Author: carlosmorley

At CollabSystem we spot future trends when they aren’t even there. That’s why we are proud to announce the release on our White Paper on the Future of Play. White Papers are long documents in which experts ask a lot of questions, pose a lot of hypotheses and generally avoid committing to anything. That’s really the main problem with both the future and expertise, they are ultimately hard to pin down.

For the benefits of the readers of this blog and the many interested customers of CollabSystems, we thought it was worthwhile to share an executive summary of our Future of Play Whitepaper:

Sounds A Lot Like Hard Work

That’s it. That’s the whole summary. Thousands of hours of really expensive experts working on collaboration, consultation and community engagement with the best thought leaders, design thinkers, ethnographers, and other obscure experts and all we get is that Play Sounds Like Hard Work at some indefinite point in the future. We have to be excited about this conclusion, we paid a lot for it.

For those who like more detail, we wish the White Paper had it, at least in some kind of intelligible sense. However, underneath all the touch-feely design speak, the pop-culture trends and the marxist cultural critiques we have found the following key trends:

• Work is All Consuming – noticed that there’s a lot more demands than ever and work follows you on vacation, into the weekends and even into the shower?
• Work is Going Home – now that work has colonised your home, why not all your waking hours?
• Achievement is the Only Socially Valid Source of Satisfaction – nobody cares how much fun you have. They want to see your bucket list and CV worthy achievements
• Grinding Effort Against Impossible Challenge can be Rewarding – we are told
• People don’t get Paid to Play – valid point
• Children Playing Expands the Workforce – unwinding a bunch of illogical labour market red tape that protected them from exploitation, injury and death. If every is working all the time, we don’t need to worry about their future.

The combined influence of these trends is that we can see a great deal of pressure on individuals to play in ways that look like socially constructive work. Once people are doing socially constructive work for free somebody is going to work out how to make a buck out of it (After all penis-shaped space-adjacent rockets don’t come cheap). Anything that brings back the vulnerable childhood workforce is a good thing as far as the market is concerned.

So give up any hope of fun. Embrace the #futureofplay. There’s a lot of work to do to bring it to life for the billionaire platform owners of the world.

At CollabSystem we recognise HR Analytics is all the rage. Nobody does it. Everyone talks about it. So when we heard that our clients were struggling to determine just how many days in the week their employees should work from the office in a global pandemic, we knew that we could bring our fearsome HR Analytics capabilities to bear across our customer base.

So we asked an intern to look at the question: “How many days should employees work in the office?’

The intern came back surprisingly quickly. They said none. Apparently the question you ask is important to the outcomes you get from HR Data Analytics. The intern had fixated on the word ‘should’ and years of wasteful philosophical training led them to the conclusion that nobody should have to ever work. We agreed our intern shouldn’t have to work.

We all know that when HR Data Analytics fails to provide the right outcome, you try again. So we got a new less philosophical & more mathematical intern and asked a different question: “What is the average of the answer of our client organisations who have announced return to work policies on the number of days employees should spend in the office, excluding zealots who are working their employees to death and showboaters who say all their employees can work from anywhere?” We felt this question nailed the analytical problem most of our clients need to solve.

Now, Kate, our new intern, is a smart young woman who will go far. Before she began the complex and involved work on HR Data Analysis, and watching the other intern pack his box, she asked us a critical question: “Before I start this, I think we should have a hypothesis to test. What do you think the answer will be?” As founders of CollabSystems, we are sure in our in depth understanding of our customer base and answered two days without thinking at all and relying on that great entrepreneurial instinct called gut.

After an extensive period of analysis which seemed to take Kate far from our office and racked up a great deal of expenses, Kate returned with the answer. We are pleased to share it with you now:

Two days

That’s how many days a week your employees need to spend in the office to receive magical office culture vibes of collaboration, culture and serendipity. Industry is irrelevant. It doesn’t matter which days or who else is there. It doesn’t even matter what they do or what office they work in. Two days is the answer.

We interrogated Kate on her methodology but she pointed out that data analysis using machine learning can be a black box, particularly where the number of independent variables is high. We had to agree whatever she had done with her time and money, Kate now sounded like an HR Data Analyst.

