Salesforce Ventures leads the $75 million-Series C round for Vivun, the first software company to help PreSales teams sell more efficiently and inform product development

By Paul Drews and Dominic Pusateri

The sales cycle is evolving, yet again. The old model of taking the CIO to a steak dinner and pitching a high-level software solution has given way to bottoms-up sales, online content strategies and product-led growth. At the same time, product categories are getting more crowded and granular, multi-cloud architectures are getting more complex, and customers are getting more technical and data-driven. All of this is giving rise to a new, revenue-boosting position that until now has been largely unsung: the PreSales team.

The emerging role of PreSales is a hybrid of sales and product. It leans more technical than traditional sales roles and is sometimes called a sales engineer, sales architect, sales consultant, solutions architect, or PreSales engineer. This person steps into the sales flow at the early stages to give detailed product demos and explain to a sophisticated customer how their solution might fit into the customer’s existing architecture.

It’s time software caught up. At Salesforce Ventures, we are always looking to identify business processes that have not yet been improved by software. When we learned about Vivun, we were floored by the inefficiency of PreSales workflows and the rapid growth of this new category. Vivun is built on Salesforce and is available on the Salesforce AppExchange, where the company has a five-star rating. We partnered with Vivun in March 2021 when we invested in the company’s $35 million-Series B. As Vivun continued to gain traction and earn customer love, we eagerly continued to support the company. We are proud to announce today that Salesforce Ventures has led Vivun’s $75 million-Series C.

PreSales has quietly become one of the fastest-growing and largest roles in business. Vivun ran a LinkedIn query in March 2022 for companies with more than 50 employees and found that Sales, Marketing and PreSales had more professionals than did any other role. Sales counts 7.9 million jobs; Marketing has 4.1 million; PreSales has 1.8 million — nearly four times the number of people in customer success (500,000), another hot field. And yet, until Vivun, while there were thousands of apps for sales teams, there was not a single product targeting PreSales; their only tools were email and spreadsheets. “Technology providers had been so focused on sales, service, and marketing, yet the profession of PreSales was completely overlooked,” says Vivun CEO and Co-founder Matt Darrow.

Matt Darrow and John Bruce are PreSales experts who were fed up with the vacancy of solutions. Darrow was VP of PreSales at Zuora and Bruce was VP of Worldwide Sales Engineering at SignalFX. Together they envisioned a centralized system-of-record for deals in the PreSales stage, as well as a platform to improve workflows.

“B2B selling is changing for good. Buyers want to get hands-on with solutions, do their homework on their terms, and engage with product experts when it’s convenient. This shift is creating explosive demand for the PreSales role. Once relegated to demo-wielding sales assistants, PreSales professionals are ascending to their rightful place within a B2B company: owning the buyer experience.”

— Matt Darrow, CEO and Co-founder, Vivun

In a crowded technology industry with decreasing product differentiation, buyers dig in deeper and ask more technical questions. Sales teams are adapting and becoming more specialized. Sales reps are now collaborating with technical experts from the start, as well as sharing accountability and fostering transparency.

Vivun makes it easy for PreSales teams to discover and qualify leads, educate buyers, prepare proposals and support buyers through their customer journey. It also provides a dedicated workspace to bring buyers and sellers closer together while encouraging transparency and collaboration.

Today’s buyer often asks for “off-menu” features that don’t yet exist. Keeping track of these requests, analyzing which ought to be the highest priority, and following up with interested buyers to let them know they’re available, is a complex task. Vivun gives PreSales the ability to scan hundreds of requests from buyers, make recommendations on which might deliver the highest return, and share insights with product developers.

From Highspot in enablement, Outreach in engagement, and Gong in intelligence, we at Salesforce Ventures are strong believers in the ability of software to empower companies to sell more while making the lives of sales personnel easier. Vivun has the potential to create and serve a new generation of technical sales professionals and improve the process for sellers and buyers alike. We’re proud to partner with Vivun on its mission to unlock the power of PreSales!

Read more about Vivun here: https://techcrunch.com/2022/05/17/vivun-is-digitizing-pre-sales-and-just-got-75m-in-new-investment/

Finally, the Sales Team Behind the Sales Team Gets Some Love was originally published in Salesforce Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Laura Rowson, Robert Keith and Kevin Chen

Today we are excited to announce our investment in Blockdaemon, which powers the blockchain economy with an easy-to-use, secure and scalable node management platform.

The problem

Institutions are increasingly interested in finding ways to leverage blockchain technology, however they are unlikely to look to build or manage their own blockchain infrastructure — much like few businesses today would choose to manage their own cloud infrastructure. Enter Blockdaemon.

Blockdaemon’s solution

Blockdaemon provides easy configuration, guaranteed uptime, around the clock coverage, and secure and compliant access to the blockchain ecosystem for institutional customers removing the need for institutions to stand up and manage their own node infrastructure, with a product suite that includes white-label validators for staking, dedicated node clusters and APIs for reading and writing transactions and querying data feeds.

Today, Blockdaemon is the largest institutional node operator, with over 40,000 nodes, and supports over 50 different protocols which include over 25 proof-of-stake protocols. Nodes are fundamental to the blockchain, acting as the network participants that transmit and collect information, as well as engaging with the creation of new blocks via proof-of-work (PoW) or proof-of-stake (PoS).

Blockdaemon leverages this node network to provide enterprise-grade staking-as-a-service. Blockdaemon’s staking solution allows customers to utilize their token holdings to receive rewards in exchange for acting as a validator on PoS networks. Given concerns around energy consumption and sustainability with PoW protocols, this additionally supports a more sustainable method of validation for the blockchain while earning yield.

Why we’re backing Blockdaemon

In spite of price volatility, the crypto market is booming and 2021 was a significant year in terms of adoption. The crypto market cap hit all-time highs of $2.8T in 2021 driven largely by growth Ethereum (ETH) and significant consumer adoption in NFTs and DeFi.

As we see more regulatory clarity around crypto and blockchain, we expect to see greater investment in and adoption of blockchain technology by enterprise and Blockdaemon stands to benefit. Indeed, in the financial sector alone, the use of blockchain is estimated to reach a value of $22.4B by 2026.

Today, Blockdaemon is supporting an impressive group of blockchain-native and traditional enterprise customers including BlockFi, Fireblocks, Revolut, and Citi. Customers are leveraging both the node management services as well as delegating digital assets to Blockdaemon for staking. This is driving incredible growth in Blockdaemon’s tokens under management, and is averaging more than $10B in monthly staked assets. Over the past year alone, Blockdaemon has scaled dramatically with 12x revenue and 6x headcount.

​​In addition to the market opportunity and the product that Blockdaemon is building, we are thrilled to be backing CEO & Founder Konstantin Richter who has over 20 years of experience building technology businesses. Konstantin leveraged his experience running Ethereum nodes to build Blockdaemon, an infrastructure platform focused on catering to the blockchain. Additionally, his focus on building and scaling Blockdaemon with compliance as a priority is a long-term competitive advantage for the enterprise use case.

