Andrew Milich, Co-Founder and CEO at Skiff chats about the growing importance of digital workplace platforms in this quick-chat with MarTechSeries:

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Welcome to this MarTech Series chat, Andrew, tell us about yourself and more about Skiff, what inspired the platform and how has it evolved over the years

Thanks for having me! Skiff is a privacy-first, end-to-end encrypted workspace with Mail, Pages, Calendar, and Drive products for communicating and collaborating. I’ve been an engineer my whole life; privacy and the movement to own your own data has deeply connected with my personal beliefs and time studying international security at Stanford, in Europe, and in Asia.

Skiff has evolved from being an end-to-end encrypted, secure collaboration product to being a comprehensive private workspace, including email, notes, wikis, file sharing, scheduling, and much more. In the future, we want to be Skiff to be an intuitive, easy-to-use, and beautifully designed workspace that protects freedom, privacy, and security.

Why is it crucial for businesses today to focus on providing employees and distributed teams with more secure or encrypted communication/collaboration channels and tools? Can you share a few thoughts on how Skiff helps here.

On Skiff, no one else has access to your work – your emails, notes, files, and calendar events are end-to-end encrypted. This is not true of every other productivity product today, including the Google/Microsoft work suites. Our products are intended to accompany every secure practice an organization takes – using Signal for messaging, building in anti-phishing and cybersecurity protections, and training employees to be security oriented.

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What thoughts do you have for the future of digital workspace platforms; how will they need to evolve to suit changing market needs?

Digital workspace platforms are not just necessities for tech companies – they’re now the infrastructure for every business.

Given this global shift towards remote work, one of the biggest changes is how different types of collaboration and work are becoming integrated. Spreadsheets, wikis, notes, emails, and calendars are all integrated, combining multiple products together and making a seamless product to get work done. We’re seeing this shift in startups, incumbents, and big tech all at once.

Can you talk about some of the ways you’ve seen global leaders build digital workspace models/frameworks for distributed teams and what key takeaways other brands should keep in mind from these highlights?

Teams have become increasingly distributed and focused on asynchronous communications. Three tips that have been critical for the Skiff team are:

1. Prioritize asynchronous meetings – Writing updates, using documentation, and creating reminders for people to review each other’s work.
2. Automate security – Chose products that are secure from the ground up. We’ve seen customers rethink their operating systems, browsers, email products, collaboration products, password managers, and more as they’ve faced a vast threat landscape, from phishing and malware to insider threats and leaks.
3. Be transparent about growth and financials – Particularly in the tech world, explosive growth followed by turbulence has led to frequently fluctuating market conditions. We’ve seen successful leaders stay focused on outcomes and be transparent with their teams.

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What do you feel about the future of the B2B tech industry?

I am incredibly excited about the future of the B2B tech industry, particularly as each sector seems increasingly competitive and distributed. Legislative antitrust attention and lower barriers to entry are creating more competition in both B2C and B2B, as new search engines, browsers, workspace products, spreadsheet products, and B2B fintech platforms are started. Crypto and AI – two huge areas of innovation – are fueling many of these levelling innovations. So, I see incumbents facing increasing competition across the tech industry, which keeps me quite excited about the future of B2B tech.