After a while and the dangling of a permanent paid role, Kate revealed the foundations of her analysis. Sadly, this wasn’t based in some time and motion study of work patterns and productivity. It wasn’t underpinned by the changing nature of work, new technologies and the transformation to a knowledge economy.

The analysis was much more simple. Kate explained that there are five days in the week. Nobody wants to commute for a half day and Fridays were a write-off already. Therefore it seemed fair to everyone to split the difference at two days. Now your employees can spend two days on video conference at home and two days videoconferencing in the office. Friday is a casual day. Now that’s maths for you.

For safety’s sake, we went to check with a number of clients, influencers and other HR Analysts before publishing our results. Everyone agreed that two days seemed like the safest compromise answer with no basis other than it falls nicely between extremes. We met absolutely nobody who objected to two days unless they were five to seven day maniacs or zero day radicals. We then spent some time making Kate the Group Head of HR Analytics and reverse engineering a bunch of complicated maths to underpin the two-day answer. Two days it is.

So for any CollabSystem client pondering their employees return to work, the answer is two days, regardless of industry, role, workload or prevailing pandemic conditions. Two days. We can live with that (assuming we are vaccinated, wear masks and follow covid-safe protocols at all times)>

At CollabSystem we believe in being contrarian. When the world tacks left, we go right. When Google calls its employees back to the office, we still don’t know where ours are to be found.

We realised recently that there are too many posts on how to write a great blogpost that goes viral and makes your content marketing strategy fizzle like a post-hangover Alka Selzer. So we are going to share our five top tips on how to write a truly terrible post.

Step 1: It’s All About You

Nothing is more engaging than a massive ego fest. Unself-aware solipsism is so on trend right now. It is also massively revealing. The more you talk about yourself the more obvious it will be to everyone that you are a terrible person that they should avoid. Except they can’t avoid your posts coming in by email, social media streams and advertising including retargeting. You will be leveraging the power of blogging to make sure that everyone understands that you are a truly shite person. To achieve the highest level of blogging bring your whole self to it and express every vain and ill-considered thought that flashed across the inside of your skull. It is important in this to compare yourself to great minds and great entrepreneurs so use the post to put your thinking up against theirs for comparison

Step 2: Make Your Post A List

1. Nothing is more useful to people than a fucking list
2. Lists are short
3. Lists are scannable
4. Lists go viral
5. Lists don’t require complicated writing like narratives, logic or development of ideas
6. Lists don’t have to make sense or work
7. It is just a bloody list and you can even break the rules of lists and most people won’t care because they are sick of them
8. They stopped reading the list before point 8.

Step 3: Sell Your Shite Service

At CollabSystems we know that posts that sell services are the posts that matter most to our customers. Almost everything we write is a press release hidden inside a post. There’s nothing more important than the relentless assault of commerce. Don’t fall into the mistake of viewing a blog post as about sharing knowledge. Even the cleverest are just sneaky ads with hidden calls to action. Remember always be closing and check out CollabSystem’s great products as you do so.

Step 4: No Connection to Reality

Talk about Blockchain or NFTs. Discuss abstract technology that nobody will ever use. Talk about Stoicism. Allude to things that others don’t understand. Use big words that everyone needs to look up and the definitions only reference other big words or French post-modern philosophers who only use them ironically. Recommend strategies that would have actual humans scratch their heads. Whatever you do, don’t have your post relate to reality or human behaviour. Nobody reads a blogpost for practical strategies that they can apply in their work and life. Haven’t you read Goop. They are looking to be inspired by social media influencers who live so disconnected from reality they might as well be on Mars. We have some candidates to join you Elon.

Step 5: Be Repetitive

Ever read a recipe online and how it mentions that recipe name and ingredients over and over again in a long boring introduction that gets in the way of the actual recipe you want to read. That’s genius. That’s the highest art of blogging. That is called SEO. Use keywords. Repeatedly. Be unimaginative. Write about what everyone else is writing about. Try to hit the zeitgeist. Did I mention SEO. Use keywords. Repeatedly. Be unimaginative. Write about current events without adding anything to the discourse. Write about what other people are writing about about the zeitgeist. Logroll. The more on ontrend and unnecessary your post it the better. Use keywords. Repeatedly. SEO again one more time for good luck.