What’s ahead?

As adoption of blockchain technology continues to accelerate, Salesforce Ventures sees a large opportunity to build scaled businesses that provide the building blocks for enterprises to participate on the blockchain.

Today, Blockdaemon is a one-stop shop for blockchain transactions, staking, and liquidity. Going forward, there is a huge opportunity to extend further into DeFi and other emerging services that support enterprises in all their interactions with the blockchain.

Welcome to Salesforce Ventures, Blockdaemon!

Welcome, Blockdaemon! was originally published in Salesforce Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Paul Drews, Katie Schwartz Thiry and Zak Kokosa

Moving money with banks is a far-from-modern experience. If you recently went through a bank to send money via ACH (Automated Clearing House) or wire transfer, you probably went through a cumbersome process that included contacting your bank, manually adding the recipient’s bank account details, hoping you didn’t make any mistakes, and then waiting a few days for the payment to clear. Now imagine what that process is like for a business — particularly one that manages a high volume of inbound and outbound payments.

Today, many companies throw people at the problem. They hire people to handle payments; engineers to build bank integrations; and finance people to send checks and wires, reconcile payments, and close the books each month. This poor experience is primarily driven by the infrastructure that facilitates these transactions, which is arcane, slow, mostly manual, and difficult to integrate into.

Despite this poor user experience, the volume and dollar value that moves through the ACH network is staggering. According to the National Automated Clearinghouse Association, the ACH network handled 29.1 billion payments in 2021, representing $73 trillion. Business transactions comprised 5.3 billion of those payments, representing a disproportionate $50 trillion in value — a 20% increase year-over-year. In addition, Fedwire, a real-time gross settlement system of central bank money used by Federal Reserve banks, estimates that 204.5 million transfers were initiated in 2021, representing $992 trillion.

Finally, an automated solution to payments

Modern Treasury automates much of the process of moving and tracking money for businesses. The company created an application programming interface, or API, which integrates with the banking system, and built software to make the tracking easier for finance and treasury teams. This automation enables companies to build and scale innovative products, manage payments via a dashboard, and automatically reconcile cash across multiple bank accounts.

Salesforce Ventures believes in modernizing outdated business infrastructure. That is why we are proud to announce that Salesforce Ventures is joining Altimeter Capital, Benchmark, Y Combinator, and SVB Capital in investing in Modern Treasury.

Modern Treasury was founded in 2018 by Dimitri Dadiomov (CEO), Sam Aarons (CTO), and Matt Marcus (CPO). The founders met at LendingHome, where they were responsible for the company’s payment operations. This included funding loans, collecting monthly payments, initiating investor deposits, handling transfers, and reconciling everything. Through their first-hand experience, they realized the inefficiency and waste of the manual and human-capital-intensive process of building tools to connect to banks, manage all of the money going out in the form of loans and coming back in monthly payments, and reconcile their books. When they began to see this as a universal problem, they recognized a massive opportunity and left to start Modern Treasury.

Today, Modern Treasury is one of the most innovative payments solutions on the market. The company brings a much-needed automated payment infrastructure to the business world. Its solution includes all the workflow around money movement to make those processes faster, more reliable, and more efficient.

The key enabler of the Modern Treasury product is its network of banks. The company has API connections with more than 25 banks today. By connecting into this network and providing a friendly user interface on top, they’re able to facilitate traditionally cumbersome processes like payment initiation, tracking and attributing sent and received funds, resolving payment failures and returns, and reconciling transactions to bank statements and the ledger.

Modern Treasury has capitalized on strong market tailwinds and achieved tremendous growth. Its customers reconcile more than $2.8 billion per month using the platform, up from $1 billion a year ago. Customers include fast-growing companies such as Gusto, TripActions, and Marqeta. Customers are driving more than $300 million in Real Time Payments, or RTP, over the Modern Treasury platform per year. RTP is the first new payment rail in the U.S. in four decades.

We are thrilled to partner with Modern Treasury on their next chapter as they transform the way teams move and track money, catalyzing growth in the economy’s most important sectors, from real estate and healthcare to education and financial services. We hope you will join us in welcoming Modern Treasury to the Salesforce Ventures family!

Modern Treasury: Improving the way businesses move and track money was originally published in Salesforce Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Reflecting on 2021, one thing is clear: enterprises can’t seem to get enough of the cloud.

By Alex Kayyal and the Salesforce Ventures team

Since 2009, our mission at Salesforce Ventures has been to invest in the most innovative cloud companies and founders around the world and support them in their efforts to reimagine the future of enterprise technology. Each year our team meets with thousands of cloud companies and speaks with hundreds of CxOs and experts in our network. And while we always believed in the impact and potential of the cloud, we’ve never seen growth like we’ve seen in the past twelve months.

Cloud companies are handily blowing through previously-set records across every measure — whether it’s product adoption, growth rates, or large customer deployments. While best-in-class companies would previously target 3x year-on-year growth, we’re now seeing outlier companies that are growing revenue 5x-10x per year. And the timeline from inception to $100M ARR has never been so short. Growth-stage companies that would typically model annual growth declines year after year are now seeing acceleration in revenue growth — something we had historically rarely seen in SaaS.

In 2021 we invested in a number of next-gen software companies that have exceeded even our most ambitious expectations, including Aiven, BetterUp, Drata, Miro, Monte Carlo, PopMenu, Vercel, and Wiz.

Even still, the potential ahead of us appears to be far greater. According to Morgan Stanley, only 25% of application workloads are running in the public cloud today, representing a significant growth opportunity. In a recent survey of CIOs, Morgan Stanley noted that in the next three years, that figure could rise to 44%.

The public markets may have pulled back from technology in recent weeks, but based on our internal research, we believe enterprises will continue to be big buyers of software and that the long-term holds great promise for the cloud. We are investing accordingly: this past year we invested ~$1.7B in capital and welcomed Slack Fund. In the same period, 22 of our companies were acquired and eight went public.

As we’ve written previously, the global pandemic necessitated a trend toward remote and hybrid work, which continues to drive demand for cloud technology. However, at the same time, there is also a broader and more permanent sentiment shift toward working in the cloud that is rooted in the belief that the cloud enables more efficient, more resilient, smarter ways to do business.

Salesforce Ventures has obviously been bullish on the cloud for more than a decade, but even we are amazed to discover how many of our companies’ addressable markets have rapidly expanded over the past couple of years and are now far larger than anticipated.

As we look back on the companies we partnered with this year, we’ve realized that the fastest-growing cloud companies have a few things in common:

1. They’re building mission-critical solutions
2. They’re inventing and mastering new growth strategies, including product-led growth and community-building
3. They foster more online collaboration between internal and external teams

Here is a little more context on how some of the fastest-growing cloud companies exemplify these trends.

