Driving Better Decisions: Announcing Our Investment in Murmur

We are thrilled to announce our co-lead investment in Murmur! 

Every day at pre-seed startups and Fortune 100 enterprises alike, teams are faced with making decisions big and small. When starting a company, teams need to decide on their mission, vision, and culture. When starting to assemble a team, companies need to align on role descriptions, key competencies, and internal dependencies. When scaling, teams need to align on operating protocols and decision-making frameworks. When planning for the new year, teams must set their goals (OKR, NOMMS, etc) and budget for the next year, and so on. Each of these decision points take time and require iteration as well as input from different parties, typically in the form of multiple meetings and discussions spread across emails, slacks, Notion, Confluence, gSheets, etc.

Now throw in the added complexity of remote and hybrid work as well as different time zones. Not only are these decisions taking up more time than they should, they are also often being made in the dark. Murmur is a new collaborative platform that aims to drive better, faster, and more transparent decision-making by enabling the following:

• Scale organizational capacity: It’s a well known gripe that many meetings and calls could have been taken care of via a single email. Now imagine a whole series of meetings, calls, and emails being replaced with a Murmur agreement. With Murmur, teams can propose an agreement, iterate with input, and finalize a decision within a set timeframe. By creating a culture of agreements where each team member clearly knows their role and responsibilities, Murmur allows for distributed, asynchronous decision-making.
• Maintain up to date agreements that are easily found: Existing agreements and documents at companies are often out of date, incomplete, and disorganized. With Murmur, teams can keep agreements in a centralized and organized repository, increasing transparency and efficiency. Importantly, you can also set timed reminders to review and refresh documents, ensuring they never go stale. 
• Access and build on top of best-in-class examples: Staring at a blank gDoc and wondering how / where to start… I think we’ve all been here. Murmur allows teams to make private work agreements public in addition to providing their own growing set of authored templates. It is not hard to imagine the recruiting and general branding benefits from making some or all of your proposals public. And for those looking to create new proposals, Murmur makes the process 10X easier as teams can, within seconds, leverage curated best practices from which to draw inspiration and customize as needed.

While it operates within the multi-billion dollar collaboration software market, Murmur is not looking to replace or add itself to the large and growing list of existing platforms. Instead, it integrates with the products you already use (Slack, gSuite, Notion, etc) and the workflows that power them. The team has built a bot that listens to conversations wherever they are happening and auto-prompts the participants about whether they want to create an agreement. They are also working on an AI writer that would help generate the proposals in a matter of minutes. The goal is to build a product that helps teams leverage existing tools more effectively and surfaces / centralizes dispersed decisions made in different corners of an organization’s tech stack. 

From the moment we came across Murmur, we immediately understood the importance of the problem being solved, having experienced the pain points firsthand in our operating roles as well as our experience building Asymmetric. And after our first meeting with Aaron, we knew he was the founder best suited to solve this problem. He has spent the last decade focused on improving precisely these organizational management shortfalls for companies  small and large – including Johnson & Johnson, Citibank, Airbnb, DropBox, and Boeing via The Ready. He’s also authored the best-seller, “Brave New Work,” co-hosts the Brave New Work podcast and has sat on the advisory boards for GE, American Express, PepsiCo, and Cooper Hewitt. By pairing thought leadership with on the ground execution and relentless iteration based on customer feedback, Aaron and the Murmur team are well on their way to making a big impact on the way we work.

Learn more about Murmur’s funding announcement here: 

https://techcrunch.com/2022/12/14/murmur-future-of-work-funding/ 

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