Today, we are excited to announce our investment in Jam, a tool that brings Google Docs style collaboration to a live product/website. With Jam, you can comment on, or soon even suggest a change to your live product, from within the product itself, turning your live product into an all-encompassing workbench. 

Jam’s mission has inspired a fantastic investor base to come together for their $3.5m seed round. We are fortunate to invest alongside Union Square Ventures, BoxGroup, and Village Global, along with some of the top product and engineering angels including Jason Warner (CTO of Github), Matthew Prince (CEO of Cloudflare), Sahil Lavingia (CEO of Gumroad), Andrew Miklas (former CTO of PagerDuty), Jamie Wilkinson (former CPO of Kickstarter), Josh Elman, (board member of the best social apps like TikTok, Houseparty and Discord), and Dane Knecht and James Allworth (executives from the innovation and incubation team at Cloudflare).

Yes, there are many collaboration tools out there. But here’s why we’re particularly excited about Jam… 

Covid-19 has accelerated an already growing shift toward remote work. Now more than ever we need better collaboration tools, especially in the production environment (i.e. reviewing the app/staging/branch before it goes out). What’s great about Jam is that it brings all the out-of-the-flow communication happening in tools like Jira and Slack into-the-flow.

At Version One, we have a core belief that technology can transform the world. However, if we are going to positively change education, healthcare, climate, etc., we first have to arm our builders with the best tools to unlock the power of technology. Essentially, we need to build for builders. For some more context on this, see the email I sent to Dani Grant and Mohd Irtefa, Jam’s co-founders, right before we invested. 

Dani and Irtefa are two incredible examples of mission-driven founders. They’re ex-Cloudflare teammates now creating the product they wished they could have used while building parts of Cloudflare – one that reduces the time required to coordinate fixes so that we can focus on delivering delightful products faster. And that’s Jam. 

If you’re interested in learning more, Jam is officially launching its beta today, so get yourself on the list! And if you’re impatient like me, I have a few beta codes so tweet at me with why you’re excited to use Jam and I’ll give you one!