What a face company does when nobody gathers
Three months into the pandemic, with no conferences on the calendar. What we're trying, what we decided not to build, and how it feels to run a startup whose market disappeared.
In February I wrote that our entire business is people in a room. By the end of March there were no rooms. Every event on our spring calendar was cancelled or postponed, and nobody knows when large conferences come back. The most optimistic organizers I talk to say fall. Most say next year.
So here’s what three months of that looks like from inside a small company.
The first month was triage. We cut costs hard, talked to every customer about postponements instead of cancellations, and made sure we had enough runway to survive a long gap. Everyone took some kind of cut. It’s the least fun part of being a founder and the part nobody writes about.
The second month was a lot of inbound interest in things we don’t want to build. Once lockdowns started, we got asked about fever screening with face recognition, crowd monitoring, contact tracing by identifying people on camera, and matching faces against lists of people who were supposed to be in quarantine. Some of these came from well-meaning organizations with a real problem. We turned almost all of them down. Thermal cameras don’t reliably detect fever at a distance, and most of the rest would mean identifying people who never agreed to it, which is the line I’ve written about here for two years. A pandemic makes the argument for crossing it sound reasonable, which is exactly when a line matters.
The third month has been about what we can honestly offer. The thing our system does well is let a known, consenting person prove who they are without touching anything or standing close to another person. That’s useful in more places than conferences right now: access to offices and facilities as they reopen with fewer people, visitor check-in, places where shared keypads and pens have suddenly become a problem. We’re running a few pilots. They’re small. I have no idea yet if any of them becomes a business.
I’ll be honest about how it feels. Some days it’s energizing, because constraints force clarity and the team has been great. Some days it feels like we built a very good key for a door that’s been bricked over. I spend a lot of time thinking about which parts of what we built are specific to events and which are general, and I’m less sure of the answer than I’d like.
The one thing I’m sure of is that the decisions we make now about what not to build will matter longer than whatever we ship this summer.