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Punitive liquidation preferences return to VC — don’t do it
Pascal Levensohn
Contributor
Contributor
Pascal Levensohn is a San Francisco-based venture capitalist with over 25 years of VC experience through Levensohn Venture Partners and Dolby Family Ventures. He is a former director of the National Venture Capital Association.
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As silently and swiftly as it has devastated families and communities around the world, COVID-19 has also left many startups gasping for air. Emerging companies with strong 2020 revenue forecasts have seen their high-confidence plans reduced by 60%-80% in a matter of days. Even in the best of times, startups must reach value-unlocking milestones to successfully raise new capital. But today, a globally synchronized halt to business activity has made irrelevant normal benchmarks for financing rounds.
Obtaining payroll support from the recently enacted special government programs for small businesses will not resolve the cascading problems startups are grappling with, regardless of whether or not they are VC-backed.
Product development roadmaps in many innovation-driven industries are changing in ways that may permanently alter a company’s future strategic direction. Merger and acquisition discussions are being shelved. Normal financing rounds, in process and contemplated, are contracting or being abandoned altogether. Many venture funds, including corporate venture programs, have unilaterally “taken a pause” to reevaluate the radically changing landscape for their early-stage company portfolios.
I last experienced this phenomenon in the aftermath of the Great Technology Bubble: 2002-2003. And all signs show that we are at the beginning of a new round of punitive “incentives” for venture investors to keep their companies alive.
Several of my current portfolio companies have recently proposed “emergency bridge” convertible note financings of between $5 million and $15 million, each featuring a painful feature for non-participants: multiple liquidation preferences benefiting only the new money above 3x, with discounts greater than 20% on conversion in a new equity financing. Of course, these financings are open to both existing and new investors. But the likelihood of another round is actually diminished by this type of structure.
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Pileus helps businesses cut their cloud spend
Israel-based Pileus, which is officially launching today, aims to help businesses keep their cloud spend under control. The company also today announced that it has raised a $1 million seed round from a private angel investor.
Using machine learning, the company’s platform continuously learns about how a user typically uses a given cloud and then provides forecasts and daily personalized recommendations to help them stay within a budget.
Pileus currently supports AWS, with support for Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure coming soon.
With all of the information it gathers about your cloud usage, the service can also monitor usage for any anomalies. Because, at its core, Pileus keeps a detailed log of all your cloud spend, it also can provide detailed reports and dashboards of what a user is spending on each project and resource.
If you’ve ever worked on a project like this, you know that these reports are only as good as the tags you use to identify each project and resource, so Pileus makes that a priority on its platform, with a tagging tool that helps enforce tagging policies.
“My team and I spent many sleepless nights working on this solution,” says Pileus CEO Roni Karp. “We’re thrilled to finally be able to unleash Pileus to the masses and help everyone gain more efficiency of their cloud experience while helping them understand their usage and costs better than ever before.”
Pileus currently offers a free 30-day trial. After that, the service shows you a $180/month or $800 per year price, but once you connect your accounts, it’ll charge 1% of your savings, not the default pricing you’ll see at first.
The company isn’t just focused on individual businesses, though. It’s also targeting managed service providers that can use the platform to create reports and manage their own customer billing. Karp believes this will become a significant source of revenue for Pileus because “there are not many good tools in the field today, especially for Azure.”
It’s no secret that Pileus is launching into a crowded market, where well-known incumbents like Cloudability already share mindshare with a growing number of startups. Karp, however, believes that Pileus can stand out, largely because of its machine learning platform and its ability to provide users with immediate value, whereas, he argues, it often takes several weeks for other platforms to deliver results.
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Instagram rival VSCO lays off 30% of staff to reduce reliance on outside capital
VSCO, the popular photo editing app and Instagram rival, is the latest company to undergo layoffs attributed to the COVID-19 crisis, which has put a strain on venture-backed startups. According to a report from NPR, which was then confirmed by VSCO co-founder and CEO Joel Flory on LinkedIn, the company is laying off around 30% of staff, or 45 of its employees.
Though Flory didn’t reference the COVID-19 outbreak by name, his post described the rapid change to the economy which necessitated the layoffs.
“2020 was staged to be a year where we would continue to forward invest into our business,” Flory wrote. “Overnight our environment changed. We realized that we would need to shift towards running a self-sustaining business.”
