Work Week | Execution Versus Innovation
| Virtual Events: Hopin buys Streamyard | PPM: Planview buys Clarizen, Changepoint | OKR: Gtmhub raises $30M | Work Chat: Channel Calendars |
I took some time off over the holidays and I am astonished by how much has been going on in work technology, both on the innovation and the execution side of things.
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Quote of the Moment
Execution pays your salary. Innovation pays your pension.
| Steve Blank
Great quote, although we may have to substitute ‘pays your pension’ with something more 21st century, like ‘pays your mortgage’, since pensions are pretty iffy these days.
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Virtual Events
Hopin buys livestreaming startup StreamYard for $250M as it looks to expand its product lineup | Alex Wilhelm reports on Hopin acquiring livestreaming platform StreamYard to make it a better-integrated default streaming option for the virtual events company:
This morning Hopin, a quickly growing startup that sells a technology platform for hosting digital events, announced that it has acquired StreamYard. The acquired company, which bootstrapped itself to material revenue scale, will retain its brand and in-market product.
The deal is worth $250 million, paid in a mix of cash and stock. Hopin raised a $40 million Series A in late June of 2020, and a $125 million Series B last November at a valuation of $2.125 billion.1
At the time of its most recent round, Hopin told TechCrunch that it had grown its annual recurring revenue (ARR) from zero to $20 million in around nine months. In an email Hopin told TechCrunch that StreamYard had itself scaled to $30 million ARR without external capital. And during a conversation regarding the StreamYard deal, Hopin CEO Johnny Boufarhat said that the combined entity would sport around $65 million in ARR.
[…]
The virtual events space, and the hybrid, online and offline events space that Hopin originally set out to serve before COVID-19, is one worth watching in 2021 as vaccines are deployed and the world looks forward to a future of safe travel. With StreamYard in its camp, however, any slowdown in the growth of virtual events software sales could be mitigated by the streaming outfit’s largely distinct customer base.
I wrote about Hopin a few weeks ago, following their $125 million series A round. I am planning a report series on virtual events. Sign up for the Work Week newsletter to get notifications.
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PPM
Planview is consolidating with two competitors in project and portfolio management. Is it really being driven by customer demand, or are they looking to decrease the heat loss from always competing with each other?
Across industries, enterprises are transforming their businesses to be digital-first. This shift has only accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, and what’s emerged is a new and enduring way of working that’s flexible, highly distributed, and digital. As increasingly dispersed teams embrace new tools and processes to meet the evolving needs of their customers, visibility and connectivity across the enterprise have never been more critical. The market demands a comprehensive software platform that can connect strategy to delivery across siloed workstreams and disciplines — capabilities best provided through PPM and Agile.
Upon completion of the transactions, the Clarizen and Changepoint teams will join Planview as distinct business units, led by Matt Zilli and Matt Scheuing. Zilli and Scheuing will report into Planview CEO, Greg Gilmore. The transaction is expected to close in the first quarter of 2021. Terms of the transaction were not disclosed. To learn more, visit Planview.com.
So, Clarizen is positioned as a PPM player, not work management, which was the direction they were headed when I last took a briefing with them, a year or two ago.
Why consolidate? Must be a long-range plan to pull this all together into one platform with various tiers, right?
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OKR
OKR-focused Gtmhub raises $30M Series B after growing 3x in 2020 | Alex Wilhelm looks pretty deeply into Gtmhub growth and funding: a $30 million series B following a $9 million series A. What’s going on?
TechCrunch reported at the time of its Series A that Gtmhub had managed 400% growth in annual recurring revenue (ARR) heading into the round, on a year-over-year basis. Similar levels of topline expansion have continued, with Gtmhub COO Seth Elliott telling TechCrunch that the company grew its ARR by a multiple of three last year (measured December 2019 through December 2020).
Around the time Gtmhub raised in 2019, a number of other startups focused on the same software market raised as well, leading to TechCrunch asking “why is everyone making OKR software?”
The acronym OKR translates to “objectives and key results,” a planning method that has become popular among American technology firms, and, according to [Gitmhub COO Seth] Elliott, is becoming more popular internationally and among non-technology companies.
The startup executive also told TechCrunch that he sees Gtmhub growing alongside two business trends. The first, the rise of OKRs themselves, is a wave that his company is riding, he told TechCrunch. The second, one that he thinks his startup is leading, deals with large companies pursuing corporate transformations to boost their agility; those firms are adopting Gtmhub, he said, which can help them execute their digital transformation, or similar efforts, successfully.
Interesting: tools intended to help manage digital transformation, rather than general work management or PPM.
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Work Chat
Microsoft Teams wants to solve one of the most frustrating aspects of remote working | Joel Khali reports on an upcoming feature: dedicated calendars for each channel, consolidating events and meetings for members of the channel. Good idea.
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Elsewhere
Enterprise-Ready-As-A-Service: WorkOS | Crossing the enterprise-readiness chasm
In a nutshell, a software start-up can take an SaaS app, and wrap it in WorkOS services that enable enterprise-level administration, identity management, and single sign-on. Also, WorkOS manages the integrations with third-party services that make those services work: various vendors’ SSO services (Okta, Azure, Google, etc.), and directory services (like Bamboo, Workday, Azure, Google, etc.).
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Working in Notion Part 2 | The intersection of journaling and work management
In this post, I will outline how I am using Notion to create and manage posts like this one integrated with my daily journaling. I recommend that readers might want to revisit the Part 1 post, especially if they aren’t familiar with Notion.