#1: It’s hard to say no to mission-critical software

As enterprises adopt more and more cloud technology and expand their multi-cloud environments, they’re coming up against new challenges such as data management and security. Companies that help CIOs and data teams manage and extract value from their data or help keep CISOs out of the news have become critical.

• Wiz, an agentless, API-based company that secures cloud infrastructure, saw a massive acceleration in demand as more workloads shifted to the cloud in 2020 and 2021. By providing a singular platform that security teams could use to monitor vulnerabilities across a company’s entire cloud environment, Wiz has become a mission-critical platform for the world’s leading companies.
• As security has become a board-level conversation, companies are demanding that their vendors meet critical requirements, such as achieving SOC2 compliance. This was a key driver behind our investment in Drata, a security and compliance automation platform that makes it easy for companies to automate the process and build trust with their customers.
• Like security, as data has become a key differentiator among companies, data management has turned from a nice-to-have to a must-have. Companies continually generate increasing amounts of data, including user data, log files, and time-series metrics. These data sets often reside in different locations; organizations that are able to analyze these distributed data sets efficiently and at scale have a competitive advantage. This is the mission of Starburst Data, which sells a distributed data analytics engine that makes it easy for users to access and query data wherever it lives.

#2: Product-led growth and passionate communities create incredible flywheels

Hyper-targeted marketing and tailored online customer journeys make it easier than ever to attract individual users, who invite others to join them and create the adoption flywheel known as product-led growth. Buying power has shifted from top-down, CxO-driven decisions to sales processes that are driven by the end-user. As individuals and teams try to solve problems to improve their own workflows, they are increasingly relying on communities to help them find the best solutions.

• Slack was a pioneer in building a bottoms-up go-to-market strategy, and now companies are increasingly leveraging Slack to build their own communities. Airbyte, an open-source data ingestion company, has fostered a robust Slack community with thousands of members who can connect with other users, ask questions about the product, and update users on new features. Airbyte also announced a participative model, where developers who build on Airbyte can earn a share of revenue when their data connectors are used.
• Aiven, a managed open source data technology company, has made giving back to the community part of the company’s mission. In 2021, it launched an official program dedicated to contributing to open source as well as a startup program that offers free credits and access to Aiven’s expertise and support to enable startups to get to market faster.
• Strong communities provide product validation. When talking with customers of Salesforce Ventures portfolio companies such as Astronomer, which is building a data orchestration engine on top of the open-source Airflow project, we noticed buyers look at metrics such as Github stars, forks, and contributors to understand how active and successful a project was.

#3: In a fast-moving, remote-first, global economy, cloud-based collaboration is imperative

When all or most of your work is done in the cloud, collaboration software is the new office. It’s no wonder the collaboration software market, valued at $28 billion, is growing 15% annually. Last year, Keybanc published a survey in which 67% of CIOs said collaboration is their #1 budget priority. Salesforce Ventures has been actively investing in tools that increase productivity for teams, whether they’re in person, remote, or hybrid.

• This past June we invested in monday.com, which provides an asynchronous, no-code software platform to manage workflows and has created a new category of software it calls “Work OS.” The company makes it easy for employees across an organization to create their own workflows without the help of a team of engineers. Getting started in the product is incredibly easy, and their ability to turn the complex into simple has led to a large array of collaboration and workflow use cases that their users absolutely love.
• We also invested in Airtable, a connected apps platform that helps users modernize business processes, and Notion, a platform designed to boost team productivity, with the goal of helping enterprises improve collaboration among the 1.25 billion knowledge workers globally.

Values-driven companies continue to win

Salesforce Ventures invests according to our values, including a focus on social responsibility, sustainability, and diversity. We are proud to partner with companies that lead with their principles. We’ve introduced a DEI clause in all of our deal agreements with founders to ensure alignment upfront. We routinely check a company’s Glassdoor rating before making an investment decision, and we will walk away if we believe the company’s values don’t align with our own.

• We also have 190+ companies in our portfolio that have joined the Pledge 1% movement. Modeled after Salesforce’s 1–1–1 model, this program allows companies to donate 1% of their time, equity, product or profit back into their communities.
• We’re thrilled to continue our support for Black Venture Institute. Since its launch in Fall 2020, BVI has graduated three cohorts — that’s 160 new Black check writers in venture capital! These graduates have made over 300 individual angel investments and evaluated over 1,000 new investments.
• During the pandemic, people all over the world have had to deal with adversity, leading to an unprecedented rise in mental health challenges. This is one reason why we are proud to partner with BetterUp and Lyra, two companies that put values at the core of their business. We also doubled down on our investments in companies such as Unite Us, which is closing gaps in health and social services for historically underserved populations.
• Against the backdrop of unprecedented climate events and Salesforce’s own Net Zero achievement, we accelerated our sustainability investments in carbon offsets, where Sylvera plays a critical role in verifying carbon offset data to ensure that funds flow to the highest-quality projects.

Onward

If we’ve learned anything these past two years, it’s that change is the only constant. Cloud technology helps workers learn, respond and iterate faster, giving their companies a competitive edge. The future for the cloud is wide open and we’re here for it. Come talk to us.

Here’s a closer look at 2021:

A Seemingly Endless Appetite for the Cloud was originally published in Salesforce Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Salesforce Ventures invests in Wheel, provider of a virtual care platform and clinician network that helps fuel the next generation of healthcare.

By Katie Schwartz Thiry and Zak Kokosa

If you were unfamiliar with telehealth prior to the pandemic, you are likely familiar with it now. 2020 and 2021 saw massive increases in the adoption of telemedicine as the healthcare industry found itself turning to telemedicine to meet patient needs. More consumers than ever have tried telemedicine — a trend that is not going away any time soon.

In fact, as consumers and providers increasingly adopt telehealth solutions, McKinsey estimates that “up to $250B of current US healthcare spend could potentially be virtualized.” Yet, every digital health company, hospital, and insurer faces the same two obstacles: a need for more doctors and better technological infrastructure.

Enter Wheel: Wheel provides a white-label virtual care platform with an integrated nationwide clinician network. Wheel’s end-to-end solution allows companies to offer a virtual care offering quickly and less expensively.

Salesforce Ventures believes in the unbundling of the hospital and invests in the infrastructure to support that thesis. That is why we are proud to announce that Salesforce Ventures is joining Lightspeed Venture Partners and Tiger Global in investing in Wheel.

A Perfect Storm for the Rise of Telehealth

A pandemic-fueled macro backdrop, increasing focus on patient experience and access, and a burnt-out healthcare workforce have created the perfect storm for the rise of telehealth.

But creating a telehealth product overnight is not easy. Whether we are talking about direct-to-consumer, virtual-first care offerings building out their clinician networks, or legacy healthcare players racing to offer virtual care to patients — no matter who you are, building a virtual care offering takes time and money. And it is no surprise that we are seeing companies, like Cigna, acquiring telehealth providers, like MDLive — a trend we expect to continue.