In other words, VSCO is anticipating a future where venture capital is less readily available and is making the shift toward running a business that’s no longer reliant on outside capital or funding in order to operate. By laying off a portion of staff, VSCO believes it will be able to sustain its business for many years.
To date, VSCO has raised $90 million in outside funding, and sees its app used by more than 20 million active users per week. However, a smaller portion of those users are customers who pay for a VSCO Membership that offers an expanded array of features, tools, presets and other content. VSCO confirmed to TechCrunch in February 2020 that it had around 2+ million paid subscribers.
Late last year, VSCO had said it was on pace to surpass 4 million paid subscribers by 2020 and was approaching $80 million in annual revenue. However, these projections were tied to VSCO’s forward investment this year, and the shift towards becoming self-sustainable will impact these numbers, the company says.
PitchBook data valued the business at $550 million, NPR also reported — a number that’s made the rounds before, as well.
In 2020, VSCO has rolled out several features designed to better support video editing. It gave creators the ability to publish their video edits to the VSCO feed, and last month, for example, launched a more powerful and feature-rich video editing tool called Montage. The latter was meant to grow VSCO’s paid subscriber base, as it requires users to pay in order to save and publish their finished videos.
VSCO’s profile has also been raised beyond its core user base in recent months, after it became associated with a Gen Z meme that circulated on sites like TikTok.
Though perhaps not the marketing the company would have desired, the VSCO girl meme became a way to mock a certain type of girl — one who sports a messy bun, baggy shirts and scrunchies and carries around eco-conscious items like Hydro Flasks or metal straws. VSCO’s app for making your photos look good became associated with this persona, as it’s often used to filter and edit images in order to give them an aesthetic that teenage girls (VSCO girls) supposedly desired.
As for the layoffs, VSCO says its former employees will receive a minimum of seven weeks of severance pay, and a minimum of two months of COBRA health coverage. In terms of equity, VSCO is pro-rating stock option vesting and extending equity exercise periods post-term, it also notes.
Flory’s LinkedIn post additionally offered a way for those interested in hiring the laid-off VSCO employees to reach the company. He said the jobs@vsco.co email address could be used to make inquires about hiring its talent. The company will also be working to provide other job placement resources and support, it says.
“I am deeply saddened to let some incredible people go and am so grateful for everything they’ve done for VSCO and our community,” Flory wrote. “Our mission and vision remain unchanged. Our ability to provide a place for creative expression, inspiration and connection is even more important than ever right now,” he added.
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Attentive raises another $40M for mobile messaging, will invest in helping customers respond to COVID-19
Mobile messaging startup Attentive continues to bring in new funding.
The startup raised a $40 million Series B last summer, followed by a $70 million Series C at the beginning of this year. Today it’s announcing that it’s extended the Series C by another $40 million, bringing the total round size to $110 million.
CEO Brian Long (who previously founded TapCommerce with his Attentive co-founder Andrew Jones and sold the company to Twitter) told me that the new funding closed just a week ago. He said the money comes from institutional investors who had wanted to participate in the Series C, but “for whatever reason, the timing didn’t work out.”
Then, as the startup wanted to invest in new areas — particularly in response to the COVID-19 pandemic — Long reached out again. Once they saw Attentive’s numbers for the first quarter of 2020, the firms were willing to invest.
Apparently, the number of new customer sign-ups is only increasing, with Attentive now working with more than 1,000 businesses. Companies like Coach, Urban Outfitters, CB2, PacSun, Lulus and Jack in the Box use the platform to manage their mobile messaging, with tools around adding text message subscribers, creating engaging messages and tracking the results of those campaigns.
And while we’re at the beginning of what’s likely to be a dramatic slowdown in advertising and marketing, Long suggested that even if businesses pull back on acquiring new customers, they’ll still need to maintain a relationship with existing ones.
“CRM is such a critical channel for companies … email and text are the last thing you would shut down,” he said.
Sequoia Capital Global Equities and Coatue are the new investors in the Series C. Sequoia’s venture fund already led (or co-led) the Series C and the Series B, but Long said he was interested in working with the firm’s crossover fund — and with Coatue — partly because they invest in public companies as well.
Not that he has immediate plans for Attentive to go public, but he said, “It just creates optionality,” so that there are fewer financial pressures regardless of the route the company takes.
Other investors in the Series C include IVP, Bain Capital Ventures, NextView Ventures, Eniac Ventures and High Alpha.
