How Stedi achieves ‘productivity from anywhere’ with Rewatch

Every year, trillions of dollars flow through the B2B economy. But the systems powering these business-to-business transactions are complex, archaic, and hard to scale. Stedi is on a mission to radically transform the technological backbone of the economy with its flexible EDI platform.

At the helm, ensuring everything flows smoothly at Stedi, is Founder and CEO Zack Kanter. The fast-growing 58-person company operates 100% remotely, spread across 14 countries and 7 time zones. Scaling internal communication and productivity, while creating opportunities for connection and culture-building, has been no small challenge for Zack and his team.

“We were constantly having ‘you should have been there’ moments,” explains Zack. “Always wishing we could roll back the tapes.” With few opportunities for teammates to be together in real time, those who missed out on conversations were left playing catch up while never feeling like they got the entire context.

Zack and his team were eager to find ways to communicate and collaborate more efficiently and drive cross-company alignment without creating more meetings or more work. That’s when they turned Rewatch.

“Rewatch is a core piece of our cultural infrastructure that we use every day. It’s a change that happened almost overnight with the entire company getting tremendous value from the videos being shared.”

Scaling team communication across time zones

When time zones and schedules don’t line up for the team, Stedi relies on Rewatch to make sure nothing falls through the cracks. The company has even made it a policy that every meeting with more than two people has to be shared in Rewatch.

“When I first presented Rewatch to everyone, there was some hesitation about adding a new tool,” shares David Kanter, Growth & Customer Operations Lead. “Then a couple of weeks later, once folks were able to rewatch an awesome demo day they missed, everyone got it immediately.”

“Rewatch enables a different kind of serendipity. When you can record all the conversations that are happening, anyone at the company can be in two places at once.”

For a fully remote company that relies heavily on asynchronous communication, Rewatch even injected a little bit of magic into the workday. “As a distributed company, you wonder how to make up for the serendipitous things that can happen in person,” reflects Zack. “Rewatch enables a different kind of serendipity. When you can record all the conversations that are happening, anyone at the company can be in two places at once.”

And when colleagues are spread across 14 different countries, every minute spent in crossover needs to count. Having access to the same context as everyone else means Stedi’s team is adding more informed opinions to every conversation and using their precious synchronous time for the discussions that really matter.

Speeding up decision-making and increasing productivity

For a growing startup, few things are more important than enabling your team to make good decisions quickly. And that’s exactly what Stedi has achieved with Rewatch. Being able to skip to the heart of a meeting means everyone has the context and clarity they need—without the time-consuming back-and-forth.

“It’s funny how quickly Rewatch became an integral part of the culture,” says Zack. “I’ll be talking in a meeting and then think ‘I need to send this to one of our teams to watch later.’” Now the entire team at Stedi uses Rewatch to highlight key moments and share them with relevant stakeholders, so the right information gets into the right hands without delay.

Stedi’s engineers, in particular, love “attending” recorded meetings at 1.5x speed, at a time that works for their individual schedules. For Janelle Espinas, an engineer in New Zealand, Rewatch has enabled her to shorten feedback loops and speed up asynchronous decision-making. “You don’t have to be at every meeting,” she tweeted. “You just need to know the outputs and have enough context to add your opinion.”

Having Rewatch is almost like being able to work outside of the normal laws of time. “One huge benefit of using Rewatch for remote work is being able to consume reality in 33% less time,” reflects Zack. “Meetings at Stedi are no longer a four-letter word because they can be recorded and digested at the right speed at the right time.”

Enabling a remote-first culture

Distributed teams like Stedi’s have many advantages: they can work with the best talent from around the world and support more flexible work schedules. But are teammates missing out on important stuff because their dusk is another person’s dawn? With Rewatch, Stedi has put these concerns to rest.

“Before Rewatch, because a large portion of our team is spread throughout Europe, we’d have to schedule all our meetings in the morning otherwise people couldn’t attend,” says Zack. “That meant blocking off and interrupting a huge portion of everyone’s time.”

Zack realized he needed a better way to keep his team informed without having to force everyone to work on the same schedule. “We were always trying to fight the tension of people not being invited and having to repeat the same meeting again later or having people miss out on conversations that are important to their work,” shares Zack. “We were constantly making tradeoffs.”

“Today, if we’re in a meeting, the first thing people ask is, ‘Are you recording?’ Our team lives in Rewatch. It’s given them access to information like never before.”

With Rewatch, the tradeoffs have evaporated altogether. Now, everyone at Stedi has access to company all-hands, demo days, customer calls, and team meetings, all in one place and all at their fingertips. “Rewatch lets us put sharing on autopilot,” adds David. “We can automatically post new videos to Slack and people can easily consume the greatest hits from meetings, so they are always in the loop.”

Rewatch’s impact can be felt throughout the company. “We used to occasionally record meetings and throw them into Google Drive—that’s if we even remembered,” reflects David. “Today, if we’re in a meeting, the first thing people ask is, ‘Are you recording?’ Our team lives in Rewatch. It’s given them access to information like never before.”

Empowering a global team to work better, together

Distributed work is the new reality, and no matter where teammates live, they should be able to confidently and effectively participate in the conversations that make the business hum. For Stedi, Rewatch is the tool that's made all the difference in tackling communication and collaboration around the world.

“Before we started recording meetings in Rewatch, we’d often find ourselves asking, ‘What’d we talk about last week?’ Now Rewatch saves us from relying on our brittle memories,” shares Zack. “I can’t emphasize this enough—Rewatch is simply a better way to work.”