When workers return to offices, Around CEO Dominik Zane thinks they’ll need a new way to talk with their teammates both who stay remote and who head back in person. Too little communication, and they’ll feel second-class; too formal a chat – say, a scheduled Zoom meeting – will wear everyone out.
Zane would know. The Slovakia-born cofounder has spent much of his life online, collaborating on hobby projects and web apps with friends in Germany, U.K. and the U.S. as a teenager using Internet Relay Chat (IRC), and later launching M.dot, a service for small businesses to manage their mobile presences, before selling it to GoDaddy in 2013. For the past five years, he and his cofounder in that business, Pavel Serbajlo, and a third cofounder, Matt Zakutny, have looked to turn those insights into a new way to work.