Raj Singh | Loop Team
RAJ SINGH
Co-Founder & CEO of Loop Team, a virtual office for distributed teams.
What Is Loop Team? Tell Us About Your Technology And What Your Mission Is.
Loop Team is a virtual office for distributed teams. We reimagine and bring the best parts of working together into a remote work environment. We do this by recreating the sense of presence you feel when you’re in an office and by making communication really, really fast, just like when you shoulder-tap your teammate when working side-by-side.
We apply a range of interesting tech to make Loop Team work. We actually spun-out of SRI (Stanford Research Institute) where Siri, Nuance amongst other companies began. We use AI to summarize discussions in real time — teammates can then follow these virtual conversations without joining to recreate the feeling of background conversations that you might have when in an office. We work with Agora for the underlying conferencing and Google for the core transcription. We have a light-weight model that we’ve trained that also runs on your machine to determine if you’re in a deep focused work state, and if so, we automatically update your status. We also have built and integrated a range of popular business tools to display rich presence.
What Is Your Background? What Led You To Starting Your Own Company, And How Did You Choose This Space?
I’ve been doing startups my whole career. I started my first company during the dot com crash while doing my Masters at Cal Poly. I dropped-out and never looked back. A consistent theme in everything I’ve started has been that I try to solve personal pain-points. When I had my DIY ringtone company, it was because I wanted to make my own ringtones and there was no easy way to do that at the time. When I had my video company, I was trying to enable Facetime pre-iPhone era because my fiancé was based in England. When I had my calendar company, it was because I had worked in business development and often felt unprepared as I entered meetings and so forth.
Well, Loop Team follows the same pattern. My previous company was a partially distributed team and after we were acquired, the parent company, although remote friendly, didn’t really have full-time WFH employees on the team that we worked with. After I had left, I’d check-in with some of my remote team members who were still there and they would say they felt disconnected or “out of the loop,” and that became the genesis of Loop Team. I wanted to solve how to make remote team members feel more connected.
What Have Been Both Your Favorite And Least-liked Parts Of Your Entrepreneurial Journey? What Have Been Your Most Challenging And Most Exciting Moments For You And The Company?
Seeing happy users without a doubt is the most rewarding feeling. Building a product where you can do this transformationally for millions of users is always the goal.
The journey to get there though is painful, arduous and has its ups and downs. Having had multiple startups, the first couple years are brutal in building your core team, testing your hypothesis and iterating to product market fit. Reaching that stage of launch and PMF is often the most exciting. Once you’re passed that, you can then apply playbooks to scale growth and revenue.
What Was The Fundraising Process Like For You? Tell Us About Your Investors And What You Use The Money You’ve Raised For.
I’ve raised money multiple times in my career and each time has had different challenges. Fortunately, I’ve been able to draw upon previous relationships as many early stage investors know that a lot of the fundraising is a bet on the team, even more-so than maybe the product or category.
Since my last fundraising cycle with my last startup, the market had changed. Pre-Seed has become the norm and accelerators are pervasive. Being adaptable is key but the same sort-of fundamental topics always come up (eg problem, solution, go-to-market, team etc).
With Loop Team, we raised $4.75M led by ENIAC Ventures amongst other great funds. We have used this money to build the product, test it with customers, put together the core team and get to launch. Over the next year, the focus is to continue to build to support larger workspaces in Loop Team while also scaling our systems, processes and infrastructure with growth.
With COVID-19 Causing So Many Businesses To Go Remote, How Has Demand Changed For Loop Team Over These Last Bunch Of Months?
As I’m sure you’ve heard, COVID accelerated our industry 10 years in 3 months. With vaccines on the horizon, teams will begin their return-to-office plans but almost certainly, remote will remain and be a large part of that. New teams are also pretty much unanimously distributed on Day One.
For us, this has been a boon. Synchronous communication is a key part of remote work, especially for those teams that are mostly in similar time zones. Loop Team, for those teams, enables that rapid-fire type communication experienced when working side-by-side in a physical office.
How Do You Think Your Industry Will Change Post-COVID?
Remote work is here to stay. This industry started well before COVID and with COVID has only accelerated. Pre-COVID, we would have said the hardest team configuration are partially distributed teams where you had an office and some full-time remote team members. In this configuration, there is an inegalitarianism between those that are in the office and those that are remote.
Interestingly, this model is going to become the default model with hybrid as Fortune 2000 returns to the office. But the difference this time is that WFH is encouraged even with those in the office meaning different people may come to the office on different days and so this leans more toward a fully distributed culture than an in-office culture. I’m looking forward to seeing how all of this plays out.
Anything Exciting Launching Soon?
Our belief is that to make a team more connected, they need to communicate more. To encourage more communication, we believe presence is key because it provides the context and opportunity for communication.
When people think of presence, they often think of individual presence (eg are you around) but it goes much deeper than that. When you’re in office, you know more than if someone is around. You know if they are available, what they are working on, what their routine is. You also see other dynamics, like who is talking to who and who is at the whiteboard etc. Much of this is lost while distributed.
Over the coming months, we have more deeper presence we are enabling through integrations and AI. We’re looking forward to bringing it live to even better represent the best parts of working together physically.
