444-Pankaj Tibrewal

Will Bachman 00:03

Hello and welcome to Unleashed the show that explores how to thrive as an independent professional. I’m your host Will Bachman and I’m here today with Pankaj Tibrewal. I’ll say that we are doing this episode as a video episode. So if you’re just listening, you may want to look at your phone because Hong Kong is going to screenshare He is the founder of a tool called board. That’s b o r d board comm it’s the whiteboard together at the speed of thought. Unlock your team’s potential with a collaborative workspace for problem solving, brainstorming and storyboarding. That is their slogan, Pong cause, tell me about this tool that you have built.

Pankaj Tibrewal 00:48

So first off, thanks for having me will really appreciate it. So we’ve been bored to essentially help with three things. One is to just problem solve on a whiteboard that I got used to doing at McKinsey. Second is to create an outline for a presentation together with your team. And third, is to actually mark up a PowerPoint if you only have one.

Will Bachman 01:14

Okay, cool. So I definitely can experience the need for all three of those things. Why don’t we start, we got the whiteboard, show me here, why don’t you show us a little bit about some of the things that we could do if you’re maybe used to working on a whiteboard together, but now people are working remotely. Or it’s just more convenient for your team to work remotely, show us some of the things that you can do on the whiteboard.

Pankaj Tibrewal 01:41

Sure. So first off, you can draw and write very, very easily. So just two shortcuts. So press and hold D and move your mouse. And you can start drawing, double click anywhere you can start typing, that’s cool. So just with these two shortcuts, you’re able to, you know, write and draw very, very quickly. Things that you draw frequently, you can just highlight and save in your library. We have lots of other templates and stuff that you can use from the library and symbols, you can do the usual things like you know, shapes, postades, images, and so on. That’s the first thing. So easily draw and write together, you can also do it on the iPad, and the experiences saved. So you know, I could draw on my iPad, and do everything else on the computer.

Will Bachman 02:49

That’s super cool. Alright, so you can combine the two, right and can like multiple people be logged in. So if I were logged in right now to board comm, I could be collaborating with you on this, on this, what you’re drawing.

Pankaj Tibrewal 03:03

Exactly. And you will see everybody else’s cursors on the screen. Gotcha. You could point to things. So that’s the first thing. Second thing is you could see, you can create a grid of multiple pages. And you could say that, hey, you know, my first slide will be topics. Suddenly, I’ve lost my ability to type. The topic. Second will be let’s say, you know, customer segmentation. And third will be let’s say the cost structure, right? So you can storyboard together, you can, you know, draw on it as well, you know. And finally, you can actually, you know, import a presentation that you’re already working on, okay. And then once you have this here, you’re able to add slides, delete slides, move the slides, and then work on your sort of v2 of the presentation. It’ll show up in just a second. So there you go. So now you have all these slides, you can move slides, you can, you know, mark up the slides, so on and you can add new slides in between.

Will Bachman 04:17

Okay, so how is this different than a tool like ones that I haven’t used a whole lot, but I know that some people use for collaborative work, you have mural and Bureau? How is this what’s How is this use case different or capabilities of this tool different?

Pankaj Tibrewal 04:36

So there are a couple of differences. One is, Miro and mural are infinite whiteboards and require a little bit of a learning curve to get comfortable with. Second, the use cases that they’re targeting are slightly different. So if you need a big whiteboard where you put a framework together maybe a product roadmap, maybe a phase plan. So what Or a few people will put it together with a lot of work pre before the meeting. And then, you know, if you invite, let’s say, 10 people, they are all essentially putting post it notes and moving them around. So for that kind of engagement, you know, mirror and mirror are both wonderful tools. But for spontaneous collaboration, drawing and writing, and working on presentations and outlines, an infinite board has not really helped there. So that’s the reason we have this concept of pages and grid rather than infinite code,

Will Bachman 05:34

right? It’s more of a, like a tool for management consultants that are working to put a deck together is what you’ve all right? And how is it different say that just getting on maybe Google Slides together? Where you could have multiple people logged in at the same time working on different slides? Like how is it kind of different from that?

Pankaj Tibrewal 05:54

So the main difference is the ability to draw and markup, it’s very difficult to have five people drawing together where you can see everybody else’s cursors what they’re pointing at what they’re drawing, both on PowerPoint and Google Slides, you know, those are very difficult to do. Alright.

Will Bachman 06:13

So if a consultant was listening to the show, was interested and using or calm, is there is is there a pricing plan for it? Is it currently free or talk to me about if someone wants to check it out, use it.

Pankaj Tibrewal 06:33

So currently, the whole product is free, we will eventually have a freemium model where some of the features will be under the paid plan. You know, for instance, the ability to record a session replay a, some some security, like, you know, single sign on and so on. So once we launched those features, they’ll be under a paid plan. But we plan to offer all the capabilities to our early users for maybe one years or two years. So they can use it, the unlimited version of it.