Wheel was co-founded in 2018 by Michelle Davey, whose childhood spent in a rural community with few medical resources drove her desire to improve consumer access to healthcare. Her career was spent working in healthcare, tech, marketplaces, and virtual care, including impressive roles in recruiting and talent at Google. It was through those experiences that she saw the opportunity to build a new workforce structure in healthcare — Wheel.

Today, Wheel is one of the most innovative healthcare solutions on the market. They provide digital health companies, clinical lab networks, retailers, traditional healthcare providers, and tech companies an out-of-the-box virtual care experience under their brand. Offering virtual care across 50 states in real-time can be incredibly complex. Wheel’s platform simplifies the operational and regulatory complexities, enabling companies to offer virtual care faster and at a lower cost, with access to a nationwide clinician network. For clinicians, Wheel provides vetted telehealth opportunities and a central location to manage their practice.

“Telehealth 1.0 brought healthcare visits online but companies are still struggling to meet their patients’ care needs,” said Wheel CEO and founder Michelle Davey. “We recognized that to move the healthcare industry forward and truly deliver on the promise of virtual-first care, we need both the infrastructure and workforce that can deliver anytime, anywhere care. We’re excited to continue leading the charge and making personalized care a reality.”

The company has capitalized on telemedicine tailwinds and realized tremendous growth. In 2021, Wheel powered 1.3 million patient visits, a figure anticipated to grow 3x by the end of 2022. Not only that, in an industry swamped with burnout and workforce shortages, Wheel’s clinician network increased 60% YoY — impressive growth while bolstering a 90% clinician retention rate.

We couldn’t be more excited about Wheel and the tremendous journey in front of them. We’re thrilled to partner with Michelle and the entire team on the next chapter as they help fuel the next generation of healthcare. We hope you will join us in welcoming Wheel to the Salesforce Ventures family!

Moving Healthcare Forward was originally published in Salesforce Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Salesforce Ventures announces its significant investment in the $400 million Series C round of Miro, the online collaborative whiteboard platform that brings teams together, anytime, anywhere.

By Alex Kayyal, Nowi Kallen, Jessica Bartos, Kartik Gupta, and Samuel Ackah-Yensu

We all know “a picture is worth a thousand words.” Yet most software apps for knowledge workers only provide new ways to write and organize words — and little-to-no ability to collaborate visually.

This problem is particularly acute in the new era of distributed work. In the past, you gathered around a whiteboard in a conference room to brainstorm new ideas with your team. The group’s productivity was limited by the physical size of the whiteboard and whoever was in the room. Post-meeting, if you wanted to share your team’s work, all you could do was take a photo of the whiteboard. The old way of collaboration is static and limited by physical constraints and doesn’t work at all in our digital world.

Enter Miro, a visual collaboration platform for knowledge workers. Miro is a cloud-based digital canvas where you can co-create visually with your colleagues in real-time and asynchronously. Your team can use Miro to exchange ideas, make complex decisions, design products, and processes, host meetings, and gather and organize detailed feedback — all in a fun, accessible, interactive way. We are proud to announce that Salesforce Ventures is making a significant investment in Miro’s $400 million Series C fundraise.

The future of work = Digital HQ

This investment reflects our belief in the rise of the “Digital HQ” as the foundation of the future of work. It demonstrates our conviction that the future of the enterprise is collaborative — as evidenced by our earlier investments in collaboration software companies such as Airtable, Hopin, Monday, and Zoom. The collaboration software market is currently valued at $28 billion and is growing at a 15% CAGR. Last year, Keybanc published a survey in which 67% of CIOs said collaboration is their #1 budget priority.

At Salesforce Ventures, we believe visual collaboration will become one of the most important categories of enterprise software in the coming years as teams continue to look for ways to bring the interactive, visual elements of in-person teamwork into new hybrid environments.”Indicating this trend, Gartner reported a 10x increase in interest in visual collaboration over the past 18 months.

Easy to adopt and easy to scale

Miro has become the visual collaboration category leader thanks to its product-led growth strategy and easy-to-adopt nature. Initially gaining traction among designers, product managers, and engineers, Miro spreads virally in an organization as workers invite colleagues to collaborate. Sales teams host interactive meetings with customers on their Miro boards. Executives ideate on strategy and plan new projects. Learning and development teams create and deliver engaging interactive content.

Miro encourages multi-directional communication and is scalable to thousands of team members working together from anywhere, on any device. And Miro integrates with 100+ other tools, such as Airtable, Confluence, Jira, Monday, Office 365, Slack, Trello, and Zoom.

Since its April 2020 Series B, Miro has grown from five million users to more than 30 million. Its paying customers have increased by more than 550%, and Miro is now used by employees at 99% of Fortune 100 enterprises. Miro’s enterprise business has also shown significant growth and progress — the company now has 20 customers with contracts worth $1+ million in annual recurring revenue. Indeed, this is one of the fastest-growing enterprise software companies we’ve come across.

Customer love and community

What’s Miro’s secret? Customer love and community. The company’s founder and CEO, Andrey Khusid, is a product leader who guides the company toward delighting users through continued product iteration. For example, in recent months, Andrey and his team have added deeper functionality to facilitate new ways to run meetings in Miro with Smart Meetings, which includes chat, reactions (love those!), voting, and increased controls — all of which contribute to a more dynamic, inclusive, and interactive experience.

Miro is the highest-rated visual collaboration tool on G2 and its Net Promoter Score rivals much-loved consumer brands. The company created and fosters a community of its most passionate users. Dubbed “The Miroverse,” it gives users a sense of ownership of the product and has become an integral part of Miro’s organic growth. In the Miroverse, members advise and inspire each other, while also sharing templates (more than 1,000 so far) to help others quickly get up to speed and make new boards of their own.

Dual-headquartered in Amsterdam and San Francisco, Miro has assembled a global organization of more than 1,200 employees — a 5x increase in the last 24 months. Andrey and the “Mironeers” have built a world-class culture. The company earns high Glassdoor ratings: 92% of employees would recommend Miro to their friends.

We’re excited by the scale of the problem Miro solves, its product innovation, stellar hypergrowth execution, and amazing team. Miro’s story shows that great businesses can be built anywhere — unconstrained by borders or distance. We view Miro as a generational company that will disrupt collaboration in the enterprise for years to come.

Congratulations, Miro, and welcome to the Salesforce Ventures family!

Welcome to the Miroverse: Unlocking Expression in the Enterprise was originally published in Salesforce Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Salesforce Ventures announces its investment in the $62 million Series B round of Klue, a powerful competitive intelligence tool that enables its customers to win more business.

By David Kellenberger and Zak Kokosa

Would you say your business is more, or less competitive now than a few years ago? Do you feel confident that everyone on your sales team has the most up-to-date information that will allow them to win out against the competition?

