:::

In Slack is becoming a full messaging app, David Pierce breathlessly wrote about Slack’s allowing direct messaging across the ecosystem of users:

It’s [texting] the highest, most elusive rung of the business communication ladder, and it’s exactly what Slack wants to replace.

[…]

Connect DMs mean that, in theory, Slack can be the only place most employees talk about work. If that happens, it creates a powerful growth engine for the platform, because using Slack no longer requires any kind of organizational buy-in. A freelance designer might use Slack to talk to all their clients, or a salesperson at a Slack-free company might use it to talk to Slack-using partners. Slack’s best move has always been to worm its way into a company a few people at a time, before the bosses catch on and pay up. Now all it takes is one.

Or a troll could send threats to someone they hardly — or don’t — know.

No surprise then this blew up in Slack’s face since they hadn’t considered the larger implications. In Slack backtracks after ‘DM anyone’ feature set up users for harassment, Jack Morse explores the mess:

The latest addition to Slack Connect, announced Wednesday, aimed to “replace email outside your company” by letting users send direct messages to any Slack user, anywhere. There was just one, rather large problem with this lofty goal: Many Slack users didn’t want to receive DMs from anyone, anywhere, and feared the new service included the potential for abuse.

After some consideration, it seems Slack agreed.

“After rolling out Slack Connect DMs this morning, we received valuable feedback from our users about how email invitations to use the feature could potentially be used to send abusive or harassing messages,” Jonathan Prince, Slack’s vice president of communications and policy, explained over email. “We are taking immediate steps to prevent this kind of abuse, beginning today with the removal of the ability to customize a message when a user invites someone to Slack Connect DMs.”

In order to DM anyone, users were first prompted to send an invitation email to that person. Which makes sense, in theory, except for the fact that the invitation emails from a Slack email domain could contain custom — and potentially threatening or harassing — text. And because those emails would be coming from Slack itself, they would be more difficult to block.

“Anytime a platform decides to create new and unexpected linkages between its users, trust and safety considerations must be worked in as part of the design,” Jackie Singh, a former senior cybersecurity staffer in the Biden campaign who was personally targeted last year in a social media-tied doxxing campaign, explained over Twitter direct message. “The way this feature has been released does not indicate sufficient thought was put into the user experience at scale.”

Other potential Slack users shared their concerns on Twitter.

“My first reaction to this news was ‘oh, another way men can harass women on the internet,’” wrote the Wilson Center’s Nina Jankowicz. “Did @SlackHQ talk to ANY women before rolling this out?”

Snap.

:::

General Atlantic leads $145 million financing round in Staffbase | Intranet and engagement platform Staffbase has announced a major round of funding, led by General Atlantic, and joined by existing investors Insight Partners, e.ventures, KIZOO, and Capnamic Ventures. This follows closely on the acquisition of Bananatag, Canada’s leading internal communications solution.

Dr. Martin Böhringer, Co-Founder and CEO of Staffbase commented on the raise:

Our vision is to unite all of a company’s employees through strong internal communications and a shared mission. To bring this about, we provide managers and communications specialists at enterprise companies with the leading digital platform for successful employee communications — a platform that we are expanding very rapidly. The partnership with General Atlantic will further help us achieve this and accelerate our growth, especially in North America. The strong local team and the expertise it provides are decisive for us.

Regarding the Bananatag merger Böhringer lays out a vision:

Our customers’ communicators and leaders report unprecedented engagement rates and a new culture of “togetherness” at their organizations. I have visited many of our customers to learn more about the impact of our platform on their companies. I quickly came to realize that we are more to them than just a new communications channel.

In the same way as society at large, the companies we work with are facing increasing division, contradicting opinions, declining trust in authority, and a diminishing common denominator. These companies need unity now more than ever in the midst of radical transformation and global uncertainty. Change is everywhere and it’s happening fast.

The number-one leadership task in organizations today is to find a common goal and to get people excited about it. Given the diverse audience they are tasked with uniting, this is a gigantic task.

Seems like they are following the trends in what was formerly called intranets but which is increasingly focused on employee experience (see Microsoft Viva Changes Everything).

:::

Airtable Tops $5.7 Billion Valuation On Growing Enterprise Sales And A Soaring Cloud Market | Steven Bertoni reports on a massive $270 million series E round:

Howie Liu, the cofounder and CEO of cloud software start-up Airtable, has raised a $270 million Series E round at a valuation of $5.77 billion.

Neil Mehta of Greenoaks Capital led the round, which included a first-time investment from Jeffery Katzensberg’s WndrCo and earlier investors Caffeinated Capital, CRV, and Thrive.

