Introducing Braid
One of the hard things about doing a startup is finding problem/founder fit. Since successful startups take forever, it’s really important for founders to go after a problem that they want to keep solving. If you’re going to end up working on something for a decade or more, you better know the problem really well and be highly motivated to solve it.
Some people are lucky — they have lots and lots of ideas for lots and lots of problems that they want to solve. They keep notebooks in their bags, by their bedsides, and in their glove compartments so they can write down ideas any time inspiration strikes. (Or, at least they did before iPhones.)
Anyway, I’m not so lucky. I’ve only had one idea I’ve been excited about for the last half-decade.
As I moved up in my career and moved from company to company, I found that I spent more of my time doing administrative work and less of my time doing the job I was hired to do. Building and problem solving gave way to tracking things down and filling out forms. I stopped being excited about my work and started dreading the artificial deadlines and TPS reports required to keep our teams in some semblance of cohesion.
For better or for worse, we define ourselves by the jobs we have. But when we go to work and we can’t even do the jobs we’ve been hired to do, it’s just a total waste. Handcuffed by tools chosen by IT and policies imposed to solve a problem one person had 15 years ago, we become exhausted and disillusioned with our jobs.
For me, at my recent jobs before starting this company, I became disillusioned and exhausted by the constant barrage of unnecessary fire drills and meetings that piled up on the calendar. Instead of being able to talk to customers and mock up wireframes, I spent most of my day making PowerPoints and writing long updates that no one ever read. People were less concerned about helping projects move along and more concerned about making sure they could blame someone else for the inevitable delay. It’s what I call the “cold comfort of soft numbers”.
No one is excited to come home and say “I went to four status update meetings today!”. No amount of money or private offices can replace the joy that comes from doing a job well. What we want as employees at an organization is pride of ownership — to be proud of the thing we built, the team presentation we delivered that impressed the client, or the finally solving that problem bedeviling the team for the past three weeks.
I wanted to build a tool that just let me — and my friends — get back to work and work better together.
Braid is designed to let teams work better together—by taking advantage of the work that we’re already doing. We’ve added Braid to be a light layer on top of Gmail and Google Calendar, targeting those organizations that live in their inboxes.
Braid is a collection of simple news feed feeds that are available where you need them — in your Inbox, and out of your way when you don’t. It’s simple to add emails to a feed with a click of a button — no more copy and pasting from an email into a wiki or a task list. Add events or jot a quick note as well. Upload files so that they’re all in one place. Tying together all the important things we do in one cohesive place is what we’re about.
The motivation behind Braid is to build a tool that respects people and respects their existing workflows. We believe that Braid will help you get better results for your projects. Braid is a quiet enabler instead of a chore. Braid is a tool that enables people to get credit for what they’ve done when they’ve done it. And the bonus is that managers and clients can feel secure seeing the progress of a project in real time.
Braid is built to be a single, simple source of truth that everyone can actually trust. So there’s more time to get things done and everyone is pulling together.
I hope you’ll try Braid and see if it helps you and your team free up more time for the things that truly matter. If you want to read more about Braid the product, check out the launch post. And please reach out with your ideas to make it even better. Thanks for reading.