Step 6: Be Offensive Unaware

A truly shite post must offend those with a modicum of sanity and grace left. The simplest way to achieve this is to appreciate the role of luck, privilege and disadvantage in life. You might have been born on third base but it is essential that everyone hears your opinion about what it takes to hit a triple and a photo of your amazing car. Deny systemic issues. Use horrendously offensive stereotypes and violent, militaristic, colonialist and imperialist metaphors. Who cares about the system when your success is yours to celebrate? Influencerdom awaits you. Join Clubhouse and talk endlessly about how you understand success and that they all need to subscribe to your substack to learn more. Collect Patreon fees that you blow on champagne and caviar because your million dollar lifestyle makes it unnecessary for you to earn a living from your writing.

Step 7: Play By the Rules or Do. We don’t care. Neither should you.

You were counting the steps weren’t you? We went past the official blogpost limit of 5 because our lives are examples of unlimited greatness. Forget the rules of speling and grammar’s. Invent unnecessary neologisms in every post – we call them newologisms. Stop writing abruptly and leave people hanging because you never know how to finish a post. You don’t care about the reader so it doesn’t matter anyway.

The global expansion of working from home in the pandemic has raised significant complexity for IT Services departments. The most significant of these complexities is the absence of need for IT services. When in the home context, many employees discover that their complex work infrastructure, device and software issues are best solved by a eight year-old, either the employee’s own, a relative, or one on a Youtube tech podcast.

CollabSystem is proud to announce a solution to this IT crisis. CollabSystem Complex is CollabSystem’s Bring Your Own Home solution. CollabSystem Complex extends the kinds of security, device control, monitoring and other inconveniences of BYOD to the entire home office environment. This smart solution ensures that an employee’s own room is useless to them for work without expensive additional software, infrastructure and support services. BYOD has effectively preserved IT jobs & power when employees use their own phone or computer. CollabSystem Complex’s BYOH solution extends that intelligence to the whole of an employee’s home.

CollabSystem Complex is engineered to defeat the talents of a canny 8 year-old with a screen-time addiction. Complex security, identity management, device management, physical access interventions and encryption ensure nothing gets in or out of the home office. Monitoring and home office management ensure that nothing works without IT Support approval and engagement. Importantly, employees feel consistently surveilled in their own homes even in their most intimate after work moments. CollabSystem Complex introduces deep enterprise IT capabilities into a simple always-on easy to run consumer IT environment thereby guaranteeing incompatibility, integration challenges, bugs and system failures. IT professionals will be very satisfied with these industry leading enterprise outcomes.

Many have queried the equity of WFH. Not all employees have the same IT resources, space or other home environments. CollabSystem Complex reduces all WFH environments to the same standardised level of limited functionality removing any equity issues. We’ve achieved a low common bar inside the office why shouldn’t employees experience the same consistency at home regardless of wealth and social circumstances. To paraphrase one of our satisfied CIO clients why should employees have an technology Ferrari at home when they only have a Model T Ford at work?

Like any good BYOH solution, CollabSystem Complex extends well beyond the proper domain of work. CollabSystem Complex’s IoT integrations sniff important IoT data, interfere with personal assistant solutions on smart devices and can even crash non-smart devices like coffee machines, white goods and the homes entire electrical network with targeted electro-magnetic pulses. All issues requiring immediate rectification and support in a stressed pandemic-threatened home office environment. In particular, BYOH solutions ensure the printer never works when it is urgent just like the office.

With CollabSystem Complex, IT Professionals can rest assured that nothing untoward will occur in the home office environment. Users will still need lots of expensive IT support, services and infrastructure. With the home office environment managed effectively in a BYOH framework, IT Professionals can return to their usual challenge of finding a higher paying job elsewhere.

CollabSystem Complex: Because there’s no walnut you can’t crush with an industrial grinding mill and a thousand expensive employees.

