Nooks set to seed its own in the world of virtual HQs –
Summary
After operating in beta for a year, Nooks, a virtual workspace space targeting distributed teams, has attracted thousands of users and millions of dollars in venture capital. The financing signals yet another cadre of investors betting on a company within the world of virtual HQs, a cohort that includes dozens of startups that believe distributed employees are ready to graduate from Zoom and into “metaverses” built with productivity and gamification in mind. There’s a “whisper feature” that allows peers to talk to each other during a presentation, virtual sales floors where Nooks creates leaderboards of top sellers and co-working spaces to promote cross-pollination of ideas. As the pandemic fades in parts of the world, startups like Nooks will need to figure out ways to adapt to the return of hybrid teams after a long stint of mostly remote work. It’s one of the realities that make hybrid work so hard to pull off at scale: Equity suffers when a group of employees is positioned as more important or prized only because they can travel to an office.