In today’s highly competitive environment, chances are, you feel less confident and less prepared than you used to. Nine out of ten executives say their business has become more competitive in the last three years. Competitive intelligence is a must-have: 95% of companies invest in their compete function.

We all know that well-informed sales and marketing teams have a much greater chance of success. Yet very little of the data that companies collect or share on competitors, competing products or strategy get to the people who need it most, when they need it most. Globalization and remote work have made a comprehensive compete driven strategy even more difficult, as teams are less coordinated and less able to share valuable competitive intelligence through traditional channels.

That is why we’re happy to announce that Salesforce Ventures has joined Tiger Global in Klue’s $62 million Series B round. Klue is an AI-powered competitive intelligence tool used by industry leaders across the board. Klue is based in Vancouver and is a signal of our continued confidence in the rapidly-expanding sales enablement technology segment.

Data, data everywhere — but where are the insights?

We all know that the amount of data available has been roughly doubling every two years — much of it unstructured. Publicly available and internally-generated competitive data and insights are no exception. This trend has been further accelerated by the increasing use of collaboration tools driven by remote work. But this also makes it challenging to get any value from it — the data spread out all over the place. It’s exhausting and expensive to try to surface valuable insights, especially using manual processes to collect data, curate intel and distribute insights.

Your teams work hard to uncover and compile competitive data — but where is it exactly, in what form? Is it up-to-date and comprehensive? Does the team in Sydney have it? How about your external sales channel partners? That new rep who just joined in Dublin?

Putting “Intelligence” into Competitive Intelligence

When we first met Jason and Klue over a year ago, we could not have been more impressed. Klue’s AI-driven insights collection and curation engine autonomously maps and surfaces critical competitive insights from over three million sources across the web and all of your internal applications / collaboration tools. Including Salesforce, Slack, Highspot and Gong, as well as email, presentations and white papers, then curating and driving key insights to your sales and marketing teams to win, defend and expand business.

Jason Smith, Klue’s CEO and Co-Founder, brings a range of relevant experience in the tech industry. He was president of Vision Critical, a customer intelligence SaaS company, and VP of sales and marketing at GAIA Custom, as well as prior co-founder of two businesses. He understood the necessity of helping sales teams move faster — especially in relation to winning deals — which led him to found Klue. Today Klue counts over 100,000 users from customers including Cisco, Workday, Shopify and Zoom. Klue was also just named a winner of Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 Canada!

The initial wave of sales enablement was all about improving workflows, now leaders and new entrants alike are focused on driving intelligence and automation through their solutions. Klue’s automated collection, curation and distribution of the right insights at the right time is key to driving Competitive Intelligence and the Sales Enablement industry forward. We believe this is just the beginning.

We hope you will join us in welcoming Klue to Salesforce Ventures!

Unlock the Hidden Value of Competitive Data with Klue was originally published in Salesforce Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The best things to automate are the tedious, time-consuming things no one wants to do but everyone has to do. Taxes. Invoices. Insurance claims. Anything with the word “compliance” in it. Now imagine it’s also existential: If things go wrong, your company could lose customer trust and its public reputation. Understandably, security and data compliance is on the top of many company’s to-do lists.

That’s why I was so intrigued when I heard about Drata, a 17 month-old company that is creating a pervasive layer of trust across the internet by helping customers automate security and compliance. “Trust is at the core of what we do,” says Drata CEO and Founder Adam Markowitz.

I’m happy to announce today that Salesforce Ventures has joined ICONIQ Growth in investing in Drata’s $100 million Series B round, joining Alkeon Capital and previous investors Cowboy Ventures, Leaders Fund, and GGV Capital. With this new financing, Drata is now officially the first $1 billion company in this new market.

Why are we so excited about this promising young company? In short, pain, scale, execution, and vision. The risk of security non-compliance is very real, very important, and rising: According to Statista, the monetary damage caused by reported cybercrime was $4.2B in 2020 — four times as much as in 2015.

Because the incidents of cybercrime and other data breaches are rising and the consequences are so severe, tech buyers at most big companies are requiring SOC 2 compliance — the current industry standard for data security — for all their software providers. That means every cloud software startup that is trying to sell into larger companies will want to get certified in order to land more customers and bring in more revenue, faster.

At his last startup, an education platform, Adam was frequently asked by potential customers to provide a SOC 2 report as evidence of the company’s security stance. “With massive data breaches happening more often, it felt as though a magnifying glass was being rightfully placed over data privacy and security, which meant companies like ours were going to need to prove early and often that they prioritize the security of their customers’ data,” he said in an interview.

More and more of our founders of Salesforce Ventures portfolio companies have told us they, too, are struggling through the process of SOC 2 compliance and are looking for ways to automate the process. And that’s precisely why Drata is growing so fast. In its first 45 days on the market, the company secured 100 customers and is on track to reach thousands next year.

The grunt work of compliance

Achieving SOC 2 certification requires tracking down hard-to-find details, sifting through old emails, taking hundreds of screenshots, and creating reams of documentation. This problem only gets harder as companies scale. Each new employee or contractor requires the addition of new security controls. And SOC 2 certification requires that not only you but also your vendors and contractors, meet compliance. Considering the fact that a typical small enterprise works with 50–100 or more vendors, the complexity is dizzying.

Getting to SOC 2 certification takes the average company 600 hours, which continues to climb as the company grows and continually needs to be renewed. It also requires hiring an expensive consulting firm to walk you through the process and give you the rubber stamp.

But with Drata, most of the manual labor is automated — including evidence collection, policy creation and continuous security control monitoring — saving your engineers hundreds or even thousands of hours that would be better spent working on your product. Drata also integrates into more than 50 apps, infrastructure providers, identity providers, code repositories, including your CRM, HRIS, and Slack. And Drata is constantly rolling out more integrations. Additionally, the company has partnered with dozens of audit firms to make sure its product is customized to suit their needs, which drastically reduces your audit time and cost.

So many regulations, so many kinds of compliance

The world is full of rules, standards, and regulations for all sorts of industries, from tech and finance to healthcare. Drata’s first product eases the suffering of companies aiming for SOC 2 compliance. The company recently added automated compliance assistance for ISO 27001, another data security standard.

Ultimately, Drata aims to solve problems across many more governance, risk, and compliance issues. They’ve already launched their ISO 27001 product and will soon include HIPAA, PCI DSS, and more. As the company realizes its product roadmap, Drata’s addressable market will continue to grow.

At Salesforce, trust is our number one value. Drata’s mission to build a layer of trust around the modern enterprise resonates, and we’re delighted to support the company through its next wave of growth. Welcome, Drata!

Your Compliance Robot was originally published in Salesforce Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

By Paul Drews and Gwendolyn Umbach

Years ago, companies were led by executives who made decisions based on “gut feel.” If that’s hard to believe, chances are pretty good that you run your business based on data — as much of it as you can get your hands on. And, chances are, the more data-centric your business, the more important it is to you that your data is accurate and can be trusted.

