We are starting a new company, Makedo.
I’ve spent my career watching remote communication get closer and closer to good enough, but then a plateau. Just good enough.
The pandemic came and forced a wider experiment and an expanded awareness. Now, 78% of Americans with remote-capable jobs work from home at least once a week. The vast majority report being as productive or more productive than they were in the office. Something real about work has changed and can’t be ignored. Yet the tools we use, the Zooms and Google Meets of the world, were never designed for what we are asking them to do. They were designed for meetings: scheduled, bounded, camera-on-or-off meetings, which they’re fine for. But “fine for meetings” is a low bar for something now so fundamental to our work lives.
What we actually need is spontaneous collaboration, the kind that used to happen in hallways, at whiteboards, over someone’s shoulder, and in the minutes after a meeting’s officially ended.
Of course, self-reported productivity boosts are one thing, but there are also valid concerns and well-intentioned pushes to return to office. Turns out, fully remote work also delivers hard-to-measure productivity losses. Professional networks can silo and mentorship opportunity fails to emerge. We get onboarding without understanding and connection. Remote workers must attend 50% more meetings just to stay aligned, which is maybe a hint that the tools are failing them.
The answer isn’t to abandon remote work. The answer is to build better infrastructure for it.
That’s exactly what Makedo does. We build a video communication toolset, VibeLive, that goes beyond the meeting. These tools let anyone, from individual vibe coders to stand-alone teams, create purpose-built collaboration spaces: persistent rooms, ambient video, spontaneous pairing, the digital equivalent of glancing across the office to see if someone’s free. We provide the infrastructure that lets any app have great video built in.
I’m a mathematician by training and I try to be a systematic thinker about productivity. My co-founder April brings a different and complementary lens. She sees the social and cross-cultural potential of frictionless video connection, the idea that a developer in Seoul and a designer in Toronto shouldn’t need to schedule a call to have a conversation. She’ll be writing here too, about that side of what we’re building. This blog is where we’ll post more details about remote work, collaboration design, and the gap between how people actually work together and what the current tools allow.
We have opinions, and we have data. We’ll try to clarify what’s possible now and where we’re headed.
Thanks for reading. More soon.
- Marty