Better communication has always been the mission

We started by studying how people talk to each other. Face-to-face conversations, meetings, team dynamics. We wanted to understand why so much communication goes nowhere. We built tools to improve 1:1 conversations, then meeting quality, working with academic researchers to ground our approach in evidence.

The deeper we got, the clearer the pattern: the problem isn't how people talk, it's what happens after. Decisions made in meetings that nobody writes down. Action items buried in email threads. Commitments made in Slack that evaporate. The gap between "someone asked me to do something" and "it actually got done" was filled entirely by human memory and manual effort.

We built an AI Chief of Staff to monitor communications and surface what matters. The concept resonated, but people live in their inboxes, not in task managers. So we pivoted. this+that reads across email, Slack, Teams, Google Chat, and Telegram, so the comms tools your team already uses stay the same and the work that comes out of them surfaces in one place.

Today, this+that reads your messages across channels, extracts the work hiding in them, and helps you act on it: it turns messages into tasks in your DoBox, runs the workflows that handle them, and keeps a Brain that grounds every answer in what your team actually knows. The mission hasn't changed. We're still making communication work better. We're just doing it where the communication already happens.

"Better conversations for a better world." That was the mission when we built a talking stick, a tool for 1:1 conversations. It was still the mission when we built a tool for better meetings. It is the mission for this+that. The shape is different now: let AI handle the work it can, so people are free for the work only people can do.

Most weeks have a hundred small jobs that do not need a human. Emailing a colleague the document. Answering a pricing question. Replying with the FAQ. Fixing the small bug a customer reported. this+that handles those. Your team gets the rest of the day back for the work that needs them: solving hard problems together, bringing different perspectives into the same room, making something nobody could have made alone.

The 80-year Harvard study behind The Good Life found that the strongest predictor of a long and healthy life is the strength of your relationships. Shallow work crowds that out. When a hundred small tasks are handled for you, the gain is not just the hours saved. It is what those hours allow you to do.