Why is this necessary when there are already many examples of successful remote companies that don't need to constantly watch and listen to their employees?
I totally understand and agree that there are a ton of awesome remote companies that were able to do it with mostly async communication.
We built Sidekick for the subset of newly remote teams that actually need to be in the same room to get their jobs done (certain types of cofounders or operations teams). The product itself actively discourages any sort of "watch and listen to employees". All communication is bidirectional -- if I can see you, you can see me.
We're totally in the same boat that we would never want Sidekick to be used as a monitoring tool -- it would go against the DNA of our company.