“Attentive’s rapid growth is an indicator of how consumers are eager to find a more direct, personalized and efficient channel to interact with businesses,” said Jeff Wang, managing partner at Sequoia Capital Global Equities, in a statement. “We’ve been impressed by how quickly Attentive’s business has scaled, its strong customer momentum, and the expertise of the team. We are thrilled to increase Sequoia’s partnership with Attentive through our Global Equities fund.”
As for how Attentive is responding to COVID-19, the startup plans to create funds to help customers navigate the economic fallout. There will be more details released in the coming weeks, but Long said the idea is to launch funds focused on the e-commerce/retail, food/beverage and educational sectors, providing free access to Attentive tools and services “to help those companies get recharged.”
Long added that he hopes to grow Attentive’s headcount from 260 employees to more than 400 by the end of this year.
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Frame AI raises $6.3M Series A to help understand customers across channels
Frame AI, a New York City startup that uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to help companies understand their customers better across multiple channels, announced a $6.3 million Series A investment today.
G20 Ventures and Greycroft led the round together. Bill Wiberg, co-founder and partner at G20, will join Frame’s board under the terms of the deal. The total raised with an earlier seed round is over $10 million, according to the company.
“Frame is basically an early warning system and continuous monitoring tool for your customer voice,” Frame CEO and co-founder George Davis told TechCrunch . What that means, in practice, is the tool plugs into help desk software, call center tooling, CRM systems and anywhere else in a company that communicates with a customer.
“We then use natural language understanding to pull out emerging themes and basically aggregate them to account and segment levels so that customer experience leaders can prioritize taking actions to improve their relationships,” Davis explained.
He believes that customer experience leaders are being asked to do more and more in terms of talking to customers on ever more channels and digesting that into useful information for the rest of their company to be responsive to customer needs, and he says that there isn’t a lot of tooling to help with this particular part of the customer experience problem.
“We don’t think they have the right tools to do either the listening in the first place or the analysis. We’re trying to make it possible for them to hear their customers everywhere they’re already talking to them, and then act on that information,” he said.
He says they work alongside customer data platforms (CDPs) like Segment, Salesforce Customer 360 and Adobe Real-time CDP. “We can take the customer voice information from all of these unstructured sources, all these natural language sources and turn it into moments that can be contributed back to one of these structured data platforms.”
Davis certainly recognizes that his company is getting this money in the middle of a health and economic crisis, and he hopes that a tool like his that can help take the pulse of the customer across multiple channels can help companies succeed at a time when a data-driven approach to customer experience is more important than ever.
He says that by continuing to hire through this and building his company, he can contribute to restarting the economic engine, even if in some small way.
“It’s a bleak time, but I have a lot of confidence in New York and in the country, in the customer experience community and in the world’s ability to bounce back strong from this. I think it’s actually created a lot of solidarity that we’re all going to find a lot of new opportunities, and we’re going to just keep building Frame as fast as we can.”
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Adriel brings automation to small business advertising
Adriel is a South Korean startup bringing automated ad tools to small businesses — and in recent months, it’s been expanding into the United States and the United Kingdom.
This might seem like exactly the wrong time to be growing an ad-buying platform, since we’re at the beginning of what’s likely to be a tremendous pullback in ad spend due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, co-founder and CEO Sophie Eom told me via email that ad spend on Adriel increased by 7% in February, then by 6% in March, and she estimated that spend will be up by 8% in April.
“We all know that businesses are struggling from the uncertainty of the economic situations with COVID-19,” Eom said. “And most are hesitant about hiring agencies for their marketing and advertising efforts due to the high costs — in addition to the fact that many corporates don’t have enough knowledge about the right marketing processes.”
So why is Adriel still seeing growth? She argued, “We see that even in the midst of tough times, many startups and entrepreneurs are not giving up their businesses. In fact, they are shifting their focus and investments into more digital to reach their customers.”
As part of its response to COVID-19, the company is also donating ads to support small business customers in the San Francisco area.
Adriel’s technology automatically generates creative materials and suggests keywords for ads, as well as managing the targeting. But there’s also a human team that reviews campaigns and suggests ways to improve. The company does not require retainers or contracts, but charges a 19% fee on ad spend.
