Investing in Rewind

Today’s digital workplace moves faster than at any point in history. We can communicate and collaborate in real-time—and around the world—across text, voice, video, and documents. We can share massive files with a URL and access an unquantifiable amount of information via a search bar. And, yet, we leave a lot of productivity on the table. We’re constantly context switching our brains and the apps we use. Inevitably, we’ve all asked ourselves: “What was I looking at when I was in that meeting last week when someone was talking about the forecast. I know it was important and I wanted to come back to it…darn! I can’t remember”

Because, too often, when we want to revisit an idea, we can’t remember the finer details or where we read, saw it, said it, heard it, or shared it. Was that in a blog post or newsletter, or something a co-worker said in a Zoom meeting? I really hope it wasn’t in one of the 218 Slack messages I received today…

When we do remember where something lives or where it was spoken, we’re faced with challenges like subpar in-app search engines or, in the case of many informal meetings, whatever notes we hastily jotted down in a notepad or on a whiteboard. There’s not an organizational method in existence that can keep up and keep track of all that digital information.

Rewind is building a solution to this problem by locally (and privately) capturing what you see, hear, and say, and making it searchable—today, Rewind is launching a Mac desktop app. When you search for a given term, you see every occurrence wherever it happened, as well as what else was open when a given result took place (e.g. the part of the Zoom call where “west coast sales” was mentioned, as well as the dashboard you were viewing when that discussion happened). Because it utilizes automated speech recognition and optical character recognition, Rewind functions without integrations with other apps.

It’s very much like rewinding time or, as I like to think about it, experiencing the type of context-aware total recall previously limited to science fiction. And, in fact, Rewind couldn’t really do what it does without some engineering feats that would’ve seemed futuristic not so long ago. The application compresses tens of gigabytes of recording data into mere megabytes, and takes full advantage of Apple’s new chips to maximize efficiency and performance.

Tens of thousands of people used the original iteration of Rewind, called Scribe, to record and index their meetings, but cofounders Dan Siroker and Brett Bejcek had bigger plans. They wanted to augment users’ memory, something we all need due to advancing age or just the sheer quantity of information we ingest every day. The thought and work they’ve put into evolving Scribe into Rewind so far is remarkable.

We saw this vision and drive in Dan when we invested in his first company, Optimizely, and it made leading Rewind’s Seed round an easy decision. We’re excited to be part of its journey to maximize productivity by giving our memory a turbo boost. Give the future a try, and get the power to go back in time. Sign up for early access to Rewind today.

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