When Your Startup Is A Venture Firm: Thoughts On Building Zero To One
Building any business from company formation to a scaled, successful enterprise.
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:
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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