I first spoke to Eom at the end of 2019, when she was first expanding Adriel into the U.S. In some ways, it felt like a familiar pitch — I’ve written about companies like AdEspresso (acquired by HootSuite) and Smartly.io (which sold a majority stake to Providence Equity Partners last year), which also said they were optimizing or automating small business advertising. Plus, Facebook itself has launched an automated ad builder.
Eom suggested that while there are tools that sound superficially similar, there’s nothing quite like Adriel (which was part of Facebook’s Namsam Lab Korea incubator), with its multi-platform support for managing Facebook, Google and Instagram ad campaigns in one place, and with its focus on the true “long tail” of advertisers — she said the average Adriel client spends a relatively modest $1,000 per month on digital advertising.
“We’re not merely a self-service tool either,” she said. “We support and assist our clients in getting their ad placed, making their campaign more successful. We use technology to make all these processes more affordable for more business owners.”
She added that Adriel has launched 7,200 campaigns for nearly 20,000 business accounts.
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Rocket Lab inks deal to carry Japanese startup Synspective’s first satellite into orbit
The well-funded Japanese space startup Synspective has tapped launch provider Rocket Lab to take its first Earth observation satellite to orbit. Launch is planned for late 2020, and the company’s StriX–α craft will be the sole payload.
Synspective was founded in 2018 and by mid-2019 had raised about $100 million, making it one of the most successful recent funding stories in the country. It’s going to need all that and more, though, to realize its ambition of a 25-satellite constellation regularly imaging the whole planet.
The number may seem small when compared to Planet and SpaceX, which will require hundreds or thousands of satellites to cover the Earth. That’s because Synspective’s craft are not making visual observations or providing internet access, but imaging the planet’s surface using what’s called synthetic aperture radar.
This difficult technique uses the motion of the satellite to essentially imitate a much larger antenna, letting it produce highly detailed imagery through cloud cover and other interference. It also can cover a much wider area than an optical camera or a radio antenna beaming data to dishes on the surface.
The satellites themselves are about 100 kilograms each and are smaller than existing SAR systems — an advantage that lets Synspective use a smaller launch vehicle like Rocket Lab’s Electron to put its birds in the air.
The launch isn’t scheduled yet, but as the sole customer, Synspective will have lots of latitude in choosing the time of launch and target orbit. “We are very pleased to work with Rocket Lab, a pioneer in rocket ventures,” said Synspective founder and CEO Motoyuki Arai in a press release. “We are also grateful for their flexibility in accepting our requests on the satellite’s orbit and launch period.”
At present the plan is only for “late 2020” and to launch from Rocket Lab’s Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand, not its brand new one in the States. We’ll know more closer to launch time.
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Labster’s latest partnership, and what it tells us about the future of remote learning
Labster, a virtual science lab edtech company, today announced that it is partnering with California’s community college network to bring its software to 2.1 million students.
California Community Colleges claims to be the largest system of higher education in the country. The Labster partnership will provide 115 schools with 130 virtual laboratory simulations in biology, chemistry, physics and general sciences.
As COVID-19 has forced schools to shutter, edtech companies have largely responded by offering their software for free or through extended free trials. What’s new and notable about Labster’s partnership today is that it shows the first few signs of how that momentum can lead to a business deal.
Based in Copenhagen, Labster sells virtual STEM labs to institutions. The startup has raised $34.7 million in known venture capital to date, according to Crunchbase data. Labster customers include California State University, Harvard, Gwinnett Technical College, MIT, Trinity College and Stanford.
Lab equipment is expensive, and budget constraints mean that schools struggle to afford the latest technology. So Labster’s value proposition is that it is a cheaper alternative (plus, if students spill a testing vial in a virtual lab, there’s less clean up).
That pitch has slightly changed since COVID-19 forced schools across the world to shut down to limit the spread of the pandemic. Now, it’s pitching itself as the only currently viable alternative to science labs.
For many edtech companies, the surge of remote learning has been a large experiment. Often, edtech companies are giving away their product and technology for free to help as schools scramble to move operations completely digital.
For example, last week self-serve learning platforms Codecademy, Duolingo, Quizlet, Skillshare and Brainly launched a Learn From Home Club for students and teachers. Before that, Wize made its exam content and homework services available for free. And Zoom offered its video-conferencing software for free to K through 12 schools, which had mixed results.
Labster itself gave $5 million in free Labster credits to schools across the country. The list continues.
Labster’s new deal shows edtech companies can secure new customers right now — without breaking the bank.
