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…
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 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 rarely happened), video calls became black holes of lost knowledge. We spent too much time trying to find the information we needed to do our jobs. To address this, we’re testing a few concepts and would appreciate your feedback on the value of the following: (1) Automatically record, summarize, and transcribe your team’s video chats. We store meeting content directly inside discussions to facilitate search and discovery. (2) Make it easy to manage & organize conversations of varying scope. A chat between team members can be forked into a dedicated Discussion with its own audience permissions and subscription. Individual messages or entire Discussions can be moved after the fact. Conversations can evolve unpredictably, so having the right tools to keep them organized post-hoc was important to us. (3) Improve search with AI and hierarchical information retrieval. We use LLMs to uncover insights, summarize content, and connect the dots across related discussions, meetings, and documents. You can ask questions like “What are the team’s priorities this week?” or “What did we decide to do with feature X?” and get back a generative response AND deep links into the original chats and meetings. Try it out: https://emdash.io and tell us what you think!
More work this month
the category →
The app store for voice native apps that lives in your notch
Work · 28d ago · voiceos.com
The New Calendly▲211Handle all of the work before, during, and after meetings
Work · 17d ago · calendly.com
Launched alongside, February 2025
the whole month →
Screen Studio 3.0▲1,833Beautiful 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
- IB
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