About the team

AI is giving technical teams superpowers. That's exciting. It's also where most of the energy is going right now, so we don't think that's where the largest need is. We believe the biggest gap is with non-technical teams. The people running IRL operations, where the work doesn't always happen at a desk and every decision has real personal costs. They've been the most underserved people in software for a long time. We want to change that.

The barriers are finally coming down. Software has been unfriendly for non-technical teams not for lack of effort, but because building it well has always been hard. The technology has been there for a while now. The engineering to make it actually fit how these teams work hasn't. Pulling unstructured data into something usable. Connecting a dozen disconnected tools. Keeping workflows moving without a human pushing them. Each of those has always required an engineering team most of these companies don't have. AI is finally bringing that barrier down, but there's still so much more work to do to bring it even lower.

Here's the picture we're working toward. It's like a multiplayer game. The map is the data: everyone sees the same terrain, the same objectives, the same status in real time. The voice chat is the conversation: calling plays, flagging trouble, making decisions on the fly. You need both. A map without voice chat and nobody coordinates. Voice chat without a map and nobody knows what they're looking at. The best teams play with both at the same time. We want every team to get to play like that, humans and agents, all on the same map.

We've spent our careers building communication and collaboration software at companies like Instagram, Slack, Pinterest, Roblox, Quip (the productivity software), and Character.AI. We've shipped to billions of people, and we've watched the same pattern hold true at every scale: even at the world's most sophisticated software companies, real coordination still happens in spreadsheets, group chats, and someone's head.

If that's true at the top, it's ten times truer everywhere else. We're going to fix that.

Join us

Popcorn is based in San Francisco, with our own IRL people scattered across SF, Oakland, Amsterdam, Japan, and Kansas. We're a group of computing and productivity geeks who love pickleball and tennis, walking meetings, popcorn puns, and the question of whether “popcorn” should be a verb.

Interested in joining? Get in touch.