More than doubled the valuation from $2.5 billion since September 2020’s $185 million series D. Airtable — and the spreadbase market — is on fire.

:::

Reports say Box is for sale. Who would buy it? | Virginia Backaitis never answers the question she raises, but adds an additional question, because despite CEO Aaron Levie’s attempts at propping up a strong story for Box — record billings, record $100,000 plus deals, and so on — there is an indisputable fact:

Box’s stock closed today at about the same price as it did six years ago. When you consider that some traders have said Box Inc.could be sold at $36 dollars per share, right now, who can blame them for hoping that Box will be sold.

…

Exclusive: Box explores sale amid pressure from Starboard — sources | Greg Roumeliotis, Joshua Franklin

U.S. cloud services provider Box Inc is exploring a sale amid pressure from hedge fund Starboard Value LP over its stock performance, according to people familiar with the matter.

Long anticipated, since the Giants are providing file sync-and-share for pennies.

:::

CoScreen Launches with $4.6M in Seed Funding | May Lauren Arad of CoScreen announces the company’s seed round.

I wrote about CoScreen in Brief | CoScreen: An Idea and a Product back in late 2019, describing it like this:

Today on Product Hunt, I encountered a truly new idea, one taking advantage of the new landscape of devices. Many people now use secondary (or even tertiary) screens on their desks. What if the near-ubiquity of secondary screens could enable a new approach to collaboration?

CoScreen — a company and product destined to be made into a verb — has taken that premise and run with it. Imagine if you could designate one of your screens as a shared desktop, and whatever you drag onto your shared screen is shared on the secondary screens of your coworkers: coscreening.

They have opened the public beta.

Work Week | How Not To Connect was originally published in GigaOm on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Quote of the Moment

It is a huge misunderstanding that the only alternative to planning is aimless messing around. The challenge is to structure one’s workflow in a way that insight and new ideas can become the driving forces that push us forward.

| Sönke Ahrens

:::

Linkedin Marketplaces

Microsoft’s New Gig: A LinkedIn Freelancer Market Rivaling Upwork, Fiverr | Amir Efrati looks into Microsoft’s plans for LinkedIn, which extend far beyond a business social network focused on finding jobs. How about a freelancer platform?

LinkedIn is developing a new service called Marketplaces to let its 740 million users find and book freelancers, pitting it against publicly traded firms such as Upwork and Fiverr, according to two people with direct knowledge of the matter.

[…]

The service, which is slated to launch as soon as September, could help LinkedIn attract new users and generate more revenue from existing users of its professional networking site, which Microsoft acquired in 2016. LinkedIn generated an estimated $30 of revenue per monthly active user last year. That’s on par with Facebook’s revenue per monthly active user.

Still, it may take a while for the upcoming freelancer product to move the needle for LinkedIn’s business. The Microsoft subsidiary generated about $8.8 billion in revenue in 2020 from membership subscriptions and selling job-related ads, up about 20% from 2019. The existing leaders in the freelance marketplace field, Upwork and Fiverr, last year together generated about $550 million in revenue. That represents their cut of transactions between engineers, designers, and other primarily white-collar professionals and the businesses that hired them for temporary work or projects. Upwork said it keeps about 13% of transactions as revenue while Fiverr said it keeps about 27%. Collectively, the two companies’ revenue rose about 37% compared to 2019.

Microsoft has also hinted to Efrati that they may be tieing in a Microsoft digital wallet with this marketplace, and other services within LinkedIn, such as subscriptions to published content, as well as goods sold through its recent acquisition, Pinterest.

LinkedIn Marketplaces is expected to look similar to Fiverr, which lets customers shop around for services and compare rates, said one of the people with knowledge of the new service. Marketplaces will also allow users to post their own proposals to attract freelancers, similar to what Upwork does. Customers will be able to post reviews of freelancers they’ve hired. LinkedIn is considering taking a cut of transactions as well as generating revenue by letting freelancers post ads, this person said.

I’ve always thought that services like Upwork could provide better collaboration support for the freelancers and companies that use the platform. Clearly, Microsoft is in a great position to do that, especially if the companies are signed up to some LinkedIn Marketplaces version of Viva or 365. More to follow.

P.S. : I discovered a plug for Upwork from a Microsoft manager on the Upwork website.