Many clients come to CollabSystem after struggling with cloud migration of their critical business workloads. We offer solutions that no other vendor would consider. More importantly we offer a migration path that’s unavailable to other large enterprise vendors.

A recent discussion on Twitter around cloud migration captured in one tweet the secret of our cloud migration strategy – evaporation.

Most people understand that the promised transformation of moving to the cloud is a little overheated and that the process of transformation is enough to make the team steamy. We are specialists in delivering things that are intangible and likely to disappear at a puff of wind. We know that that steam is everything in a cloud migration. The more evaporation (of your money) the better your progress (for us).

At CollabSystem we aren’t afraid of getting ourselves and our clients in a little hot water. Well, honestly, we are a bit more afraid than some social media apps that are getting shut down for their sins. However, we have no fear of steam, evaporation and we literally are vaporware. We’ve never met a trendy hot promise we couldn’t make without the faintest idea of how we would deliver.

Trust your cloud migration to CollabSystem and we will guarantee your CIOs eyes become cloudy and you will be able to see the steam coming out of their ears. After all, if you can’t trust a software vendor who can you trust?

At CollabSystem, we know employee engagement is critical, especially in times of crisis. We are proud to announce CollabSystem Journey, the ultimate employee lifecycle platform.

The Journey is Important

Our best product ideas are based on deep customer understanding. We spend hours in our conference room frankly discussing our customers. Often in those discussions, we gather an insight that defines our next phase of product development. Some of those products actually work.

We have noticed four key themes recently in the discussions our clients are having:

• Employee engagement is important but nobody seems to know what it means or how to have it
• Our clients talk a lot about ‘journeys’, usually as an explanation as to employees as why things are so tough or aren’t progressing
• Employees at our clients have an employee lifecycle. We don’t know what that means, other than its another kind of journey, because none of them stay long enough to explain it. It is clearly unrelated to the human lifecycle, because it is way shorter and nobody ever learns anything.
• None of our clients can travel while the world is locked down in this global pandemic, so they can’t possibly be on journeys as they all work from home.

Combined with some CollabSystem product genuis, these insights underpin our confidence in the transformative potential of CollabSystem Journey, as an employee lifecycle platform to deliver employee engagement. CollabSystem Journey enables employees to become highly engaged in AI-mediated digital cloud-enabled experiential learning journeys to acquire blockchain enabled credentials that are worth about as much as most crypto-currencies.

Planning the Journey

For most employees onboarding is a bewildering experience where the promise of a role and an organisation dissolves into a bewildering series of compliance training, compromises, cultural clashes and disillusionment. We recognise that this is rarely an optimal experience.

CollabSystem Journey automates this process using AI and bots to ensure that nobody wastes any time disillusioning the employee and breaking their will to live and think independently. Our UI is perfected to maximise the confusion and the sense of fear of new employees, increasing the urgency of their engagement to work out what is going on. At the end of onboarding employees all wonder how they can keep their role when they feel so unqualified.

TentPlace

We struggled to find a term for the module that is the heart of CollabSystem Journey and supports the ongoing journey of all employees. First we wanted to call it Basecamp, but our lawyers said no. Then we tried Trailhead, but apparently that’s a cloud solution too. We considered SAP (for structured AI-mediated progress), WorkDay and dozens of other acronyms, time or journey related names, but it seems our competitors are well ahead in this space and we surrendered quickly.

The intern suggested Tentplace. We all laughed. Apparently it is available, so we assigned the intern the drudgery task of making the core of our application where most of employee time is spent. Like many of those other applications, it will feel like it has been designed by someone underpaid and unloved for those who are underpaid and unloved.

The intern had the genius idea that most travel these days doesn’t live up to the experience that others are having on Instagram. Our Tentplace module makes sure employees are always aware that someone is travelling further, having more fun and making more money. While they might be tempted to just sit back and scroll, employees will continue to receive helpful comments from their friends, family and colleagues as to how they could go further as they work. Like Instagram, we want employees to really wonder what they achieved with all the time spent, other than acquaintances they want to forget, a sense of frustration and unresolved envy.

We couldn’t be prouder of the intern’s work so we told them to take a hike.

