GoInstant

For Adam, no day at GoInstant is a typical day. “Sometimes I don’t know what I’m going to be working on, but whatever it is, I know I’ll be working on something I enjoy.” But it’s more than just work – it’s a learning opportunity that he hadn’t been able to find previously, even as a manager at his old employer. At GoInstant, “I’m constantly learning something new. It’s great not to be pigeonholing myself into a comfort zone.” He calls it his favourite part of the job. “It’s really important from a computer science background – to constantly be figuring problems out.”

And the worst thing at work? “Not finishing something before the end of the day.” Adam wasn’t expecting to have a job where he felt like that, but he believes there’s something special about GoInstant. “If you’ve ever had the feeling of being really passionate about a project you’ve worked on, take that and apply it over a grander scale, all the time. That’s the way I feel here.”

As the CTO of GoInstant, Gavin’s charged with managing the development of the technology behind GoInstant. He leads the team across the roadmap, trying to build as much value as possible. More than anything, Gavin believes that the GoInstant team is behind a significant shift from how most people look at the web. “Fundamentally, GoInstant is a method of communication. The use cases for any communication technology are sort of endless, so the challenge of identifying use cases that you should focus on is pretty exciting.”

Like anything truly revolutionary, it’s no small project. “The web is fundamentally a single user interface – it’s been designed for one person to navigate. And we’re taking the web, which is this wild complicated place, and we’re throwing multiple users at it at the same time.” To build GoInstant, the development team has needed to invent new solutions, new concepts, and new perspectives on the most familiar communications medium of the 21st century. To put it briefly, this isn’t just another browser. It’s a whole new way of interacting with the web, and with other people.

Dave’s in charge of building and scaling our QA processes. It’s not an easy task. “Everything has to be tested on any number of paths,” and as GoInstant grows, those paths grow exponentially.

Because of the complexity of the development and QA processes at GoInstant, it helps to have a truly dedicated team. “That’s what you need in a startup: you need everybody to keep fighting through every single roadblock they face, every single day.” By hiring the people who are most passionate, GoInstant has been able to tackle the huge project of building a multi-user browser. “Other browsers have the luxury of sending and receiving and replaying events the way that the browser is meant to, but we have to unify that experience technically across all browsers and then make it work in GoInstant.”

For Dave, life at GoInstant is incredbily different from his previous nine-to-five jobs, “where no one’s motivated to win and go forward.” He notes, “That is so destructive to people’s creativity and motivation and everything. And especially for people like us here, who all want to contribute to something … we’re all motivated and proud to make this better and better every day.”