:::

Virtual Events

Virtual events startup Hopin raises funds at a $5.65 billion valuation | Ryan Browne reports on the newest funding news from Hopin, which raised $125 million at a $2.1 billion valuation in October 2020:

Hopin says it’s raised $400 million at a $5.65 billion valuation, more than double what it was worth in a November investment round. The latest financing round was led by Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst and IVP, some of Silicon Valley’s most prominent VCs. The start-up has experienced rapid growth thanks to surging demand for virtual events in the pandemic.

The need for virtual events has been accelerated by the pandemic, but it’s clear that investors believe virtual events are here to stay, even if events transition to some sort of hybrid model in the future.

…

Hubilo raises $23.5M in Series A round, to hire 150 people | Vishal Krishna and Trisha Medhi reported on a Hubilo funding round, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Balderton Capital, following a $4.5 million raise in October.

The Series A investment round also saw participation from industry experts, including John Thompson, Chairman of the Board at Microsoft, and Chris Schagen, former CMO at Contentful.

[…]

In a conversation with YourStory, Vaibhav Jain, Co-founder of Hubilo, said, “We will use the latest investment to bring strategic, tactical, and technological advancements to our core product, integrations, and platform — allowing us to empower our clients and partners with more nuanced experiences and more in-depth intelligence with their events. This means our clients can leverage all the indispensable propositions of Hubilo much more effectively, much more significantly, and much more powerfully.”

Interesting that both Hubilo and Hopin had raises in October and again in the past weeks.

I am planning a report on Virtual Events platforms later in the spring.

:::

Asynch Video: Weet

I read about a new asynch video tool called Weet, a product of Speach, a video knowledge management platform. Weet arose in a Slacklike fashion, in that the founders were using an internal tool during lockdown which led to the communication tool’s release. As Connie Loizos explains,

[Weet’s] entering a crowded field. [founder and CEO Najette] Fellache is hardly alone in recognizing the power of asynchronous meetings as an attractive alternative to phone calls, real-time meetings and even email, where tone is often lost and content can be misconstrued. Loom, for example, a six-year-old enterprise collaboration video messaging service that enables users to send short clips of themselves, has already raised at least $73 million from investors, including Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins and Coatue.

Another, newer entrant is SuperNormal, a year-old, Stockholm, Sweden-based work communication platform that employs video and screen recording tools to help teams create and send asynchronous video updates throughout the day and which raised $2 million in seed funding led by EQT Ventures in December.

[…]

Weet already features instant recording, screen sharing, virtual backgrounds, video filters, emoji reactions, commenting options and auto transcription. For a premium paid version in the works, it is also developing features that will make it easier to organize discussions for users. Imagine, for example, a salesperson looking for communications about a potential client and wanting notes from those auto-transcriptions that are presented together in one email to that individual.

I am a real believer in asynch communications (see Work Week | Focus and Asynchronous Communication), so I think people should take advantage of tools like Weet. I’ll report back after I have tried it a bit with others.

:::

Microsoft Viva

I had a chance to see and hear more about Microsoft Viva during Microsoft’s recent Ignite event this week (virtual, of course). I wrote about Viva recently in Work Week | Microsoft Viva Changes Everything.

The biggest takeaway is that most of Viva is not available at present. Viva Topics — an outgrowth of the Microsoft Cortex initiative is available in an early form, but we will be waiting a while for everything else. Viva Insights will begin rolling out in April, Viva Connections at the end of March, and a Viva Learning preview is coming in April.

I thought that Sam Marshall asks good questions about Viva in Microsoft Viva — Who is it for?:

From what Microsoft has revealed about Viva so far, I see a mix of elements, some of which are better suited to smaller companies, and others that only really deliver at an enterprise scale.

Take the intranet element, for example. The Teams integration embeds a SharePoint site into the Microsoft Teams tool bar with your company’s logo as the icon. As far as I can tell, this is a single SharePoint hub site, relying on the new SharePoint app bar supporting global navigation.

A hub site can roll up content from associated sites, but most larger companies have much more complex intranet demands that involve multiple locations and divisions. I’ve every hope that SharePoint will continue to evolve and fill the gaps, but until then it’s going to mostly feel like a small SharePoint intranet using Teams as the browser. It’s not clear that the ‘Viva’ element adds anything on top for enterprise scale.

I’ve seen demos of Viva Connections, but they haven’t gotten far enough along to determine if Sam is right. Still, given Microsoft’s approach of grind, grind, grind, we can expect release after release trending toward market fit.

Sam continues:

Microsoft is clearly trying to appeal to HR with the employee experience pitch. Although IT has successfully championed many Office 365 deployments, there’s often a sense that these deployments happen in isolation, without backing from the business. Compared to Internal Communications, HR budgets are often larger, and HR as a function tends to have more influence in the C-Suite.

