Rousseau Kazi, the CEO of Threads, a collaboration application company, has launched a new tool to rival Workplace by Facebook – ‘Threads’.
While there are plenty of collaboration systems competing on the market today, Threads is unique because it was built by a former Facebook rising star. Kazi joined Facebook as an intern when he was 19 and remained there for 6 years, supporting everything from mobile infrastructure to “Pages.”
According to Rousseau, collaborating with his co-workers through Workplace simply didn’t fit his “flow.” As a result, Kazi decided to launch the Threads startup, which directly competes with Workplace.
How Close is Threads to Workplace?
When discussing the new technology, Kazi admitted that “superficially,” Threads and Workplace by Facebook are very similar. However, Threads has been designed to support thoughtful discussions in the business space, without feeling too much like a social network.
The new start-up has launched at around the same time that Facebook has announced 2 million paying customers on its Workplace platform. What’s more, there’s plenty of other competition for Threads to think about too, including Cisco Webex Teams, Microsoft Teams, and Slack. However, the majority of the biggest players in the field focus more on real-time conversations. Threads, on the other hand, centres conversations around the things that employees post. In that way, it’s very similar to your standard Facebook experience.
Kazi describes threads as an “asynchronous” productivity experience, and he believes that it’s better suited to work discussions than Facebook’s offering.
What’s Unique About Threads?
Of course, Threads isn’t just another version of Workplace by Facebook. For instance, there are context bars in the platform that show you how many colleagues have read their conversation or marked it to follow up on. You can also add items to a list of things to follow up on. Once everyone has given their opinion on a topic, you can highlight the resolution.
According to Kazi, the Workplace by Facebook experience takes inspiration from the original social platform, made for friends and family. However, Threads was built deliberately to focus on teams.
Non-paying customers can have up to 150 conversations, while a paid version is available for unlimited discussions at $10 per user per month. Up until now, the business has raised a little less than $11.5 million in funding. The most recent funding round was led by Sequoia Capital, a company that has been impressed by Kazi before.
During his time with Facebook, Kazi embraced a tool that could take shaky video and stabilise it. He developed that concept into the Hyperlapse Instagram app, which helps users to create more sophisticated time-lapse content. Now, Sequoia and other investors believe that Rosseau can bring the same innovation into his work with Threads.
