Emdash – Slack/Zoom alternative for distributed team collaboration
Hi HN, I’m Phil, one of the co-founders building emdash. Previously, I was an early engineer at Facebook and led Customer Products at Square. We’ve focused on making chat and video work together so distributed teams can stay aligned without drowning in information. You can try it here: https://emdash.io. It frustrated us how easily important conversations would happen and then disappear. Slack never quite matched how we worked. Channels were too coarse which led to noisy notifications and broken search. Zoom meetings weren’t much better–unless someone took perfect notes (which…
Emdash – Slack/Zoom alternative for distributed team collaboration launched on February 26, 2025 with 80 votes, #419 of 5,999 launches that month and more than 95% of that year's launches.
In plain words
Emdash is a collaboration platform combining chat and video for distributed teams. It addresses problems with existing tools by automatically recording, summarizing, and transcribing conversations to prevent important information from being lost. The platform aims to reduce notification noise and improve searchability compared to traditional chat channels and video meetings, helping teams stay aligned without information overload.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hi HN, I’m Phil, one of the co-founders building emdash. Previously, I was an early engineer at Facebook and led Customer Products at Square. We’ve focused on making chat and video work together so distributed teams can stay aligned without drowning in information. You can try it here: https://emdash.io. It…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →
Interactive Screen Sharing in Slack2017 · slack.com · ▲759The next best thing to working in the same room
Dialogs by Slack2017 · docs.slack.dev · ▲396Build interactive forms in Slack that do all sorts of things
More work this month
the category →
Endless lofi beats composed live in your browser, over pixel-art nights in Paris, Tokyo, New York, Hong Kong, Sydney, San Francisco and more. Free, no sign-up.
Work · 25d ago · loficities.com
Smooth Recorder▲257Mac screen recordings that look edited when you hit stop
Work · 19d ago · smoothrecorder.com
Work · 13d ago · readrare.com
Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
Launched alongside, February 2025
the whole month →
Screen Studio 3.0▲1,832Beautiful screen recordings with instant shareable links
Growth · 2025 · screen.studio
- IG
I was at FB/Meta from late 2013 to early 2023, mostly working in the compiler/runtime spaces. I got hit in the spring 2023 layoff wave. I immediately started making games in my newfound free time (a lifelong interest, and I even worked in AA(A?) back ca. ~2000), and in October 2023 I stumbled upon the idea of a roguelike pachinko/plinko game inspired by Luck Be A Landlord. Things snowballed quickly, I started talking to publishers, then worked like crazy through all of 2024, almost the hardest I've ever worked in my career, and launched the game in December 2024. It's sold…
Work · 2025
i wanted to change the habit of reaching for my phone in the morning and doomscrolling away an hour so i built an app to help me. now i have to literally touch grass before accessing my most distracting apps the app is built in swiftui, uses the screen time apis provided by apple and google vision to recognise grass or not i'd love to get your thoughts on the concept.
Life & fun · 2025 · touchgrass.now