A few commentators have celebrated this move, but we need to ask if Viva is what HR wants from a digital suite. After all, there are some large, entrenched players such as Workday, Peoplesoft and SAP Success Factors. These tend to cover the transactional end of HR processes but have been less strong on the wellbeing angle that Viva Insights is targeting. In that respect Microsoft is actually taking on the “pulse survey” sector, such as 15Five, Qualtrics, Culture Amp and Peakon.

And yes, they are going after the somewhat aging leaders in the HR platform marketplace, leapfrogging them with an employee experience orientation and built on the business operating system platform of Microsoft 365.

Work Week | Ahren’s Challenge was originally published in GigaOm on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I came upon Complish a few months ago and thought I might fool with it before writing it up. However, my time is so limited these days I haven’t had a chance. But I want to draw attention to the founders’ motivation to building a content-centric, asynchronous work management tool:

The first reaction to transitioning to distributed teams is usually to start scheduling more video calls to stay aligned. This works for the first few weeks, but ends up being disruptive, blocking focus and real work. What if we could keep everyone updated on our own time, without interrupting anyone on the team? What if we could replace the “brainstorming” meeting, so allow everyone to think on their own time, and then synthesize together if necessary?

We don’t want to to completely avoid meetings, but we believe your time spent in meetings would be better spent maintaining a social bond with your teammates, or back and forth on strategy.

[…]

If everyone knew what was going on, could we reduce the number of distractions? What if we could make it easy for people and teams to discuss things on their own time, and then only jump into a video call where necessary?

‍Exactly.

…

The future of work with Google Workspace | Javier Soltero, VP and GM of Google Workspace, makes an announcement about a slew of features for Google Workspace (but not the massive relaunch of Workspace + Sites I’m expecting).

One feature that jumped out: Focus Time.

In the coming weeks, we’re releasing an integrated set of features in Google Workspace that help people easily share their work hours and location, while also finding more time to focus on what matters most. Features like segmentable working hours, recurring out-of-office entries, and location indicators let employees share their availability and location with their colleagues. Meanwhile, a new event type — Focus Time — lets people minimize distractions by limiting notifications during these event windows. All these availability and location indicators will show up seamlessly across Google Workspace, as teams engage with Calendar, Meet, Chat, and Gmail. We’ll also be delivering Time Insights to Google Workspace users (visible to the employee only, not their manager), so that employees can assess how they’re spending their time against their own priorities.

Personally, I think the setup should be the opposite, where people would indicate the times in the day they designate for communication, notifications, and meetings. The rest (hopefully the majority of the time) would be allocated for Focus.

He also uses the term collaboration equity:

We’re especially interested in what we call collaboration equity, or the ability to contribute equally, regardless of location, role, experience level, language, and device preference.

Very good phrase, very good goal.

…

Quill is a new messaging app that is designed (so they argue) to decrease some of the negatives that arise in work chat like Slack (although they don’t mention Slack, explicitly). As they state:

Quill is messaging for people that focus.

We love messaging. It’s our favorite way of collaborating, but not if it’s overwhelming and disorganized. We believe there’s a better way.

We grew exhausted having to skim thousands of messages every day to keep up, so we built a way to chat that’s even better than how we already communicate in person. A more deliberate way to chat. That’s what Quill is all about.

I have not used Quill in the real-life, within-a-team context that would be needed to judge if what they claim is the case. Here are two features that support their case:

Passive Mentions

By default, @-mentions are passive; mentions will add someone to a conversation without sending them a notification. Include people in conversations without disrupting them.

Priority Mentions

For urgent messages, use a priority !!-mention. Priority mentions will always send a push notification.

Their motivation to decrease distractions from notifications or the time lost trying to decide what is important to read, and that I completely click with.

…

In Paradoxes of Engagement: Less Communication Is More, I wrote about the research behind ‘bursty communication’, which is one of the tricks adopted by successful teams:

Christoph Riedle and Alice Williams Woolley take a different slant in recent research, and focus on the communication style of successful teams:

“Human communication is naturally “bursty,” in that it involves periods of high activity followed by periods of little to none. Our research suggests that such bursts of rapid-fire communications, with longer periods of silence in between, are hallmarks of successful teams. Those silent periods are when team members often form and develop their ideas — deep work that may generate the next steps in a project or the solution to a challenge faced by the group. Bursts, in turn, help to focus energy, develop ideas, and achieve closure on specific questions, thus enabling team members to move on to the next challenge.”