But there can be dozens of touchpoints between you and the original data source, and mistakes can come from anywhere in the organization. The only way to know whether you can rely on what your data is telling you is to proactively monitor the health of your data flow so you can course-correct if something goes wrong — because when it does go wrong, businesses come to an expensive, screeching halt. According to an IBM study, poor data quality costs the US economy up to $3.1 trillion yearly.

At Salesforce Ventures, we believe every single company that wants to make data-driven decisions will need an effective, proactive approach to solving this problem. That is why we are proud to announce that Salesforce Ventures is joining Accel, GGV Capital, Iconiq, and Redpoint Ventures in investing in Monte Carlo.

Digital transformation = data, data, and more data

It’s hard to overstate the massive worldwide explosion in data. More than 59 zettabytes (ZB) of data will be created, captured, copied, and consumed in the world this year, according to a Global DataSphere report from International Data Corporation. The report predicted that the amount of data created over the next three years will be more than the data created over the past 30 years.

As our personal and professional lives move online, and as businesses continue to migrate to the cloud, more and more data will be generated, stored, and analyzed — and managing it all is getting increasingly complex. Business leaders are now looking to use data to make decisions across every function in the organization. To do so, they need access to trusted data. Yet as the applications ingesting, storing, processing, and modeling data become increasingly siloed and complex, the opportunity for error grows.

If someone in the company finds an error in a report that is caused by bad data — say, only 28 days out of 30 were included in a monthly sales summary, or a customer calls to complain about incorrect data in a product dashboard — suddenly everything is in doubt. People wonder: “If this chart is wrong, what other charts are wrong?”

In the same way that New Relic, Datadog, and other performance management solutions ensure reliable software and keep downtime at bay, Monte Carlo solves the problem of broken data pipelines and data downtime — periods of time when data is missing, inaccurate, or otherwise erroneous.

Monte Carlo tracks and observes data as it progresses throughout its life cycle, using machine learning to analyze the data, ensure that quality is up to par, and track relationships between data assets. Their system proactively identifies data downtime and notifies those who need to know, while also making it easier for non-engineers to get answers when they need them. Since its launch in 2019, Monte Carlo has helped data teams reduce infrastructure costs by 3X, save 120 hours per week and decrease the number of data incidents by 90%.

Data as a competitive advantage

Monte Carlo’s mission is to accelerate the world’s adoption of data. Making sure data can be trusted is a core brand promise. Its customers include a number of companies for which data is a competitive advantage and data integrity is existential, such as Affirm, Fox, Intuit, Nerdwallet, PagerDuty, and Vimeo.

The company’s founders each came from leading software companies where data is used as a competitive advantage. Their expertise comes together in a unique way to solve a growing problem they each personally experienced around monitoring valuable data flows. Barr Moses, Co-founder, and CEO was previously VP Customer Operations at Gainsight, where she built the company’s first data team; Lior Gavish, Co-founder, and CTO was formerly SVP Engineering at Barracuda, where he built fraud detection systems powered by data, machine learning, and analytics.

“In 2021, it’s not enough to use data to drive accurate decision making; you need to trust it, too. If you’ve been on the receiving end of bad data, you understand the pain: lost revenue, wasted time, and most importantly, lost confidence,” says Moses. “Monte Carlo enables teams to stop bad data before it impacts the business.”

“As companies become more data-driven, it’s fundamental that organizations not only understand the health of their data but also have the data observability necessary to trust it from end to end,” says Gavish.

The data management landscape is ripe for disruption. Solutions abound to help companies manage where data comes from, where it goes, how it moves around, how it gets prepared and how it gets used. At Salesforce Ventures, we are bullish on companies that solve data problems. We hope you will join us in welcoming Monte Carlo, and if you are building something in this space, we hope to hear from you.

Data Engineering is Making Relying on Gut Decisions A Thing of the Past was originally published in Salesforce Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Future of Work — Leaders Tell All

For the knowledge economy, going to work is more of a state of being than it is a destination. And for the past year, this concept was put to the test as many corporate leaders rose to the occasion to transition entire industries online and create new ones. But as offices begin to reopen, the question remains — what does the future of work look like? And how can technology and community drive innovation and a sense of purpose no matter where people work? Top CEOs — Christal Bemont of Talend, Wade Foster of Zapier, Johnny Boufarhat, of Hopin, and Anjali Sud of Vimeo — discuss their predictions regarding the work-from-anywhere movement, how tech is reimagining the way businesses operate, and their leadership insights into building inclusive and equitable hybrid work environments.

Speakers

Anjali Sud, CEO of Vimeo, Christal Bemont, CEO of Talend, Johnny Boufarhat, CEO of Hopin, and Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier

Watch the session!

Transcript

Anjali Sud: Hi, I’m Anjali Sud. I’m the CEO of Vimeo.

Wade Foster: Hi, I’m Wade Foster, co-founder and CEO at Zapier.

Johnny Boufarhat: Hello, I’m Johnny Boufarhat, founder and CEO of Hopin.

Christal Bemont: Hi, I’m Christal Bemont. I’m the CEO of Talend.

Anjali Sud: Welcome to Cloud 100. All right. Hi, everyone. It is great to be here at Cloud 100. I’m really looking forward to this conversation. We have four CEOs and leaders here who are building the companies of the future and the software of the future. And so we’re just going to dive right in. Obviously, all of us in the tech world have had to adjust pretty dramatically in the last year with the pandemic and this immediate shift to remote work. But actually I think Johnny and Wade, you both were already embracing remote work before the pandemic, so I’m just curious how, if at all, did you have to change how you and your teams worked? And did you learn anything from this last year-and-a-half that’s shifted how you think about your work? Johnny, maybe you could start.

Johnny Boufarhat: Well, I was hoping Wade would start because I mean, before the pandemic, our company wasn’t that big. So most of the way that we operated, we were a fully remote company, but we didn’t change much and a lot of what we learned about how to operate remotely was from Wade at Zapier and other great companies, like Gitlab, et cetera. So, I’ll pass that on to Wade because I think he’ll give a better answer than me.

Wade Foster: Well, you’re too kind, Johnny. We started Zapier in 2011, fully distributed from the get-go. In terms of how the pandemic changed our operating model, we’re fortunate in that a lot of the rituals and routines that we’d set up continued to work through the pandemic, but that wasn’t universally true. Remote work in sort of a, I guess, “normal time” is different than when you’re going through a pandemic and the key things or the things that changed around us. In particular, I think about things like caretakers losing access to the normal things that they have access to. Schools being shut down, daycares being shut down. If you’re taking care of an older parent, all of those things now fall to the burden of all of us. And if you’re trying to juggle a day job while watching a child at the same time, you know how difficult that is.

