Joe Thomas and the feature that escaped the business plan

Joe Thomas and his co-founders had about two weeks of money left when they gave people a smaller piece of their idea. They had been trying to build a business around video feedback. What caught on was the part that let someone record a video and send it. The elaborate proposition had struggled. The useful little instrument inside it was suddenly being passed around.

In June 2016, the team launched that recorder as Openvid. Around 3,000 people signed up on its first day. For a company approaching the end of its funds, this was a persuasive argument for changing direction. Seven years later, Atlassian agreed to acquire the business, by then called Loom, for approximately $975 million. The distance between those moments can make the beginning look inevitable. It was a fairly uncomfortable place to live.

Thomas has described spending six months on a twin mattress on a co-founder’s floor. A founder’s title, it turns out, does not necessarily come with furniture. He, Vinay Hiremath and Shahed Khan were friends before they were business partners. That mattered when the work kept changing and the money kept leaving. They had a relationship substantial enough to survive an idea being wrong.

A degree in economics, a living in design

Thomas studied economics at Indiana University Bloomington, attending from 2008 to 2012. His route into technology included a useful detour. A friend taught him Adobe Creative Suite; Thomas began offering design work to local businesses, going door to door with help for logos, signs and websites.

Consider the education in that arrangement. A shop owner has something to sell and a limited appetite for someone else’s creative philosophy. The design has to explain itself. The customer has to see a reason to pay. It is practical training in the gap between what a maker enjoys making and what someone else needs.

Thomas continued with agency work after college, and a client, MediaPass, became an employer. His career then included product leadership at MyLife.com. Before he was running a company devoted to communicating work, he was doing the work of product management: bringing people, decisions and a roadmap together.

The three eventual Loom founders brought different experience. Thomas came from product, Hiremath from engineering and Khan from design. Their shared interest was video at work. They could see the ease with which people used video in their personal lives. The office still offered plenty of opportunities to type a long explanation and hope for the best.

The customers wanted to take one piece home

In 2015, Thomas, Hiremath and Khan began pursuing a video-feedback business. The original Opentest proposition connected people seeking feedback with expertise. It was a more specific application than the broad communication tool Loom would become. The team spent months trying to find the arrangement that customers would use.

The difficulty was instructive. Companies had their own people and their own sources of expertise. A proposed workflow could be sensible in a presentation and still be awkward to introduce into an ordinary working day. The founders were learning where their enthusiasm met someone else’s existing habits.

Inside the product sat a recorder. It could capture a screen and a speaker, making it possible to show a problem while explaining it. Users’ interest in recording outside the feedback process pointed toward a simpler proposition. Let the explanation stand on its own. Let the person sending it decide what it was for.

That shift enlarged the possible audience by loosening the rules. A developer could explain a bug. A salesperson could demonstrate something. A colleague could walk through a document. The same basic action served all three: record what you meant, then share a link. Nobody needed to adopt the entire original business idea first.

Openvid’s launch gave the founders a reason to keep going. Its reception also gave them work of a more encouraging kind: listening to people who were actually using what they had built. A successful launch did not finish the product. It supplied a much better set of questions.

A name woven from the replies

On January 16, 2017, Thomas introduced the Loom name. The rebrand followed surveys about how people used quick videos and how recording and sharing made them feel. The questions were personal enough to reveal something a usage chart alone could miss: a communication tool changes how it feels to work with somebody.

The replies helped the team connect efficiency with a sense of connection. Written messages could be laborious to compose. Teams working apart could lose some of the texture of being together. Video offered a way to preserve a voice, a demonstration and a little personality without arranging a live encounter.

The name carried two associations. A loom weaves separate threads together. The team also enjoyed a playful connection with communication faster than light. There was some ambition in the word, and enough brevity to survive being used in a sentence. Eventually, people would ask colleagues to send a loom. Naming departments can spend a great deal of money hoping for that outcome.

A company learns to use its own invention

Growth made the communication problem internal, too. By late 2019, Loom reported more than 1.8 million users across 50,000 companies. Thomas announced a $30 million Series B led by Sequoia. The plans included improving the foundations of the product and putting it in more of the places people already worked.

The company itself was growing from the small group that had built the recorder. It reached 45 employees in 2019 and 100 in December 2020. At that latter milestone, its team worked across 11 countries. Explaining decisions across locations was becoming part of its own daily operating problem.

Thomas’s stated priorities put people ahead of product, and product ahead of profit. In practice, that order asks difficult questions about whom to serve and whom to hire. Kindness alone does not answer whether a job fits someone. A compelling product alone does not tell a team which customer’s problem to tackle next.

He has described keeping notes and written priorities, and reviewing alignment with his co-founders. This is an appealingly ordinary detail in a story with large financial numbers. A company can have an ambitious mission and still need somebody to write down what matters this week. Memory is a charming colleague until it is assigned responsibility.

“Content scales, time does not.”

Joe Thomas

That sentence captures the appeal of the recorded explanation. A person can say something once, and someone else can return to it later. As an illustration, a colleague in another time zone can pause a walkthrough at the exact moment the cursor reaches the confusing part. The explanation acquires a useful independence from its author’s calendar.

The customer on day five

The first Atlassian employee began recording with Loom five days after its June 2016 launch. Atlassian later became the first company to purchase a license for every employee. Long before it was a buyer of the business, it was a buyer of the product.

Thomas also developed relationships with Atlassian’s co-founders, Scott Farquhar and Mike Cannon-Brookes. The conversations included mentorship. By the October 2023 acquisition announcement, Loom reported more than 25 million registered users and over 200,000 paid customers. On November 30, Atlassian announced the acquisition was complete.

Selling brought its own education. Thomas described unfamiliar legal terminology, negotiations and the value of investors who could guide him through the transaction. The prospect of joining a much larger company was accompanied by a rather specific personal adjustment: after eight years, he had a manager.

There is a dry comedy to that progression. Build a company, raise money, negotiate a sale, acquire a boss. Thomas’s account also makes the practical attraction clear. Atlassian brought customers and established products into reach. The interesting question became what Loom could do inside that larger system.

What happens after you press stop

By 2024, Thomas was leading product management for Loom within Atlassian. One part of his argument concerned the effort of sharing video. The recorder sent material up while someone was recording, so the finished message was ready to share. An inconvenient sequence of saving, uploading and distributing became a much smaller task.

The next extension was to make the contents useful elsewhere. At Team ’24, the product direction included turning video explanations into draft Jira issues and Confluence documents. A recording could become the raw material for another task, carrying its context into a place where a team could act.

In his outlook for 2025, Thomas described AI indexing recorded context and converting it into text, metadata and workflows. He was making a prediction about how teams might work, with video serving as documentation for both people and AI agents. The aspiration still began with someone explaining something.

It is a fitting continuation for a founder whose company emerged when customers wanted freedom to use one piece of a larger product. The opportunity keeps moving beyond the recording itself: first into a shared link, then across a team, then into another kind of work. Thomas’s original plan changed. The useful explanation kept finding somewhere else to go.