The researchers point out that with distributed teams, finding times when team members can focus on ‘being bursty together’ can be complicated, but doing so ‘can help smooth out the jagged edges of our Covid-induced remote-work constraints’. This means that other times are dedicated to heads down, individual, deep work.

How to accomplish this? The simplest may be to schedule periods for communication, and block off the rest:

“The old-fashioned way to do this would be to schedule blocks of time when people are open for meetings, and then do a burst of back and forth communication during those blocks.”

Riedle and Woolley offer this as a counter to one of the consistent arguments made against minimum office: serendipity in face-to-face interactions.

“The bottom line: Worry less about sparking creativity and connection through watercooler-style interactions in the physical world, and focus more on facilitating bursty communication.”

Yea, verily.

Work Week | Focus and Asynchronous Communication was originally published in GigaOm on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Trello has announced the availability of a variety of new views, so users are no longer limited to the now-familiar kanban board. Now, those who upgrade to Business Class (14 day free trial) can use timeline, table, calendar, dashboard, and map views.

The table view shows that Trello is heading in a spreadbase direction, offering filters, sorting, and other capabilities like those in Notion, Airtable, and other spreadbase tools.

At present, the table view does not support capabilities you’d expect in a full-up spreadbase, such as adding custom attributes, or a formula language to add values, or creating relationships across tables. But you can see that’s where they are heading.

The timeline view uses data information in cards to display information in swimlanes, where the names on the swimlanes are the lists in the original board:

The cards can be modified by dragging the ends to change start and end dates, and dragged from one list (swimlane) to another.

The calendar view is currently limited to just a month view, and as far as I can tell, you can’t create cards there.

The dashboard view is geared toward managers, to provide visibility into team progress, and highlighting metrics like due dates, task assignment, and so on.

Trello is headed to a much richer user experience with these new views, and also some new forms of cards which are available to all users. Trello describes these new cards this way:

Link cards: With the simple paste of a URL as a card’s title, enjoy a more connected experience across different external tools and platforms including Youtube, Dropbox, Google Drive, Box and Jira

Board cards: Connecting projects and cross-functional teams across Trello by simply pasting the URL of a board as a card’s title and it will automatically render a direct visual link to that board

Mirror Cards (coming in a few months): Reflect a card across multiple boards to efficiently keep information aligned and up-to-date without having to switch boards

Mirror cards will solve a problem I have encountered in many work management tools.

Bottom Line

Trello is responding to a rapidly changing work management marketplace, as I described in the recent Prospectus | Work Management. As I wrote then,

Trello is, at present, a more-or-less traditional work management solution, one with a great deal of customization built-in, and a very extensive set of integrations. Trello Tables is a departure, an explicit effort to adopt characteristics of spreadbases, and perhaps the first step to reconfiguring Trello to be a spreadbase, in fact. We can envision that as shown below, where the solid bordered Trello is the situation today, and the dashed Tables represents a possible next phase, where Trello Tables could implement apps that are not work-management-oriented, at all.

We’ll have to see if that proves to be the case.

:::

Work Technology News

OKR platform Ally Raised $50M | In a series C funding, Ally is poised for even more growth, after more than tripling revenue in 2020. A ‘business execution platform’ that connects strategic goals with team productivity, and day-to-day goals. There is a lot of action in the objectives and key results space.

…

LumApps raises $70M Series C led by Goldman Sachs | Steve O’Hear reports on the ‘social internet’ vendor’s new round:

The SaaS integrates with other enterprise software such as G Suite, Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft SharePoint, to centralize access to corporate content, business applications and social features under a single platform. The central premise is to help companies “break down silos” and streamline internal communication.

LumApps customers include Airbus, Veolia, Valeo, Air Liquide, Colgate-Palmolive, The Economist, Schibsted, EA, Logitech, Toto, and Japan Airlines, and the company claims to have achieved year-on-year revenue growth of 100%.

…

Vimeo Raises $300M, Valuation Tops $5B Ahead of IAC’s Planned Spinoff | I am fascinated for the opportunities for video in the enterprise offered by Vimeo. Not just the use of Vimeo’s tools to produce video and stream it, but following the rise of consumer tools like TikTok, the ways that video could change internal communications.

Vimeo said it raised $300 million in new equity funding — giving it a valuation north of $5 billion, doubling from three months ago — ahead of parent company IAC’s planned spinoff of the video hosting and services unit.

The new investment in Vimeo came from T. Rowe Price Group and Oberndorf Enterprises. Last month, Barry Diller’s IAC announced plans to spin off its full stake in Vimeo.

