The philosophy behind Once

`1:26:36`

Yeah, sure. The first product we're going to be launching is basically an old product that we made way, way, way back when. So years and years and years ago, 2006, we launched a product called Campfire, which was- Oh, of course.... a group chat tool. How could you not remember Campfire? Well, some people are- Are younger.... 22 and they don't know, understandably so. But if you've been around, maybe you remember Campfire, which was a group chat tool, which is I think eight years before Slack came out or something like that. So it was really early and it was really hard to get people to even understand what this thing was, and a lot of people didn't get it. And then Slack came out, of course, and steamrolled it and really, really executed beautifully and did a great job. But chat has become a commodity.

`1:27:22`

There are a million ways to chat with people now, and in the business realm, they're all still quite expensive and they're all month to month to month. You got Slack, you got Teams, and you've got a few others and it's like, you know what... And there are some open-source alternatives, by the way, that are free or cheap. But we want to put something back out there. So we're going to relaunch Campfire under the Once brand. You'll pay for it once, you'll install on your own servers, and you'll run it. And it'll do 90% of the things that you want to do every day and these other chat tools and do them very, very well and very, very simply and very, very easily. And we think it's going to be really interesting. And by the way, the other thing we're thinking about with these Once products, which is interesting,

`1:28:07`

just get to this alternative point of view, is that these don't necessarily need to replace things. They can be in addition to. You might still run Slack at your company but you want to back up for when Slack goes down, or you want a special air-gapped chat for your executive team that cannot be leaked by another company where you're hosting data or having other people involved that might have access to it by accident. You can run things, you can have different tools doing similar things but for different groups in different contexts. Now, you probably wouldn't want to pay month to month to month to month to month for a backup system when something almost never goes down, but if you only have to pay for it once, it might be really... that's a good thing to have. That's an insurance policy to pay for it once and we just have it in our back pocket.

`1:28:53`

The other thing we're doing with Once product is that you get the code. And so if you're a product team and you're curious to see how this product was built, and we've gone to great lengths to make it exceptionally well-built for this purpose, this is a book, essentially, of how to build this kind of thing really, really, really well on the CSS on the HTML and the Ruby on Rails side, for example. So you'll get all the code and you can look at it and you can modify it, you can play with it and you can tweak it. You can't resell it. There's a certain licensing but it's yours. And so if you want to change the layout, go ahead. If you want to add some features, go ahead. If you want to mess around, go ahead, it's yours. And that's another thing that's really novel. You don't get that in subscription software. So there's a lot of things going on that we're trying.