Labster CEO and co-founder Michael Bodekaer declined to give specifics on what the deal is worth. He did share that Labster works with schools one by one to understand how much they can, or want to, invest in teacher training and webinar support. He also confirmed that Labster does profit from the deal.
“We want to make sure that we set ourselves up for supporting our partners but still also make sure that Labster as a financial institution can pay our salaries,” Bodekaer said. “But again, heavy discounts that help us cover our costs.”
The long game for Labster, like many edtech companies, is that schools like the platform so much that these short-term stints have a better chance to lead to long-term relationships.
“We’ll be keeping these discounts as long as we possibly can sustain as a company,” he said. “It looks like initially the discount was until August and now we’re extending it until the end of the year. If that continues, we may extend it even further.”
Pricing aside, the real struggle toward implementation for Labster, and honestly any other edtech company focused on remote learning, is the digital divide. Some students do not have access to a computer for video conferencing or even internet connection for assignments.
The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted how many households across America lack access to the technology needed for remote learning. In California, Google donated free Chromebooks and 100,000 mobile hotspots to students in need.
Bodekaer said that Labster is currently working on providing its software on mobile, and has worked with Google to make sure its product works on low-end computers like Chromebooks.
“We really want to be hardware agnostic and support any system or any platform that the students already have,” he said. “So that hardware does not become a barrier.”
While today’s partnership brings 2.1 million students access to Labster’s technology, it does not directly account for the percentage of that same group that might not have access to a computer in the first place. The true test, and perhaps success, of edtech will rely on a true hybrid of hardware and software, not one or the other.
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Join a Live Q&A with Bradley Tusk tomorrow at 1pm ET/10am PT
Bradley Tusk is relatively unique among investors. Where other VCs shy away from heavily regulated industries and businesses, Tusk leans in.
The Tusk Ventures founder and CEO has investments that include Uber, Bird, Coinbase, Lemonade, FanDuel and Alma Health.
At a time when good governance is front and center, and innovative thinking to evolve the status quo is necessary, we couldn’t be more thrilled to have Tusk join us for a live Q&A session.
In the last decade, public perception of the tech industry has changed dramatically. When Tusk first invested in Uber, the “ask for forgiveness, not permission” era was well underway. Since, tech has slowly been seen as an enemy after an erosion of public trust by big and small firms alike. Has the coronavirus pandemic shifted the tide of public sentiment in favor of tech? This is but one of many questions we’ll ask Tusk.
We’re also excited to hear from Tusk on adaptation strategies for tech startups during this time, how they can catch the ear of government officials and regulators during COVID-19 in a way they couldn’t just a few months ago and how founders can be better leaders to their companies during a time of crisis.
We’ll also chat specifically about the potential of digitized voting tools and the explosion of telehealth amidst the pandemic.
There will be plenty of time for audience questions, so come prepared!
Hit up this link to drop the Zoom details into your calendar! See you there!
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Replace non-stop Zoom with remote office avatars app Pragli
Could avatars that show what co-workers are up to save work-from-home teams from constant distraction and loneliness? That’s the idea behind Pragli, the Bitmoji for the enterprise. It’s a virtual office app that makes you actually feel like you’re in the same building.
Pragli uses avatars to signal whether co-workers are at their desk, away, in a meeting, in the zone while listening to Spotify, taking a break at a digital virtual water coooler or done for the day. From there, you’ll know whether to do a quick ad hoc audio call, cooperate via screenshare, schedule a deeper video meeting or a send a chat message they can respond to later. Essentially, it translates the real-word presence cues we use to coordinate collaboration into an online workplace for distributed teams.
“What Slack did for email, we want to do for video conferencing,” Pragli co-founder Doug Safreno tells me. “Traditional video conferencing is exclusive by design, whereas Pragli is inclusive. Just like in an office, you can see who is talking to who.” That means less time wasted planning meetings, interrupting colleagues who are in flow or waiting for critical responses. Pragli offers the focus that makes remote work productive with the togetherness that keeps everyone sane and in sync.
The idea is to solve the top three problems that Pragli’s extensive interviews and a Buffer/AngelList study discovered workers hate:
- Communication friction
- Loneliness
- Lack of boundaries
You never have to worry about whether you’re intruding on someone’s meeting, or if it’d be quicker to hash something out on a call instead of vague text. Avatars give remote workers a sense of identity, while the Pragli water cooler provides a temporary place to socialize rather than an endless Slack flood of GIFs. And because you clock in and out of the Pragli office just like a real one, co-workers understand when you’ll reply quickly versus when you’ll respond tomorrow unless there’s an emergency.
