What is Whereby all about?

From a technical perspective, its premise is simple. It’s a video conferencing service that works straight in the browser on a phone or laptop. There’s no app or software to download – just a simple click. Our focus from the outset was to remove the friction around getting people on a call quickly.

Culturally, Whereby is on a mission to give people the freedom to work and live where they thrive. It’s about flexibility. About enabling people to set up and run meetings from anywhere. Employees are happier when they have this kind of flexibility. And happy employees are productive employees. We don’t just believe this is important to our customers, it’s fundamental to how we have built our company.

Can you describe your growth path?

We were born global. In just four months following our launch, we had customers in 175 countries and have since grown the business organically. Our task has been to build a sustainable business, taking us beyond a purely free product to one that companies will pay for. Following our rebranding in 2019, we anticipated that our approach to flexible remote working would take three to five years to become mainstream. And then COVID-19 happened. In February last year we had 25 full-time employees and now nearly a year later we have more than 80. We went from employing just four nationalities to 23 working in 17 countries, from Bali to San Diego!

How did you manage this sudden growth from a recruitment perspective?

All our hiring has been done remotely since March last year and it has worked really well. It wasn’t a shock for us because we’d set ourselves up to handle remote onboarding several years ago – it was our vision and reflects Whereby’s raison d’etre. We’ve always wanted to feel our customers’ pain so that we can help them. That’s why our first use case was ourselves. We are a fully flexible remote team spread across 12 countries and use our own technology to enable this distributed model.

Hiring remotely has also given us access to candidates we might not have been able to reach. Our VP of People and Talent Jessica Hayes has been at the forefront of helping clients and candidates adapt to the concept of remote recruitment. In a recent blog, she wrote:

“Being able to recruit from everywhere totally changes the game in terms of the opportunity to invite new backgrounds, histories, languages, ethnicities, cultures, and perspectives into your teams.”

How have you funded your growth?

Our VC funding is one of the best around. It has given us the confidence to build ambitious growth plans and our investors, Point Nine Capital, continue to push us to go further than we otherwise might have. There is currently a lot of investor interest in Whereby, but we are just focusing on the next phase of our growth. We have the basic organisation design principles in place to manage this growth and are working on how to take this forward in a post-pandemic world, with new revenue models, new talent and new products.

Tell us a little bit about these new products?

With the pandemic forcing people to move their businesses online, we’re focused on building products to help them work better. We had already begun this process with the launch of Whereby Embedded in 2019 – our API for embedding video meetings in a website or company app. We originally had just one salesperson selling it because it was so new but from March 2020 we were flooded with enquiries about the product. Fortunately, our parent company was able to move sales support across from another business to help us out while we brought our own sales team up to scratch.

We are still reinventing our products. For example, we’ve added new functionality, such as collaboration features like the Miro whiteboard. 2021 will be a year of continued innovation and at the core of this remains user value through product simplicity. It’s one of our differentiators. Our plug and play products are designed so that your grandmother can use them. This has been especially important during lockdown.