Mapping Workplace Collaboration Startups

The companies are all part of the rise of knowledge-sharing startups meant to make work more organized and collaborative — an area of particular interest for venture capitalists.

Consider the cascade of specialized productivity apps (not suites) over the years, like Evernote, Wunderlist, Any.do, Todoist, Trello, Clubhouse, Basecamp, and the list goes on. Many of these are stable businesses, but they all claim a small piece of a large pie (and one could argue, were not great VC investments from a multiples perspective). The ... See more

But I do know that as the boundaries of life and work become more porous and businesses transform into webs of interrelationships between people, we need software that takes new assumptions about group structures to heart.

Productivity and collaboration shouldn’t be treated separately. Instead, they should go hand in hand and that’s exactly what a lot of the latest productivity tools do: Figma, Notion, Airtable, etc all have messaging natively built in to their apps.

So many tech companies have the same problem that Jason did at Apple, MightySignal, and Instacart: it’s hard to grow efficiently when critical knowledge is siloed in outdated docs, back-and-forth emails, and worst of all—in people’s brains. Remote work makes it even harder to deliver, measure, and recommend necessary learning to those who need it.