Walk Us Through Your Typical Workday Schedule.
With the kids out of school and a 15 month old falling all over the house, it’s been hectic to say the least. I get up earlier than most everyone else in the house and I use that quiet time in the morning to get some real work done. Around ~9AM, I typically help my son with getting started for his remote school and then get back online and crank between sync and async until about ~11:30. I usually eat an early lunch and shower around the same time, one of the benefits of remote work flexibility.
After lunch, I continue to work async/sync until ~5PM. I generally don’t like meetings, but to the extent I have them, I try to schedule them in the mornings to get them out of the way. Around ~5PM, I sign-off and then go for a bike ride and/or play tennis or other with my son. It’s also the time our nanny leaves and I have to take baby duties back depending on whether my wife has evening meetings or not. I remain connected, mostly async through mobile and Slack and then depending on the day, may sign back in to get some work done after the kids go to bed around ~10PM.
What Are The Most Important Skills A Modern Day Entrepreneur Needs In Order To Be Successful? What Advice Do You Have For Entrepreneurs Who Are Just Starting Out?
The first is focus. You need to be able to prioritize and focus. Each time in my career where I decided to delay a hard decision and thus didn’t focus, it ultimately cost us.
Second, in my opinion, would be perseverance. The startup journey is long; it’s easy to give up just 9 months in because things aren’t going the way you’d expect. My recommendation is if you have conviction and believe in your hypothesis; it can take at least 3 years before you can even see or prove it’s going to work and you’ll have to suffer through raw grit and determination to get there.
Last, I would say is accountability. It’s easy to play a blame game but in the end, you’re the genius if you succeed and you’re not if you don’t. That’s ok, but it’s important to recognize that you control the destiny of the company and have an opportunity to fix things or change course when things aren’t going the way you’d like etc.
There are certainly lots of other attributes that are critical such as recruiting, likability, consensus-driving etc etc, but above are items that I think are invaluable and hard to learn from just reading a book.
Tell Us A Story Of Something That Happened To You, Something You Heard, Or Something You Saw, That Either Made You Laugh Or Taught You An Important Lesson.
You get so absorbed into work, that you sometimes forget all the greatness that is right around you. Visiting the Serengeti a few years ago was an incredible experience. It wasn’t so much seeing all the animals as much as seeing the ecosystem. It was fascinating to see up close the way that each animal’s behavior impacts another and so forth. If anything disrupts this cycle, the ecosystem is threatened.
Startups in many ways are part of an ecosystem too. We build and support each other; we sometimes get so big, we become something else and new startups emerge. It’s important to stay humble as you experience this journey because it’s not something that most get to experience more than a few times in their life.
If You Can Have A One-Hour Meeting With Someone Famous Who Is Alive, Who Would It Be And Why?
It’d take me well over an hour to answer this as there are so many amazing folks, but I’m always fascinated by people who have become the top .01% of what they do. It takes immense determination and focus to accomplish that in any activity, sport, hobby or other.
I’d probably take an hour lunch with Roger Federer. Not because I specifically like tennis or other, but he’s an example of someone who has become one of the best in the world at what he does. It’d be great to dig into his mindset and understand how he stays focused and motivates himself.
What Is Your Favorite Quote And Why Does It Resonate With You?
I’m a sucker for hard work quotes. There was a great one from Jim Harbough who was formerly the Head Coach for the 49ers, “I don’t take vacations. I don’t get sick. I don’t observe major holidays. I’m a jack hammer.”
That quote makes me chuckle but there is some real truth in that. Startups are hard and I don’t subscribe to the philosophy that you can build a great startup working 35 hours a week. You certainly have to work smarter, not harder, but I do believe grit, determination and just raw luck are part of startup success.
What Does Success Mean To You?
This is going to sound cliche but in the end, it’s to be happy. How you define happiness obviously varies from person to person but I think the mantra of health, friends and family first rings absolutely true. For me personally, I like stress. I know it’s often thought-of as a negative but without it, I feel too complacent and I get bored.
Many define success as financial wealth and fame. Wealth certainly provides opportunity to explore more freely, but if you’re building a startup primarily motivated by wealth, you likely won’t succeed; it’s just too hard.
Raj Singh’s Favorites Stack:
Books:
1. The Hard Thing About Hard Things - This is an insightful read about Ben Horowitz’s stories as a CEO.
2. How to Read a Person Like a Book - This author pretended to be deaf for 1-2 years and in that process, learned how to read people at coffee shops.
3. Can You Hear Me - This book is a selfish choice. The author studied the psychology of video conferencing and discusses what is needed to make conferencing work.
Health & Fitness:
1. BJJ / Muay Thai - I’ve been doing this for years although it’s been on hold since COVID.
2. Backpacking - It’s a great way to challenge myself and create an experience that I’ll remember.
3. Tennis / Badminton - I love racquet sports. I’ve gotten too old for the more physical sports like football. I’ll still play basketball, if indoors, but that’s harder to get these days.
Brands:
1. Amazon - It’s sad but true. I used to have specific brands I loved, like Thomas Pink but since COVID, I just wear t-shirts, shorts and/or sweats. Maybe this will change again next year, I am hoping so!