“In Pragli, you log into the office in the morning and there’s a clear sense of when I’m working and when I’m not working. Slack doesn’t give you a strong sense if they’re online or offline,” Safreno explains. “Everyone stays online and feels pressured to respond at any time of day.”
Pragli co-founder Doug Safreno
Safreno and his co-founder Vivek Nair know the feeling first-hand. After both graduating in computer science from Stanford, they built StacksWare to help enterprise software customers avoid overpaying by accurately measuring their usage. But when they sold StacksWare to Avi Networks, they spent two years working remotely for the acquirer. The friction and loneliness quickly crept in.
They’d message someone, not hear back for a while, then go back and forth trying to discuss the problem before eventually scheduling a call. Jumping into synchronous communicating would have been much more efficient. “The loneliness was more subtle, but it built up after the first few weeks,” Safreno recalls. “We simply didn’t socially bond while working remotely as well as in the office. Being lonely was de-motivating, and it negatively affected our productivity.”
The founders interviewed 100 remote engineers, and discovered that outside of scheduled meetings, they only had one audio or video call with co-workers per week. That convinced them to start Pragli a year ago to give work-from-home teams a visual, virtual facsimile of a real office. With no other full-time employees, the founders built and released a beta of Pragli last year. Usage grew 6X in March and is up 20X since January 1.
Today Pragli officially launches, and it’s free until June 1. Then it plans to become freemium, with the full experience reserved for companies that pay per user per month. Pragli is also announcing a small pre-seed round today led by K9 Ventures, inspired by the firm’s delight using the product itself.
To get started with Pragi, teammates download the Pragli desktop app and sign in with Google, Microsoft or GitHub. Users then customize their avatar with a wide range of face, hair, skin and clothing options. It can use your mouse and keyboard interaction to show if you’re at your desk or not, or use your webcam to translate occasional snapshots of your facial expressions to your avatar. You can also connect your Spotify and calendar to show you’re listening to music (and might be concentrating), reveal or hide details of your meeting and decide whether people can ask to interrupt you or that you’re totally unavailable.
From there, you can by audio, video or text communicate with any of your available co-workers. Guests can join conversations via the web and mobile too, though the team is working on a full-fledged app for phones and tablets. Tap on someone and you can instantly talk to them, though their mic stays muted until they respond. Alternatively, you can jump into Slack-esque channels for discussing specific topics or holding recurring meetings. And if you need some down time, you can hang out in the water cooler or trivia game channel, or set a manual “away” message.
Pragli has put a remarkable amount of consideration into how the little office social cues about when to interrupt someone translate online, like if someone’s wearing headphones, in a deep convo already or if they’re chilling in the microkitchen. It’s leagues better than having no idea what someone’s doing on the other side of Slack or what’s going on in a Zoom call. It’s a true virtual office without the clunky VR headset.
“Nothing we’ve tried has delivered the natural, water-cooler-style conversations that we get from Pragli,” says Storj Labs VP of engineering JT Olio. “The ability to switch between ‘rooms’ with screen sharing, video and voice in one app is great. It has really helped us improve transparency across teams. Plus, the avatars are quite charming as well.”
With Microsoft’s lack of social experience, Zoom consumed with its scaling challenges and Slack doubling down on text as it prioritizes Zoom integration over its own visual communication features, there’s plenty of room for Pragli to flourish. Meanwhile, COVID-19 quarantines are turning the whole world toward remote work, and it’s likely to stick afterwards as companies de-emphasize office space and hire more abroad.
The biggest challenge will be making comprehensible enough to onboard whole teams such a broad product encompassing every communication medium and tons of new behaviors. “How do you build a product that doesn’t feel distracting like Slack but where people can still have the spontaneous conversations that are so important to companies innovating?,” Safreno asks. The Pragli founders are also debating how to encompass mobile without making people feel like the office stalks them after hours.
“Long-term, [Pragli] should be better than being in the office because you don’t actually have to walk around looking for [co-workers], and you get to decide how you’re presented,” Safreno concludes. “We won’t quit, because we want to work remotely for the rest of our lives.”
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