Work Week | The Niche Itch
By: Stowe Boyd
Tags: Virtual Events, People Operations, Work Week, Work Technology, Email

Work Week | The Niche Itch

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The accelerating pace of tech innovation during the pandemic is astonishing. Software is squeezing into every niche, as the examples below demonstrate: enterprise management of email signatures, and a tool to help private, venture-backed startup manage how and what they pay employees. Pretty nichey, but very important to those in the niches.

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People Operations

Pave raises millions to bring transparency to startup compensation | Natasha Mascarenhas reports on a series A funding at a valuation of $74, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Jeff Bezos, and others:

Compensation within private venture-backed startups can be a confusing minefield that if unsuccessfully navigated can lead to inconsistent salaries and the kind of ambiguity that breeds an unhappy workforce. Pave, a San Francisco-based startup that recently graduated from YC Combinator is aiming to end the pay and equity gap with a software tool it developed to make it easier to track, measure, and communicate how and what they pay their employees.

Pave was formerly known as Trove, and supports integrations with Workday, Carta and Greenhouse. One challenge will be getting companies to share the anonymized data back to Pave, which is part of their benchmarking value.

Launching today, Pave has teamed up with the portfolio companies of a16z, Bessemer Venture Partners, NEA, Redpoint Ventures and YC to gather compensation data. The data, which is opt-in, will allow Pave to release a compensation benchmark survey to show how companies pay their employees. The survey will be public but will aggregate all company responses, so there is no way to see which company is doing better than others. Other platforms have tried to do measure pay across roles, such as Glassdoor and Angellist. Schulman says that “companies don’t trust that data” because it’s crowdsourced and therefore has a survey bias.

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Email

I admit that I hadn’t heard of email signature management tools until I read about Exclaimer’s newest round of funding in Exclaimer raises $133 million to help companies manage email signatures by Paul Sawyers:

Email signature management platform Exclaimer has raised £100 million ($133 million) in a round of funding led by Insight Partners. Despite the hullabaloo around modern enterprise communications tools like Slack, soon to be a $27.7 billion Salesforce subsidiary, a reported 80% of businesses still use email as their primary communication tool. That’s not to say companies aren’t also using Slack, Microsoft Teams, or Zoom, but email’s asynchronicity makes it difficult to fully replace anytime soon, particularly when it comes to external communications. This is one reason Exclaimer has now managed to raise a hefty chunk of change from a venture capital and private equity firm that has backed a host of companies across the consumer and enterprise spheres, including Twitter, Shopify, Pipedrive, and Qualtrics. […] Exclaimer’s core selling point is that it allows businesses to centrally design and disseminate email signatures to everyone in the company, with consistent footers automatically inserted on all company emails across devices. The signatures can also be tailored for specific teams and individuals, with admins able to control everything from a centralized dashboard.

Makes sense.

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Virtual Events

I am researching virtual events tools for an upcoming report, and I saw that Wonder raises $11 million to make large virtual events more sociable, again by Paul Sawyer:

Virtual event platforms have gained significant traction in a year marked by social distancing. Berlin-based Wonder is part of a new crop of contenders and promises to make large online gatherings more sociable. The startup, which was founded as Yotribe in April, today announced that it has raised a substantial $11 million seed round of funding led by EQT Ventures, with participation from BlueYard Capital. Much as large in-person meetups can segue into more intimate bubbles as people begin to network, Wonder aims to enable smaller, more organic video-based interactions within a larger virtual conference setup. This is reminiscent of features in numerous other events platforms, many of which have breakout spaces. But Wonder’s maplike interface allows guests to see at a glance who is speaking to whom and move their avatars around to join conversations in a virtual room.

So they are providing bottom-up, person-to-person communication as a sidebar to the top-down, conference-to-participants communication. Interesting.

More broadly, a number of events platforms have raised significant investments over the past few months, including Hopin, which last month secured $125 million at a $2.1 billion valuation, and Bizzabo, which attracted a mammoth $138 million after being forced to add virtual events to its existing offline events platform. Similar companies that have secured sizable investments this year include include Hubilo, Welcome, Run The World, and Airmeet.

More to follow on that front.

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NoLo

SAP latest enterprise software giant to offer low-code workflow | Ron Miller reports SAP announcements, including SAP Ruum, SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation, and SAP Cloud Platform Workflow Manager:

Low-code workflow has become all the rage among enterprise tech giants and SAP joined the group of companies offering simplified workflow creation today when it announced SAP Cloud Platform Workflow Management, but it didn’t stop there. It also announced SAP Ruum, a new departmental workflow tool and SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation, its entry into the RPA space. The company made the announcements at SAP TechEd, its annual educational conference that has gone virtual this year due to the pandemic. Let’s start with the Cloud Platform Workflow Management tool. It enables people with little or no coding skills to build operational workflows. It includes predefined workflows like employee onboarding and can be used in combination with Qualtrics, the company it bought for $8 billion 2018, to include experience data.

Trying hard to keep up with Salesforce Einstein and Google Workflows launches.

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Elsewhere

ITProPortal quotes me in a prediction piece 2021 tech trends:

The pandemic has accelerated the adoption of technologies that were popular before, but which are now essential. One example has been the combination of work chat tools and video conferring, as typified by Microsoft Teams and Slack. Microsoft has seen a dramatic uptick in usage, and the release of Google’s new take on the former GSuite, now known as Google Workspace, which also integrates work chat and video conferencing represents another challenge for Slack. As the two leaders in what we might think of as ‘business operating systems,’ Google and Microsoft present a difficult challenge for Slack, since companies will not want to pay extra for functionality, they already have access to in their communications and file storage platforms.

A few days after I wrote that, Salesforce announced the acquisition of Slack (which I wrote about here). Tom Tualli included me in a round-up of experts on the Slack acquisition:

Regarding Salesforce, it can’t stop with Slack. Salesforce will need to build out (or buy) all the pieces of a business operating system: email, file sharing (they have a start with Salesforce Files), document sharing (they have Quip), low code/no code app builder, work management (Salesforce Anywhere is a start, but is too CRM-oriented), and video conferencing. This is not the end of their reconfiguring Salesforce into a platform more general than the sales force.

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Prospectus | Work Management

Today’s work management landscape is undergoing radical change.