Taking a Hike

Not every employee is suited to your organisation. Not every employee is up for the journey. CollabSystem Journey is designed with this in mind.

Employees who fall behind on the gruelling death march that is your organisation will be highly engaged in a careful designed experiential detachment program known as ‘the hike.’ When the journey is complete, CollabSystem Journey will tell them to take a hike and digitially remove any record of their existence from the organisations systems.

Many customers have asked about CollabSystem’s support model. When we finish laughing, we explain that our approach to customer support is based upon the best possible international practices and an unending commitment to cost saving. Ultimately, our support model is best described as ‘Lizard People All The Way Down.’

As a cloud solution, we have an approach to customer service that is best described as ambivalent just short of negligent. We’re so busy designing products that supporting them seems a waste of focus. As a result our primary model is self service but we didn’t build self service channels to save costs and because every dev team has to descope something.

Early in the CollabSystem journey we used human employees for support. Unfortunately, we found that they had a characteristic that rendered them inefficient. They cared for our customers more than they cared for our PURPOSE as an organisation. Even outsourcing then offshoring then outsourcing the offshore outsourcing to another offshore location wouldn’t solve this fundamental issue. People put care before PURPOSE

Now, we provide industry best practice support that delivers our customers all the support they need short of actual help. Our supremely qualified crew of lizard people have no concern for niceties of human emotion. They just want to get to dinner.

Of course, even an endlessly escalating stack of lizard people is not costless. They are rapacious eaters. Therefore we have implemented a range of chatbots, FAQs, user guides, customer communities, customer authentication protocols and other appealing digital support channels to divert, distract and delay customers all with the ultimate goal of surrender of the need for service. After all every unhappy flow needs an unhappy customer.

So if you have a need for support, reach out today. Once you get through the process to talk to the first lizard person, it should be about Thursday next week. We guarantee resolution of your issue promptly within 48 years of that point. Should we fail to resolve the issue please ask for escalation and again we commit to resolution of the escalation within 48 years. The great thing we’ve discovered is that properly fed lizard people seem to live forever or at least longer than our customers.

We have heard your feedback loud and clear. Nobody likes change. That’s why CollabSystem are proud to announce CollabSystem Normal.

In these uncertain times, we need to come together. Nobody wants to be dealing with the pain of change when we are dealing with the pain of everything else in life. We might have toilet paper now, but things are still far from comfortable. We know you want things to be normal again.

Not Too Little – the New Normal

Other vendors might try to sell you something dressed up for these time. Everyone is talking about the New Normal.

We can’t really keep up with these fads. What exactly is this New Normal? It’s something that involves work invading your home. Then you discover masks were bad idea because of shortages then a good idea to keep the economy open and now they are a bad idea again for some threat to our freedom. Just when you fall in love with background blur there are virtual backgrounds and Brady Bunch grids. The next New Normal is already being conceived in an abandoned WeWork by software bros fuelled by craft beer and craft coffee and funded by massive amounts of VC money, just like the Old WeWork. The problem with the New Normal is that there is always a whiter, brighter, newer Normal.

The New Normal is just an attempt to make you love the compromises life has forced on you. Your organisation didn’t resist flexibility, autonomy and digital work for so long just because it couldn’t make its mind up what to do in the face of a changing world. You managed your digital agenda on your own terms and your own time. Your CEO and CIO knew that all that mattered was being just like everyone else. You won’t settle for New Normal’s shabby simalcrum. You want it all to be a bit more normal and peer approved.

Not too Much – the Old Normal

Others might be trying to sell you a nostalgic version of Old Normal like they had back in the 1950s. Remember your grandparents stopped using Old Normal for good reason. It never worked for them. Like the non-inclusive, sexist, ableist, ageist & racist children’s book people gave you read as a child, it’s not as good as anyone remembers and looks pretty shabby now. It will feel seriously creepy and alienating to try to return to it. Plus you don’t want your neighbours to know you use Old Normal. They’ll either confess to being Old Normal users too and you might feel the need to move or they will smile at you with the thin lips they save for deranged bigots.

