Ex Facebook CTO Bret Taylor launches Quip, a mobile word processor

Among the wave of employees who left Facebook when the social network went public last year, perhaps the biggest exit was CTO Bret Taylor. At the time, he would only say that he was leaving to build another startup, but now we know the company’s name and the product it’s building.

Taylor, along with his co-founder Kevin Gibbs, announced the launch of Quip, a mobile word processor. The two claim that the app will allow you to “create beautiful documents on any device — phones, tablets and the desktop”.

Their mission with the company, they say, is “to create products for work that you actually enjoy using every day”. “We think your time at work should be composed of the same delightful, beautiful experiences you’ve come to expect from modern mobile apps,” they add.

Quip was apparently designed with four main design goals: collaboration, mobility, interactivity, and simplicity.

Anyone who’s ever had to work on a big project with a group of people will appreciate the collaboration feature. According to Taylor and Gibbs, “Quip combines documents and messages into a single chat-like ‘thread’ of updates. You can all edit the same document — no matter what device you’re on — and don’t have to bounce back and forth to email to talk about it”.

While Quip documents will work on the desktop, they are naturally best suited to mobile. Quip documents are supposed to automatically format to the size of your screen and can be edited offline, before syncing once you get online again.

The interactive features, if they deliver, seem pretty cool too. The two founders say that “you can turn a bulleted list into a checklist, transforming your meeting notes into a shared task list. You can @mention other documents to link between them. You can create a table of sales data, and your entire team can type data into the table at the same time”.

If Quip sounds like a fairly sharp challenge to Microsoft Word’s dominance of the word processor space, it’s worth bearing in mind that Taylor and Gibbs have much bigger plans.

“We are starting with the word processor,” they say “but our mission is to eventually build the productivity suite for the mobile era”.

Quip is available now on iOS, with an Android version reportedly in the works. Quip is free for personal use and a subscription-based service for businesses.

Look out for a review of the app on our sister site Gearburn in the near future.