242. Tech Tools: The Power of Showing, Not Telling

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: This Tech Tools miniseries is brought to you by Prezi, the presentation tool that makes your ideas easy to follow, hard to forget, and faster than ever to create with Prezi AI. The best investment is in the tools of one's own trade. At Think Fast Talk Smart, we are taking this quote by Benjamin Franklin, the famous US inventor and founding father, very seriously. As you know, our show strives to share tips and techniques to help you hone and improve your communication and careers. These practices and approaches can be augmented with tools and technology.

[00:00:36] I'm Matt Abrahams. I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to this Tech Tools miniseries of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. In this multi-part miniseries, we'll introduce you to tools we use at Think Fast Talk Smart to help us be better at our spoken and written communication. And you'll learn best practices from the founders who created them. Taken together, we hope these communication tools will help you find new ways to think fast and talk smart. I'm excited to speak today with Joe Thomas, who's one of the founders and the CEO of Loom, now part of Atlassian. Well, Joe, welcome. Thanks for joining me.

[00:01:16] Joe Thomas: Thank you so much for having me, Matt.

[00:01:18] Matt Abrahams: Some of our listeners might not know exactly what Loom is. Can you share what your product is using the elevator pitch structure that I teach to my MBA students, what if you could, so that, for example, and that's not all.

[00:01:33] Joe Thomas: Certainly. So what if you could record a quick video showing your screen, including a camera bubble, where the video is instantly ready to share, to communicate complex ideas with anyone anytime, so that you can save time, reduce misunderstandings, and build stronger connections with your team, no matter their availability or where they are in the world. For example, with Loom, instead of typing out a long note to explain a project or walk through a slide deck live in a meeting, you can record a video for your team to move work forward. Over ten million Loom videos are shared per month. And that's not all. Loom utilizes AI to transcribe your video and auto draft a relevant title, summary, chapters, and action items, including helping you polish the video, removing filler words and silences so you can communicate even more effectively. No video editing skills required. 

[00:02:27] Matt Abrahams: That was very well done in that structure and very clear. I'm curious, what led you to create Loom?

[00:02:33] Joe Thomas: When we were starting out in 2015, myself and two co-founders, what we observed was that video was everywhere in our personal lives from a consumer landscape perspective. But when we would show up to work, video recording and sharing was nowhere to be seen. Where I was working at the time, we were still using Microsoft Outlook for emails. Slack was just starting to become a thing. When we looked at what the existing software and offerings provided, it was really complex to use. You would record a video, it would save a local file on your desktop. You had an app to upload it to Dropbox or Google Drive.

[00:03:13] By the time you were ready to actually share a link, it had already been twenty, twenty-five minutes, and we felt like there was a ton of latent potential within this space to bring video recording and sharing to the workplace, based off of the fact that consumer behavior tends to leave the enterprise. Now, to be clear, we had a core thesis of bringing video to the workplace. But from November 2015 when we started building to June of 2016, so nine months, we had a couple major pivots about how we would apply it and bring it to the workplace. But ultimately, what we've built, and what we've been building against now for nine years, is how do we enable more people to use async video as part of their core communication?

[00:03:50] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for that. And one of the big powers of what you've created is that it is asynchronous. You don't have to be in live connection. Many of us, thanks to the pandemic, are very familiar with synchronous communication, but the tool allows you to do this asynchronously and provide very specific videos for people to leverage. Now I know beyond just really thinking about bringing video to the enterprise, you spend a lot of time thinking about how to integrate videos into our work life and our workflows. What best practices have you learned that can really help people be more effective at integrating video into what they do?

[00:04:25] Joe Thomas: It's funny 'cause in listening to this podcast and other episodes, I feel like a lot of things end up being consistent in terms of what is good ways to use asynchronous video. And one of those is, you already talked about it, which is show, don't tell. I think one of the things about Loom is that ninety-three percent of videos that are recorded on our platform, they have a screen component to them. They're not just talking heads. And that allows people to show their work, not just tell about it. There's also, keep it concise. We actually have a feature on our free tier of loom that is a five minute limit, and we have had a lot of people talk about the fact that it should be a paid feature to implement a recording limit. And then the third thing that I think about is being authentic. The thing about recording video and sending it is that you can watch it back. You can hear your own voice, you can know the stumbles and say, I can rerecord that. I might be able to do it better.

[00:05:20] But in a meeting, you can't go back, in a face-to-face conversation, you can't go back in time, right? And so just be authentic and lean into that authenticity. And that's what really resonates and builds trust with people. And the last thing that I'd say with async video is that even though we're bringing consumer behavior to the workplace, it is still a new skill for a lot of people to record and share video as a form of communication. And so just think of async video as a skill that you can build and develop over the course of time. We actually have had many users and customers write into us that they started using Loom and because it was the only consistent way that they've ever heard themselves played back, that they've improved their communication as a result of just clicking play on themselves, no matter how painful it is, because pain is gain. And so just think of async video as a skill. 