Wade Foster: And so, for many of us, 40-hour work-weeks that were sort of the norm became quite challenging and we didn’t have the sort of normal rhythm of the day to get that work done. And so, I can’t say that we were un-impacted by the pandemic because of that, just because we were remote to get-go, all the other stuff in the world definitely had an effect.

Wade Foster: There were things that we were able to do to sort of mitigate some of those hurdles. I think one big thing that we continue to strive to do is be asynchronous in a lot of our work that bakes in a lot of flexibility in terms of how you approach things. If you can handle things in the morning or in the evening, or whenever is best for you, that frees people up to do things like take care of their kids, help them with homework, help them with Zoom school, what have you, and then you can sort of get to work when makes sense for you. So I think really leaning into the flexibility that remote work can afford through asynchronous work was one of the key habits that really made work better, not great, but still better through the pandemic. So I think that would be the one really important adjustment that we paid attention to.

Anjali Sud: Yeah, that makes sense. And you know Vimeo is an example of a company where about 10% of our workforce was remote, so it was a big adjustment for us. And if anything, I think we’ve become more distributed globally as a team and it’s actually been awesome because our user base is so global and we’ve really been able to kind of bring in talent from many more parts of the world, which I think has been a real benefit to the business. Christal, you had a really interesting experience, I believe. You literally stepped in as CEO like a few weeks before the pandemic hit. Amazing diving. So how did you navigate that transition of literally coming in and getting up to speed while also managing through this sort of crazy time?

Christal Bemont: Well, it certainly was an interesting time and it was something that no matter how long you were in the chair, I think it was a challenge. It was really about the uncertainty of knowing how much you could continue to run fast when you had a lot of plans ahead of you and how much you needed to slow down just to see around the corner of what was next. And I think what it did, if to put a positive spin on it, was really required action and decisiveness because there wasn’t really a choice to just sit and wait. I didn’t feel like that was the right thing to do. And so really it was about putting things into action, not just about what we were going to do from a strategy perspective, but how we were going to take care of our employees and what it meant to define wellbeing that went outside of physical health, but also mental health, which is a really big focus for me and the way that I think about taking care of the people that run this business.

Anjali Sud: Well, I think it’s an incredible feat. I can’t imagine having to do that while becoming the CEO of a company for the first time. So let’s talk about, each of us are leading companies that are trying to use technology to help people work better. I know Vimeo since the pandemic and we saw a big spike in large companies using video in ways they hadn’t before, live streaming their town halls in Netflix like quality, HR teams sending video messages to welcome employees. Every employee is sort of becoming a content creator and we’ve been sort of building the tools to make that easier. I’d love for each of us to share sort of what are the things that you’ve seen the pandemic has actually changed behavior and opened up opportunities for your technology and what innovation are you most excited about bringing to your customers? Maybe Johnny, you could start us off.

Johnny Boufarhat: Absolutely. So for us, obviously in the past few months we’ve seen a huge amount of adoption, not only of the typical type of events that you would expect Hopin to be powering like a virtual conference like this, but more on the internal conferences that people are hosting inside their companies. So whether it’s a company all hands or a workshop or a sales kickoff or whatever it is across the company, that’s where we’re starting to see lots of usage because people are starting to adopt a more virtual and remote mindset. Even if you’re going back into a hybrid work workplace, you still need to talk to all your employees wherever they are in the world.

Johnny Boufarhat: So, extended use cases outside a company, recruitment fair, and virtual conferences, we’re seeing a lot of that. On top of that, we made some quite interesting changes to how our product works. And in terms of we, added Boom Stack, which is a physical event provider to our suite so that we’re able to power these hybrid events right in the middle where you have people attending on site, but also virtually. And so, innovating in that space, which really wasn’t a thing hybrid, the events, has been super exciting for us and also a huge opportunity for us to invent and that’s what we love doing as a company.

Anjali Sud: I’m curious, do you think that you can create a world or technology and experience where the online experience is just as engaging and sort of effective as the offline experience?

Johnny Boufarhat: I think there are two parts to it when it comes to engaging and effective, I think when it comes to the effectiveness, I think 100%, I think organizers already who run events on Hopin see that they get to attract ten times as many people wherever they are in the world and the sort of data and analytics that they’re getting from these events are unlike anything you could get from a physical event, from how engaged they actually are with the content that they’re watching and who they’re networking with and who they’re engaging with at the event.

Now from an engagement piece, I think it really depends. I don’t think the virtual component is going to compete with a fire-breathing sort of event where you’re kind of learning yoga, whatever it is, where it’s really, we call them experiential events. But everything else that’s content-based, I think virtual can be a lot more engaging and that’s why we’ve implemented so many integrations as a platform where you’re able to now implement Trivia inside Hopin, you’re able to really far third party projects, like if you wanted to play poker within a session during a Hopin event, you’d be able to have that sort of extreme setup. And all of these things add to that engagement piece.

And you asked about what the most exciting thing for us in the long-term is, we’re super excited. We think that similar to how Vimeo sees the world from video being in the future, we also see video being the future like many other companies. And I think we’re going to be doubling down on not only the larger events that you see Hopin in, but also smaller to medium-sized meetings and events and I think there’s a next-gen that’s coming because of the pandemic where companies realize how much innovation is needed in order to take us to the next steps of hybrid and remote work workplaces.

Anjali Sud: Well, you’re definitely speaking my language. Wade, what are you seeing at Zapier?

Wade Foster: Yeah, I think Christal talked a little bit about the importance of speed and agility and decisiveness. And I think so many companies realized how important that was. And at Zapier, I think that’s one of the things a lot of our customers benefited from was being able to build automation, build new systems and processes in minutes and hours rather than days and weeks.

We had a customer that provided event-building exercises at museums in New York City, and overnight that business lost basically all of its business. It went from three million dollars to nothing and had to lay everyone off, but they were able to pivot to teambuilding.com and start providing online experiences in part, because they were able to build out the entire business through Zapier in a weekend and that business now has more employees than it had before the pandemic. And so being able to build out these applications, websites, workflows, automations, whatever you want to call those, in such a short amount of time is something I think all of us have learned is that ability to adjust, adapt on the spot, and having technology that allows you to do that is so critical.

Christal Bemont: I think that’s a forcing function. I think it’s a wake-up call for something that’s been long overdue. I look at it as if you could take a positive out of it, and I always try to look at the reality of a situation, is it checks you to see if you’re working at the level that you need to be working both on behalf of your company and your customers. And I completely agree with you. I think it’s more behind, quite frankly. I think if we take a look at how long it took us to get here, you would never want this to be the thing, but now that it is, it’s like what’s possible? How do we push ourselves beyond what’s even thinkable right now?

