My friend and I were working on a tool for this when the pandemic started and our jobs went remote. It was a fun exercise and we learned a lot about webrtc and audio/video APIs. But we noticed there was a new startup every other week raising some funds to do the same thing and working much harder than us on the problem. Finally, Slack announced “huddles” and we gave in to the fatigue we had with some peer negotiation issue & dropped the project. Now, 2 years later, none of those tools have blown up. I feel pretty confident that tools aren’t the solution to the missing pop-in; culture is. Teams that want this capability have been figuring it out one way or another just like this example. Even myself: a decade ago I would work one-on-one on something and we’d sit in a Skype call, both muted doing our own things, music playing, but able to poke the other with extremely low friction. It was great. Nowadays with hybrid work and the momentum of in-person culture, I think a lot of people are unable to appreciate remote work as much as possible. IMO the pop-in can be an important part of the remote puzzle.