…

Rocket.Chat raises $19M for its open-source approach to integrated enterprise messaging | Ingrid Lundgren reports on funding of a hybrid messaging platform that supports on-prem open source implementations or SaaS hosted service. The former model is attractive to governmental agencies or large corporations that want total control of secure communications. The SaaS approach may be attractive to companies wanting to have a single solution for internal, partner, and customer communications.

…

Goldman-backed ON24 valued at over $3 billion after strong market debut | Sohini Podder reports on the rise of ON24, which is a proxy for the very hot virtual events marketplace. I will be doing a series of reports on that space:

Founded in 1998 by Chief Executive Officer Sharat Sharan, San Francisco-based ON24 allows people to create webinars and host virtual events on its platform and received $25 million in funding from Goldman Sachs in early 2019.

…

Google Workspace Updates: Updates on how to sync Google Drive content to your computer | Google is moving toward a single solution for desktop syncing of Drive content, at long last.

Work Week | Trello Goes Overboard was originally published in GigaOm on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Today’s Work Week is inspired by Frank Herbert:

Deep in the human unconscious is a pervasive need for a logical universe that makes sense. But the real universe is always one step beyond logic.

| Frank Herbert, Dune

I confess that I am searching for the logic behind the various stories below, which is not obvious in all cases.

:::

Work Management

Citrix to acquire Wrike | I was notified by Wrike marketing that the rumors about an acquisition by Citrix are true. From the press release:

Citrix Systems, Inc. today announced that it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Wrike, a rapidly growing, recognized leader in the SaaS collaborative work management space, for $2.25 billion in cash.

[…]

The combination will bring together Citrix’s powerful digital work platform, which securely delivers the resources an employee needs to be productive in one unified experience, and Wrike’s innovative work management solution, which streamlines collaboration and work execution, providing employees with additional tools to work efficiently and securely wherever they may be. The addition of Wrike’s cloud-delivered capabilities will accelerate Citrix’s business model transition to the cloud and strategy to become a complete SaaS-based work platform addressing the needs of various functional groups within the enterprise.

I will be getting a briefing from Wrike and plan to ask more about this. My sense is that Citrix is moving hard on its transition to cloud and SaaS. In August 2019 Arlen Shenkman assumed the role of Chief Financial Officer, with the charter to pull Citrix into the cloud/SaaS world:

Mr. Shenkman joins from German software giant SAP, where he spent almost 15 years. He served as CFO of SAP North America, the company’s biggest business unit, from 2015 to 2017 and most recently worked as SAP’s global head of development and ecosystems. In that role, Mr. Shenkman was responsible for developing new business models, fostering strategic partnerships and overseeing investments as well as mergers and acquisitions, Citrix said.

Citrix, one of the biggest providers of digital workspace platforms and applications allowing remote access to company servers, is facing competition from Amazon.com Inc., Microsoft Corp. and Alphabet Inc.’s Google.

“The big question is how Citrix is retaining its relevance,” said Brad Reback, an analyst at Stifel, Nicolaus & Co. “There is a multitude of ways to access corporate applications remotely today,” Mr. Reback said.

“Ultimately, this is a company that has growth challenges as more enterprise spending is moving to the cloud,” said Daniel Ives, a managing director at Wedbush Securities Inc.

Note that the founder and CEO of Wrike, Andrew Filev, will be reporting to Shenkman.

In 2012, Citrix acquired the work management tool Podio, and has been selling it ever since. The Podio acquisition came after Citrix started using the app internally. Maybe they are using Wrike nowadays, and have seen the value of a tight integration for Citrix customers? Not a word about Podio in the press release about this deal.

This would be a great payoff for Vista, which bought a majority stake in Wrike in 2018, valuing the company at $800 million.

More to follow.

:::

People Operations

Personio raises $125M on a $1.7B valuation for an HR platform targeting SMEs | Ingrid Lundgren muses on the changing needs of HR in the postnormal world:

Personio — the German startup that targets small and medium-sized businesses (10–2,000 employees) with an all-in-one HR platform covering recruiting and onboarding, payroll, absence tracking and other major HR functions — has picked up $125 million in funding at a $1.7 billion post-money valuation.

The Series D is being co-led by Index Ventures and Meritech, with previous backers Accel, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Northzone, Global Founders Capital and Picus all participating.

The $1.7 billion valuation is a big jump on the company’s $500 million valuation a year ago, and it comes after a year where the startup has doubled its revenues, and was not on the hunt to raise, with much of its previous fundraising still in the bank.

Personio currently counts some 3,000 SMEs in Europe as customers.