And it’s the same for us. We look at customers like Via Medical. Ventilators were pretty or have been a really important part of solving for at least the repercussions of COVID. And we have Via Medical who are, they could at most create 60 ventilators a week 60, 60. And Ed would tell me the guy who runs all of their data, their processes, the operations of their organization, he’s like, “Christal, maybe we could get it to 61.” They do 600 a day. And they do that because they had to rethink the way and it’s automation exactly what you were saying. And they had to force themselves outside, but if they didn’t have a good foundation of data and some of the things that require you to run operations at a speed that you can, for us was really about showing up for our customers in a way that they had to stay in business. They had to reimagine the way that they met their customers online.

And we have pharmaceutical companies that had to make sure more than anything that the data they were using was helping them instrument and make the decisions and operate their business. And you know what happens when you don’t have good data. It’s not necessarily the best outcome, but I just think this is a wake-up call and I don’t need to wait for the next one, I’ll tell you that right now.

Anjali Sud: Yeah, I think necessity is definitely the mother of invention and I think we’re all experiencing it. And if anything, what we observe is a lot of people were very reactive at the beginning of the pandemic because they had to be. And now, as we’re sort of re-emerging, people are becoming more intentional. Intentional about the way that they design their technology stack and workplace environments. I think it’s a good segue to a topic that I’m sure you all have been dealing with a lot, which is culture. If anything, I know I’ve learned a lot about being more intentional about sort of supporting employees, ensuring people are informed, productive, engaged during this time. And I’m wondering, does anyone have any great hacks or solutions or things that have just worked incredibly well beyond what you imagined or that you’re definitely going to be continuing, that you want to share for other leaders? Anyone who has a good one.

Christal Bemont: Go for it.

Wade Foster: You would think having run a remote company for a decade that we would have this solved, but I still think this is even an area where we realized how important any in-person activity is. We relied on in-person events twice, three times a year to really build that human connection. And when that disappears, I think you start to notice how transactional distributed work can seem. It’s an email, a Slack conversation, a quick Zoom call, and it’s usually down to business. And if you do that for a prolonged period of time, you start to notice things just don’t click quite the same way because those relationships aren’t established.

Wade Foster: And so, one simple thing that we’ve started doing in our executive meetings at the beginning of the pandemic is regular green check-ins just to make sure we understand how people are doing. How are people showing up? And then two, we have these silly icebreaker questions. This week we asked, “What was the first concert you ever went to?” And it just is a quick reminder that, “Hey, we’re working with other people who have lives outside of work, who have things that we care about outside of work.” And I think that when we get into the difficult problems that we face inside of work, those reminders just help us treat each other as humans along the way.

Christal Bemont: Yeah. I’m just going to draft up to that. I think first of all, that’s awesome because it’s a, we’re all humans, right? And we have obligations outside of work. And I always thought that it was interesting that people thought you walk in the front door and then you can shut everything else out. It really doesn’t work that way. And I think that if you look at the type of people that you really, if you want authentic, diverse culture, where people really bring their best selves, that means you have to support them in things inside and outside the company. And this again was a wake up call, I think to say, “Hey, first of all, people can’t turn things on and off, so fluidity and flexibility is key.” But also we have to really think about what it means to take care of our people. And they spend a lot of their time focused on the things that we do at work. So, it’s an eye-opener, I think, for a lot of people.

Johnny Boufarhat: I think one thing for us, we implemented a Hopin Vibe team. And I guess this is something a little bit different, and I can share for us, it might be a honeymoon period type thing, but at the company we have an internal MPS of over 90. And I think the way we’ve done that is through this Vibe team, as well as being obviously is probably a honeymoon period with how long we haven’t been around for as long as a lot of the other companies, but it’s worked incredibly well for us as the team basically runs events weekly for people, from mental health events, to trivia nights, to events now city by city. So wherever we have more than ten people in a city, they have a community member that works with the Vibe team to run whatever type of events per city they want to run or per town, so for anyone within ten people plus. So that Vibe team has been instrumental for us. And I got to say, it is a little bit of a pitch, but we’ve been using StreamYard even before the acquisition of StreamYard to basically turn our all-hands events into a shell. And I think it’s something that most of our employees talk about. Our all-hands events are really fun because we really produce it the same way we would a TV show and it’s really enjoyable for everybody.

Anjali Sud: Oh, that’s awesome. I’ll share two hacks. One, it’s sort of related to the vibes thing, which we’ve definitely as we’ve scaled and gotten more distributed, just we need to be better at recognizing great work. It’s really hard. It’s one of the things I think a lot of us have lost with the pandemic. So we rolled out all these like team love initiatives to basically make sure like at every corner of the company, no matter where you are working, we’re kind of giving people shoutouts. And then the other thing, and I’m sure everyone can empathize with this, but we went through a period right when the pandemic hit, where it was like meeting overload. And one of the things, to the point that we made about asynchronous communication, doing things like asynchronous video messaging, we use our Vimeo record tool, but there’s a bunch of others. We’ve really shifted the mix of when meetings actually need to happen versus recording your screen to walk through my presentation or a demo, quickly sending that out and getting comments back. And I think there was a real, tangible productivity benefit while also retaining this sort of connectedness that you get of seeing somebody, their face, talking through a complex and nuanced idea. So I think those have been two that we will definitely be kind of leaning into as we look to the future.

All right, so we’re running out of time, but I want to ask one last question for the group. If you could wave a magic wand and make any future-facing technology or capability just be available in your palm today, what would it be? Christal, do you want to start?

Christal Bemont: You bet. It would be what we’re working on right now and what we’re providing, which is data health. And what I mean by data health is the ability to actually have a confidence monitor, if you will, for every person in the organization who interacts with data so that when talent is running your data operations, we actually can let you know that everything is on track in terms of the quality of data. It’s ironic to me that no one can measure the quality of data today or define it, but more importantly, help people see trouble coming. And there are a lot anomalies in operations and in instrumentation of a business that if you could get in front of those, imagine how much we could help companies really think about avoiding risk, but also looking for opportunities. And I just see it as a foundation and being core to everything that companies are looking to do. So, that’s what we’re working on and that’s what I’d wave a magic wand to develop.

Anjali Sud: Wade, what do you think?

Wade Foster: Well, not necessarily directly related to our work at Zapier, for me, affordable, renewable energy for all, to me, has got to be the thing that if I could wave a magic wand, I would give that to all of us.

Anjali Sud: Johnny?

Johnny Boufarhat: Yeah, I’m going to go outside of the business as well. And I think for me, it’s teleportation. I’m really into accessibility and what’s more accessible than being able to be wherever you are anywhere in the world? So that’s something I would easily wave a magic wand and beg for.

Christal Bemont: Johnny, if you figure that out, buddy, I’m right there. Sign me up.

Wade Foster: Virtual events, what is it? It doesn’t matter…

Christal Bemont: Does it?

Anjali Sud: I love that. Thank you all. It was a really great discussion and we appreciate it. Bye.

Christal Bemont: Thank you so much. Bye.

Johnny Boufarhat: Thank you so much.

Future of Work — Leaders Tell All was originally published in Salesforce Ventures on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.