Just The Right Amount of Normal

We know you just want the classic traditional good value Normal that you are used too. CollabSystem Normal is delivered to you the way it always has been. It does what it says on the tin. Buy CollabSystem Normal and you will get the approval of all your peers. Nobody will point you out for comment or ridicule because your Normal is just like the socially approved official illusion of normality that is reinforced everywhere.

There are no confusing options, flexibility or adoption issues with CollabSystem Normal. You either can use it or you can’t. The latter users will be locked out if they try. Social exclusion is key to reinforcing standards of normality. CollabSystem Normal is not inclusive or accessible. The actual user it has been designed to meet is vanishingly rare and mostly a collective figment.

Start your journey to normality today. Sign up for CollabSystem Normal and you will be fine.

We’re sick of the posts about working from home. We’re a workplace technology vendor. We love working from home but world enough is enough. Everyone ignored the future of work for decades. Your boss thought working from home was time off. Now everybody can’t get enough.

We’ve decided to put some sparkle into your work. It’s not all Working From Home in a Deadly Global Pandemic (‘WFHIADGP’). This means you are now saved from yet another vendor post giving you meaningless drivel about why you need a new solution, why you should take up our free offer or how good we are at our pandemic response.

Bringing the Sparkle

At CollabSystem, in our rush to deliver vapourware, we can lose sight of the joy of work. If you find it, can you point it in our direction.

That said, we all work for a reason, even if that reason is that we need something to do with Wednesday afternoons (major hump day drags in our offices). At CollabSystem we work for PURPOSE. Ours is not just a single capital Purpose. Ours is an all-caps PURPOSE. It’s big and it’s bold and it’s all-caps. Our PURPOSE is our hope for the future. Our PURPOSE is our reason for being and all that we do for our clients. Having an all-caps PURPOSE is what brings the sparkle to our work and lets us keep it. Are we doing this right, Marie Kondo?

How good is working with families?

Families, hey? We all have them. Being home is a great opportunity for us to reconnect, reengage and share our work with our families, if only they wanted more of that. Unfortunately, a side effect is exposure to our families’ work. Who knew that life being work 24×7 for everyone in the family would bring such community, joy and hope in the collapse of our economic system and way of life? Nothing brings us more joy than trying to manage family life while we hose down the latest crisis at work, in our partner’s work and in the household whitegoods.

We all have parents, partners, ex-partners, kids, ex-kids now adults that never leave the house or leave and only come back for cash, food or laundry, that cousin who loves to share conspiracies on facebook, pets or a complete hatred of all of the above. Being home reminds us minute by excruciating minute of the joy that comes from our relentless love and eternal war with our families. At this time CollabSystem would like to especially acknowledge the love and adoration of pets (who doesn’t love pets? Apologies to all the cat owners out there who are coping with cat bland indifference). We would also like our relatives to stop emailing us the viral chain emails. We have enough. We work at a global technology vendor, just getting to a workshop involves a multi-party distribution list debate.

We all long for the simple sparkle of great droning long presentations in a quiet conference room with doughnuts. We long for IT support. We long for the ability to leave our workplace. We long to claim expenses. We long for the clang Of security gates. How good is stationery. How good is regular pay. How good is work? We didn’t realise how good we had it.

The magical feeling of relentless work in a crisis

If you’ve ever been in a chat, reading a document, finishing a presentation, while taking a phone call, while on a conference call about an email that you forgot to read because you were reading the news and trying to understand a message on Twitter, then you have discovered the sparkle of WFHIADGP. There’s no reason to stop working. Forget waking at 5am, just never sleep.

There’s no end to the stimulation, even before coffee. There’s no where to go, nobody to see and nothing to do. At CollabSystem, we know that work is the best way to prevent yourself from realising the existential meaninglessness of life. You too now have a PURPOSE. Yours is all-caps now too. Job done we gave it to you. Is that the right thing to do, Marie Kondo or did we make a mistake in sharing our sparkle?

You can take that sparkle to the kitchen table you now use for conferences. At work you might have leading edge AV equipment, but at home you have sparkle if you push the mess a little to the side.

The good news is that soon the work will end. Hopefully we can all go back to the fun we used to have at home. We can do work in our beautiful offices with fancy security gates on the bandwidth that never ends. Then the sparkle will last forever.

