Like a drink of water in the desert.
That’s what it felt like to me when I got to use Quip for the first time.
By 2013, when Quip first launched, we were all well into the mobile age — phones and tablets ubiquitous in our lives. The stuff of mobile dominated our lives — messages and photos and tweets and likes and shares. But the way we did our work — core productivity — remained pretty mired in the 30 year legacy of Microsoft Office, or the more modern, but still desktop web oriented Google Docs.
Then Quip launched, and it was immediately obvious how natural it felt everywhere I wanted to work — just as simple on my phone as it was on my desktop. It felt good and usable and useful everywhere.
Which was no surprise, really. In 2012, Kevin & Bret first shared their breakthrough insight: There was an opportunity to rebuild the core office productivity suite with modern, mobile native sensibilities and capabilities — real time messaging, collaboration, automatic synchronization — across all screens.
They were right, of course, and Quip immediately found a place on the screen of every device I use for work.
If that were the whole story, it would be a strong product with a ton of potential. But what makes Quip even more compelling is that it not only feels immediately natural and appropriate for how you want to work, but also transforms the way you work over time.
In Quip, documents are central, of course, but so are people. My coworkers and collaborators can see the work that I publish, and contribute. Writing this now, in fact, I’ve just shared it with my partner Elisa, who will get a notification on her phone, swipe right, and then will join in and start making this post better. Both in real-time together, but also asynchronously.
The more you use Quip, the more real-time collaboration becomes a part of your process. When you you lower friction to participate and communicate — just like our mobile phones have done in the rest of our lives — interactions get richer, documents get better, and cycle times get shorter. It’s magic that way.
At Greylock, we started using Quip years ago. It’s very hard to remember how we worked before Quip — it’s been that transformative to how we work together. We’ve observed that in other Quip customers as well — adoption starts in small groups, and quickly grows because it improves collaboration everywhere.
Quip has a chance to be the core productivity tool for a whole generation — something that everyone in a company will use every day.
It bridges extremely well from the systems that people have worked with for decades like Office, to the mobile, connected, collaborative future we all know will soon be everywhere.
We were very happy to be investors in Quip’s Series A, and we’re ecstatic now to lead their Series B. Quip’s a company, and a team, and a product, with the potential to transform the way we all work, and we’re very happy to be part of the journey.
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