[00:06:14] Matt Abrahams: Taking the time to watch yourself is perhaps the best way to improve communication skills. And with a tool like yours, it allows you the opportunity to try slightly different variations and compare them literally side by side so you can see how that looks different. I tell people this is like going to the dentist, and I do not mean offense to anybody who is a dentist. My uncle was a dentist. A lot of us don't like going to the dentist, but we're super glad we went. Some of what you're talking about is exactly that. Take the time to record yourself, watch that recording. As Joe said, it is a skill and it is a skill that you can develop. All athletes watch their videos, coaches use those videos to help the athletes. It's a great skill. The notion of focusing on showing really valuable. I think it's fascinating that over ninety percent of the folks that use your tool have something else on the screen besides just them. That shows you how much people are using it to show. Being concise and clear. I love that you have a feature, I wish we could build that into everyday interaction. Wouldn't that be great? And then finally, be who you are. Be authentic. You don't have to put filters on and be somebody or not when you do this. That authenticity matters.

[00:07:21] Joe Thomas: Before we end, I'd like to ask you two questions that I'm asking everyone who's part of this miniseries, who is a communicator you admire and why?

[00:07:30] This is gonna be a basic answer in the sense that, look, Steve Jobs I, I think he is undeniable, but I wanted to call out not just his keynotes. I think that the recordings that I'd go back to on a very regular basis are the informal Q&As that he's done with Apple employees, where I find it really fascinating to study those. And Mike, the CEO of Atlassian does something very similar to Steve in our town halls where he'll pause and he'll really think about an answer for ten, fifteen seconds, which seems like an eternity, right? But that allows him to shape the communication in his head such that it is thoughtful, but it is also not skirting around what the real answer is, like the no BS answer. And so I feel like Steve Jobs was truly excellent at that. 

[00:08:25] Matt Abrahams: Many of us, when we think of Steve Jobs, we think of those big keynotes or the amazing address he gave at Stanford's graduation many years ago. But in fact, he was also pretty expert at the Q&A piece. And that's where I really think the rubber meets the road because you can prepare and practice and have a lot of help in those planned communications, but in those on the spot moments, that's a lot harder. Second and final question. Beyond Loom your tool, what is one communication hack or tool or shortcut that you use personally to help you be more effective? 

[00:08:57] Joe Thomas: So this one is probably more for managers and leaders, but when I actually adopted it, it was incredibly helpful for me in order to reduce my anxiety in communicating with a team. It's a framework called do, try, consider. A lot of times when you're communicating things to your team, especially if you're in a position of authority, if you don't frame what your message is to them through, do, try, consider, they're all gonna take it as gospel. Like, we need to go off and do this. So when somebody finally introduced to me three years ago, this, do try, consider framework, it actually radically changed my ability to share feedback in a higher volume while also knowing that I trust that it's not gonna be misconstrued on the other side. So, do in this scenario, is used extremely rarely, at least for myself personally, which is I have extremely high conviction on this. I am asking you to do this, right? Like this, this isn't a try or consider.

[00:09:53] Try is if it's a design concept. I'm not saying that this is a thing that we're gonna ship, but I would love for you to experiment and tinker with the designs in this way, and then we can come back and have a conversation about it. And then consider is used eighty to eighty-five percent of the time, which is just, hey, this is a random thought. I think it's relevant, but I don't know. You're the owner of your work and you need to take it as like just another data point relative to all of the other things that you're considering. And so that was a huge communication hack for me as a leader, is making sure that I communicate whether this is a do, try, consider to make sure that something that was a consider wasn't taken and come back three months later and I'm like, oh no, I forgot I even said that. 

[00:10:35] Matt Abrahams: I really appreciate not only you sharing that, but also teaching that to us. And you're right, many leaders when they will say things, people take it as a do, when in fact it was meant as a try or consider. It's the preamble that you give to your comment that helps people understand this is a try, this is a consider. And the fact that we look at our thoughts as leaders and even colleagues, I would argue as either do, try, or consider, helps us to frame and makes the communication more clear for the recipient. Joe, thank you. You know, when I think about it, a lot of what you're about is helping make things clear and easier. We are a visual species. Seeing things helps us a lot and Loom, as a tool, is really helpful for us doing that. Thank you for your time and thank you for sharing your insights and background story of the tool. 

[00:11:20] Joe Thomas: Matt, thank you for creating this podcast in the first place. So, so helpful, and thank you for having me on.

[00:11:28] Matt Abrahams: Thank you for joining us for one of our communication tools episodes of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. Please be sure to listen to all of the episodes in this miniseries. We appreciate Prezis sponsorship of these episodes. This episode was produced by Katherine Reed, Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With special thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Follow us on LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram, and check out fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Please consider our premium offering for extended Deep Thinks episodes, Ask Matt Anythings, and much more at fastersmarter.io/premium.