Our story—We’re a passionate group of people working from all over the world to build the future of collaboration.

Liveblocks first launched in 2021, but our story started a couple of years earlier when Guillaume Salles and Steven Fabre met and started working closely together on realtime creative tools.

They first connected when they were both working on the design tools team at InVision: Guillaume as an engineer and Steven as a product designer. They bonded at an in-person team event in San Francisco over being the only two French people in the company, and also their shared passion for making creative tools.

They eventually decided to leave their jobs to focus their efforts full-time on building a Google Slides competitor. The first several months were difficult. Guillaume was working from Montreal and Steven was working from New York, and they struggled to find a solution that would enable them to build a tool with the multiplayer functionality that was so critical. The tools they did manage to find had myriad problems. They didn’t integrate easily into their infrastructure, made it difficult to build a version history panel and multiplayer undo/redo, were optimized for text collaboration rather than layer-based creative tools and required them to cobble multiple services together in order to have something work end-to-end.

Eventually they decided to create their own. Along the way, they realized that if they were having this problem, other companies must be as well. And so they decided to drop the presentation tool, and focus on turning the powerful backend they’d built into a set of APIs that any team could use to build realtime collaborative products.

And that’s how Liveblocks was born.