After working for Facebook for six years, Threads CEO Rousseau Kazi is now competing directly against his former employer. Threads

Rousseau Kazi worked for Facebook for nearly his entire career. Kazi went to work as an intern for Facebook when he was 19 and later graduated early from the University of California, Berkeley so he could join the company full time. He was with the company for six years, working across various teams, including the groups that worked on Pages, core mobile infrastructure and search. Throughout that time, Kazi collaborated with his colleagues using Facebook's internal version of its social network, which is now known as Workplace. But Kazi said there were features he wished Workplace had to fit his workflow. That is why Kazi is now launching Threads, a start-up that will be directly competing against Facebook's Workplace. "Workplace and Threads are superficially similar," Kazi told CNBC. "We have a similar core product, but Workplace is more like Facebook. It feels like a social network. Our product is built from the ground up and designed for work teams in mind." Threads is a workplace collaboration software that is designed to help companies have thoughtful discussions and make decisions through online conversation.

Threads

The San Francisco start-up launched publicly on Wednesday and is entering a crowded field that includes Microsoft Teams, Cisco Webex Teams, Google Hangouts Chat and Slack, which is preparing to go public. But unlike Threads, these productivity services place an emphasis on real-time conversation. That's why Threads' most direct competitor is Workplace, a service launched by Facebook in late 2016. Workplace, which is used by the likes of Walmart and Starbucks, focuses conversations around employee posts, just like the consumer version of Facebook. These discussions are not happening in real time. They are asynchronous, as Kazi describes them. And Threads, Kazi said, is better suited for these types of work conversations than Workplace by Facebook. Threads has a few features that Kazi said will make the service stand out. Specifically, Threads users have a context bar that shows them how many of their colleagues have read a conversation or intend to weigh in. Users can mark a conversation for follow up, adding it to a list of items to respond to. And after everyone on a team has weighed in, users can highlight a specific comment as a decision, broadcasting to their team the conclusion of their virtual meeting. "Workplace is more inspired from Facebook, which was deliberately designed to help you connect with your friends and family," he said. Threads "is deliberately designed to help growing teams have discussions and make decisions."

Threads