We believe work should be fun. We believe teams are at their best when individuals in them thrive. When they feel deeply connected and tightly aligned with their teammates. And when they are empowered to let their inner singularities shine through. If you’ve ever been on such a team, you know that special feeling, that magic when things just click. You get to be in flow. The team gets to be in flow.
Yet finding flow has become so hard at work. The constant barrage of instant messages and their tacit expectation of immediacy have made us shy away from deep meaningful work. It has become harder and harder to actually get things done.
We’re building Upstream because we think something is fundamentally broken in the way we work today. 10 years ago now, Slack took the world by storm and introduced us to a new way of connecting with our teams. It brought transparency and fun into our daily communications, but somewhere along the way, we lost control. We’ve built habits imposed on us by a product built to reward our subconscious like a slot machine. And now we’re stuck with them.
Chat never stops. The never-ending flow of chit-chat keeps burying key action items. No one knows who’s in charge of what. We keep dropping the ball. Context is non-existent, discussions never get closed, and finding anything that is more than two days old is seemingly impossible. Where did we discuss this again? What decision did we make? What was the reasoning? Our teammates spend their workdays reading, trying to pick up signal from the noise, rather than moving the needle on what matters. Why has it become so hard to get more than 15 minutes of focus time?
We believe that our tools shape our relationship with the world. And we must shape our tools in a way that makes us act consistently with our best intentions. We’re building Upstream as a place where teams can stay connected and make decisions more effectively, while empowering individuals to maintain control of their time.
“Why email?”, you might ask. We hear you. Email has got a bad reputation these days. We all think of it as a clunky inbox that we fall behind on. Something we need to clean up, not care for. A place where we need to be formal and polite rather than show up as our authentic selves. A tool that creates silos rather than bringing transparency to our teams.
But it doesn’t have to be this way. Email is the de-facto language of business. It’s not going anywhere. We all still have an email address, we all still check it every day, even if briefly. Granted, it’s a bit old and rusty, but who has meaningfully invested in it? Email is in dire need of a full makeover.
We’re building Upstream as a modern email client, so that you can manage everything in one place. But we think of it as something much larger than email. We're crafting a full-blown collaborative experience: introducing fun, transparency, and connectedness on top of a 40-year-old protocol. We’re building it as a place where teams can get clarity of mind as a group, while letting individuals maintain control and focus.
We’re on a mission to help all teams maximize their potential. If you’re excited about this future, get in touch with us. We’re handpicking a limited number of partners to help us design the first version of Upstream.