Big takeaway: 99% of all European enterprises — 25 million in all — are SMBs, and many of them have yet to adopt any kind of HR platform at all: many are still working on spreadsheets, or paper and pencil. I wonder how many US companies still are, too?

:::

Atlanta’s SalesLoft raises $100M for its digital sales platform, now valued at $1.1B | Ingrid Lundgren discusses a series E round for its sales engagement platform, in a busy space made more critical given the forced distributed work regime of Covid:

The company has been on a growth tear for several years now, as one of the big players in the area of so-called sales engagement: tools to help salespeople sell better to clients (or would-be clients), which can include real-time monitoring of interactions to provide coaching to improve the process, suggestions for supplementary content to enhance the pitch, and more basic software simply to manage records and communications.

Even before the pandemic hit, this was a key growth area in enterprise software, with both in-person and online/digital salespeople relying on these kinds of products to help them get more of an edge with their work, but a lot of the focus had really been on inside sales (B2B sales focusing on bigger purchases). [Cofounder and CEO Kyle] Porter described the effect of Covid-19 as a “tailwind” propelling that already strong trend.

[…]

He added that SalesLoft’s own sales cycle has improved by 40% since the pandemic, a reflection, he said, of the “urgency and need” for tools like those that the startup develops.

Another shift has been in terms of the kinds of customers SalesLoft works with. The company originally was focused on the mid-market, but that has changed with more larger enterprises also coming on board. Google, LinkedIn (which backs SalesLoft and is in a strategic partnership with it), Cisco, Dell and IBM are all customers, and Porter said that more “mainstream” businesses like Cargil, 3M and Standard & Poor are also increasingly becoming clients.

That is leading the startup to building out bigger solutions, beyond the basic pitch of “sales engagement” that has been SalesLoft’s mainstay up to now. The company competes against a plethora of others including of Clari, Chorus.ai, Gong, Conversica, Afiniti and Outreach, as well as biggies like Salesforce. Outreach, notably, had a big mid-Covid round of its own, raising at a $1.3 billion valuation in June last year, a mark of that wider market demand. Porter notes that SalesLoft’s big selling point is that it offers an increasingly end-to-end sales solution to customers, meaning less shopping around.

Note that Linkedin is a Microsoft company, a major enterprise player. I am officially, as of now, following SalesLoft and the sales engagement market.

:::

Spreadbases

Softr scores $2.2M seed for its no-code website and web app platform powered by Airtable | Steve O’Hear reports on Softr raising a seed round based on it’s building a no code system on spreadbase platform Airtable:

The idea is to let Airtable do the database grunt work, combined with Softr’s relatively flexible but template-driven approach to website and web app creation.

Softr’s [CEO Mariam] Hakobyan explains that out of the box the startup offers templates for anything from a simple marketing website to web apps for an e-commerce store, job board, marketplace and more. Those applications can include functionality like user authentication, gated content, payments, upvoting, and commenting etc.

Leveraging the relational tables of spreadbases like Airtable as the centerpoint of use-case oriented apps is a major trend for the future.

:::

Expense Management

Divvy raises $165 million to give companies greater control and insights into their expenses | Paul Sawers reports:

Divvy, which offers a business expense management platform, has raised $165 million at a $1.6 billion valuation.

The series D raise comes amid heated competition in the space, with the likes of Ramp recently closing a $30 million tranche and Brex securing $150 million. Divvy said it has seen a 500% increase in monthly sign-ups since the global lockdown started last March as businesses seek capital and greater visibility and control over their spending.

Another market I should be monitoring, obviously.

Work Week | One Step Beyond Logic was originally published in GigaOm on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I took some time off over the holidays and I am astonished by how much has been going on in work technology, both on the innovation and the execution side of things.

:::

Quote of the Moment

Execution pays your salary. Innovation pays your pension.

| Steve Blank

Great quote, although we may have to substitute ‘pays your pension’ with something more 21st century, like ‘pays your mortgage’, since pensions are pretty iffy these days.

:::

Virtual Events

Hopin buys livestreaming startup StreamYard for $250M as it looks to expand its product lineup | Alex Wilhelm reports on Hopin acquiring livestreaming platform StreamYard to make it a better-integrated default streaming option for the virtual events company:

This morning Hopin, a quickly growing startup that sells a technology platform for hosting digital events, announced that it has acquired StreamYard. The acquired company, which bootstrapped itself to material revenue scale, will retain its brand and in-market product.