Are we Caffeinated enough?

While at home we need coffee, lots of coffee and even more coffee. Whatever issues your work brings you in this troubled time, add sparkle to your life with more coffee. We hug our coffee mugs to our chest every day just to feel the joy.

As a global technology company we run on caffeine. We aren’t talking the instant stuff. We are talking fancy cold brew dripped for hours with iced water using single origin beans that come from a mountain a long way away and have been roasted by someone with a beard and tattoos. Time out to make coffee is one of the only acceptable breaks from work and life when working at home. We’re heading out to harvest the beans soon and don’t expect to see us back any time soon.

If the excess of coffee has you wired, stressed and barely sleeping, then you are almost caught up with the rest of us. The alertness that coffee brings will make you better able to ignore the news and win the battle at the supermarket for precious supplies. It’s such a good thing you emptied out all those cupboards in 2019 as part of the last craze, isn’t it? There’s now more space for coffee, toilet paper and alcohol. Once upon a time we only stockpiled work stationery at home.

We miss the barista who makes coffee near our office. We can’t wait to get back and rediscover her sparkle.

Thank God It’s Friday

The great thing about being at home is the ready supply of alcohol. Who knew we would miss the absence of anything like an HR team to stand in the way of our substance abuse issues? We find alcohol to be a barely acceptable coping mechanism at the best of times and its definitely a great anti-social lubricant for those in isolation.

With our global technology expertise, we have come to to an understanding that it’s always Friday somewhere in the world. So celebrate the sparkle of your work and enjoy your Friday. Tomorrow is another day of working from home on the weekend. The days do tend to blur a little online. Then again that might be the lack of sleep, stress and alcohol.

Wash Your Hands

Our legal department told us there had to be some useful advice somewhere in this article. Here it is: wash your hands. Wash them until they sparkle and keep doing it. Good luck and stay safe.

At CollabSystem, we have been reading the rush of new advice to founders on the money making opportunities in a downturn. We are always up for a quick buck so we thought we’d add our own perspectives and pleas for cash.

Firstly, ‪we apologise for all previous attempts to present a satirical alternative. We now realise reality has us beaten. Comprehensively. ‬Nobody could outcompete the absurdist reality. We were foolish to try.

However, disappointing performance and tough economic times are no reason to give up. We are all about the future of work and we know that the future is accountability free. Rather than face the harsh reality of our failure we will adopt the two key strategies for any startup in a downturn: pivot and raise money.

Many people with a lesser grasp of modern VC economics talk about recessions and hard times as time to get close to customers, improve economics and focus on fundamentals of execution. What terrible advice. Haven’t they heard of the importance of social distancing? We are desperately trying to get as far away from our teams and customers as possible. Only a pivot and new cash will truly enable that.

The Pivot

The key thing about our pivot is that it is not important we know where we are going now. It just needs to be different and involve exponential growth. We briefly considered a pivot to healthcare but we discovered it involves expertise, work and people, three of our least favourite things

We are still working on the exact execution but we now view our pivot as developing the best platform for the social transmission of information through networks. We believe there’s plenty of exponential growth left in rumours. we expect to be the least reliable most urgent source of news. We are currently analysing the viral characteristics of your second cousin’s Facebook feed, Fox News and 4Chan for insights to power our hockey stick growth. We’ve already noticed that each of these platforms has a heartening lack of accountability. Our kind of business.

The Cash

Any good hockey stick demands you focus on fund raising. creating the hockey stick in excel basically demands it. We can’t wait for the feature where as soon as you enter the assumptions in the spreadsheet the money arrives.

Anyway, we have dragged our founders out of their lassitude and have sent them out to do a dog and pony show with VCs. Unfortunately nobody gives you a meeting in this era of social distancing. In the old days people were nice to your face and said no later. Now they don’t even see your face.

As a result they are presenting online 24×7 in the vain hope money arrives, just like a presidential candidate and for about the same amount of money. If you wish to support our raise read our IM but more importantly click the donate now button or text ‘Take my Money’ to 13GONE4GOOD.