Will Bachman 07:02

Okay. And how do you imagine people using a tool so people could log in synchronously or asynchronously and draw stuff together? But then they’re not hearing each other? So do you expect people to be doing kind of what we’re doing, I’m doing a zoom call together. And then, instead of sharing the screen, like we would each be looking at our own board, Comm. Login. So we can hear each other talk while we draw eyes at the idea.

Pankaj Tibrewal 07:31

Yeah, that’s the idea. So people are on a zoom, you could either share your screen or not, you could also share some other screen like presentation or some other screen while you’re working on this. But you could have a browser open with board and you can see where everybody else is at.

Will Bachman 07:47

Gotcha. Maybe you can show us now. Like, let’s say that you want to invite me to collaborate with this? What’s that look like?

Pankaj Tibrewal 07:56

So you just click on the share, Link? Yep.

Will Bachman 08:01

Copy later. copulate. All right.

Pankaj Tibrewal 08:03

And one of the ways you just populate it, put it on chat here,

Will Bachman 08:05

why don’t you Why don’t you put it in chat? We’ll actually do this for real. Yes. All right. So this is a this is real time people. This, we’re seeing if this works. All right. Let’s see. Whereas

Pankaj Tibrewal 08:15

you’d have to use your Google login right now. And it’ll make you do like two quick steps before you can jump in. Copy Link.

Will Bachman 08:22

And let me see if I can paste this here. All right. Oh, no. Okay. Like all this is, this is real time podcasting. This is, this is great. All right. So we’re going now I copied the link. And I’m going to go ahead and paste it into my browser. Copy that. So then I need to sign in with Google. Okay, I’ll sign in with Google and sign in. Alright, so now I am signing it. Alright, here we go. So let’s see a few tips. It gives me some tips to get started. Yeah. Gotcha. Next, all right. So now I’m able to look at this. So I’m able to say like, Here I am saying, will, will, that’s my name. And I’m saying let’s do a I would if we do something like this we do. It’s typical, you know, let’s do a little chart here. I’ve drawn my boat chart. And then underneath that by by type this, then I can start typing just double click, double click to type Yeah, and then say like, first phase. Alright, so this is real time, real time listeners. Or I’ve not used this tool before. And I do a D Ctrl D now just start typing.

Pankaj Tibrewal 09:54

Just Just hold it and move your mouse to draw.

Will Bachman 09:57

I see hold. Gotcha. Don’t start typing, I just do it. Now we can type in second phase. So super easy to learn how to use, you can see that I just learned how to use this tool myself, right? So and we’re now collaborating. So you can see me drawing a boat chart, typing in first phase, second phase, and so forth. So very quick to get started. And this would be so you could get on a zoom with your team start editing things together. And I can imagine, I’m sure you have all sorts of ideas on how to integrate it, I can imagine one nice, like, tie up or partnership, would we with a really capable PowerPoint production firm. So you could say, now that we’ve sort of done our hand drawn stuff, handed off to a firm that does PowerPoint production, and then get them to turn it into finished pages for you or like to make all the edits that you just drew on your page would be kind of neat. All right. That’s cool. And then let’s see if I go to this, if I go to, so I’m looking at the board, I just see what you’re showing, right? So you’re like the presenter. But if I click on a grid, then and I click on a different page, does that show up for you? No, you’d have to show up on the nodes that I’m showing up, right?

Pankaj Tibrewal 11:11

So what you would do is you’d go to the three dots on the top. Yep. And say bring others to my page.

Will Bachman 11:17

Oh, I see. There we go. bring others to my page. Okay. So here’s my page, and I tried to draw like a little drawing on top. So if I just draw right here. Okay, gotcha. That’s very cool. So, now, Pankaj, are you currently at the point where you’re still kind of beta testing and looking for feedback from us? Yes.

Pankaj Tibrewal 11:36

Okay, definitely. That’d be amazing. All right.

Will Bachman 11:40

So listeners, we’re going to encourage you to check out this tool. And how can people give you the feedback on Cause if people want to check this out, they like it, but there’s some features missing that they would really like to see how what’s the best way to contact you?

Pankaj Tibrewal 11:59

So they can write to me at Pankaj mo.com but they can also click on this bottom right here and send us a message it will come directly to me.

Will Bachman 12:09

Alright, fantastic. So check this out. It looks like a useful collaboration tool designed for management consultants by management consultant by McKinsey law, punk, gosh, timber wall and board comm where you can sign up for free. Check it out. Send Pankaj some feedback. He would love to hear it. Prakash, thanks for joining today. This is great.

Pankaj Tibrewal 12:36

Thank you so much for having me.

Will Bachman 12:38

My pleasure. All right. Thanks for listening and do go to board comm v o rd comm check out this collaboration tool that Prakash is building and send him some feedback. How can you get better