to be at a physical location could help people lead a lifestyle they want as well. Perhaps you don’t like to live in crowded places like New York City or San Francisco (or Tokyo) but still want to be able to work for a company located there. oVice can help achieve that, and can still make you feel like you’re close to the people you work with regardless of the physical distance apart.
On the other hand, if you’re a company looking to access talent globally, oVice can help you make sure employees in remote locations feels like they’re part of the team regardless of where they live. Having that sense of belonging can be a crucial part of both the company’s and the hire’s success.
When I see technology having the potential to help bridge the gaps, and provide alternatives to the traditional ways of doing things, that’s when I get most excited.
NOTE: We can’t solve time zones just in case if you’re wondering so you’ll need to figure that part out yourself
Technical challenges
I’m an engineer at heart, and solving problems are what I enjoy doing most.
For oVice to fulfill its full potential, there are a tremendous amount of technical challenges to solve. While WebRTC technology is not something new, the major difference between oVice and other existing video collaboration tools like Zoom or Google Meets is that you have the extra layer of real-time visual interactions on top. That adds a new set of complexity for human-machine interactions and making this work will be something quite interesting to solve.
- What would mobile interactions look like?
- How do we allow other people to develop on top of oVice and create their own experience?
- How do we make sure things scale and handle connections well even with 10s of thousands of connections in certain spaces?
- How do we make sure the people working in an office and people working remotely can still collaborate well together?
These are all interesting problems to solve, both complexity-wise and scalability-wise. And being one of the early companies in this space, our solutions could have the potential to become the next norm of how people interact with each other moving forward.
Just to be clear, we’re not trying to make you ditch the real world and make you throw yourself completely into the digital world like some companies are. We’re merely trying to extend what’s possible, and allow people to choose the best options for themselves and how they want to live their lives.
Technologies have evolved a lot in the last 2 decades, and I believe we’re at a turning point that we can achieve what our predecessors couldn’t.
Sounds interesting?
We’ve just closed on our Series A and we’re expanding globally (Will share English press once released).
Come join us!!
The location is fully remote. The job description is set to the US because LinkedIn won’t let me just set it as remote.