The deal is worth $250 million, paid in a mix of cash and stock. Hopin raised a $40 million Series A in late June of 2020, and a $125 million Series B last November at a valuation of $2.125 billion.1

At the time of its most recent round, Hopin told TechCrunch that it had grown its annual recurring revenue (ARR) from zero to $20 million in around nine months. In an email Hopin told TechCrunch that StreamYard had itself scaled to $30 million ARR without external capital. And during a conversation regarding the StreamYard deal, Hopin CEO Johnny Boufarhat said that the combined entity would sport around $65 million in ARR.

[…]

The virtual events space, and the hybrid, online and offline events space that Hopin originally set out to serve before COVID-19, is one worth watching in 2021 as vaccines are deployed and the world looks forward to a future of safe travel. With StreamYard in its camp, however, any slowdown in the growth of virtual events software sales could be mitigated by the streaming outfit’s largely distinct customer base.

I wrote about Hopin a few weeks ago, following their $125 million series A round. I am planning a report series on virtual events. Sign up for the Work Week newsletter to get notifications.

:::

PPM

Planview Announces Strategic Acquisitions of Clarizen and Changepoint to Accelerate Strategy to Delivery for Enterprises | Business Wire

Planview is consolidating with two competitors in project and portfolio management. Is it really being driven by customer demand, or are they looking to decrease the heat loss from always competing with each other?

Across industries, enterprises are transforming their businesses to be digital-first. This shift has only accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, and what’s emerged is a new and enduring way of working that’s flexible, highly distributed, and digital. As increasingly dispersed teams embrace new tools and processes to meet the evolving needs of their customers, visibility and connectivity across the enterprise have never been more critical. The market demands a comprehensive software platform that can connect strategy to delivery across siloed workstreams and disciplines — capabilities best provided through PPM and Agile.

Upon completion of the transactions, the Clarizen and Changepoint teams will join Planview as distinct business units, led by Matt Zilli and Matt Scheuing. Zilli and Scheuing will report into Planview CEO, Greg Gilmore. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2021. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. To learn more, visit Planview.com.

So, Clarizen is positioned as a PPM player, not work management, which was the direction they were headed when I last took a briefing with them, a year or two ago.

Why consolidate? Must be a long-range plan to pull this all together into one platform with various tiers, right?

:::

OKR

OKR-focused Gtmhub raises $30M Series B after growing 3x in 2020 | Alex Wilhelm looks pretty deeply into Gtmhub growth and funding: a $30 million series B following a $9 million series A. What’s going on?

TechCrunch reported at the time of its Series A that Gtmhub had managed 400% growth in annual recurring revenue (ARR) heading into the round, on a year-over-year basis. Similar levels of topline expansion have continued, with Gtmhub COO Seth Elliott telling TechCrunch that the company grew its ARR by a multiple of three last year (measured December 2019 through December 2020).

Around the time Gtmhub raised in 2019, a number of other startups focused on the same software market raised as well, leading to TechCrunch asking “why is everyone making OKR software?”

The acronym OKR translates to “objectives and key results,” a planning method that has become popular among American technology firms, and, according to [Gitmhub COO Seth] Elliott, is becoming more popular internationally and among non-technology companies.

The startup executive also told TechCrunch that he sees Gtmhub growing alongside two business trends. The first, the rise of OKRs themselves, is a wave that his company is riding, he told TechCrunch. The second, one that he thinks his startup is leading, deals with large companies pursuing corporate transformations to boost their agility; those firms are adopting Gtmhub, he said, which can help them execute their digital transformation, or similar efforts, successfully.

Interesting: tools intended to help manage digital transformation, rather than general work management or PPM.

:::

Work Chat

Microsoft Teams wants to solve one of the most frustrating aspects of remote working | Joel Khali reports on an upcoming feature: dedicated calendars for each channel, consolidating events and meetings for members of the channel. Good idea.

:::

Elsewhere

Enterprise-Ready-As-A-Service: WorkOS | Crossing the enterprise-readiness chasm

In a nutshell, a software start-up can take an SaaS app, and wrap it in WorkOS services that enable enterprise-level administration, identity management, and single sign-on. Also, WorkOS manages the integrations with third-party services that make those services work: various vendors’ SSO services (Okta, Azure, Google, etc.), and directory services (like Bamboo, Workday, Azure, Google, etc.).

…

Working in Notion Part 2 | The intersection of journaling and work management

In this post, I will outline how I am using Notion to create and manage posts like this one integrated with my daily journaling. I recommend that readers might want to revisit the Part 1 post, especially if they aren’t familiar with Notion.

Work Week | Execution Versus Innovation was originally published in GigaOm on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.