INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
These days it’s not enough to have meetings
Now tech companies need to have meetings about meetings — and to ensure that this can happen efficiently(?), a Los Angeles company called
Parabol has just raised $4 million.Founded in Brooklyn with a workforce that’s mostly virtual, the new-ish company managed to raise cash
from three firms that know a thing or two about enterprise operations — CRV, Haystack and the Slack Fund.Parabol’s software allows
distributed and in-house teams to talk about how effective different processes and meetings have been.The company says that more than 500
organizations use the company’s suite of software services.Think of it as a programmatic view of structuring a meeting and feedback —
“Robert’s Rules of Order” for the internet age.“There are about 20 million engineers that run the agile development process
today,” says Parabol founder and chief executive, Jordan Husney
“In the past everyone would show up to the same office and they would have these highly structured meetings
But as soon as great video conferencing software developed, people started thinking more openly about labor and started hiring people all
around the world.”These distributed workforces required even more organizational structure for their meetings as they collaborated on
This is especially true for adherents to the agile development process, who break down work into sprints that then need to be assessed, he
said.“Parabol was created so that every meeting held amongst team members is actually worth the time invested
With the support of CRV and Haystack, we will make Parabol useful to more kinds of teams, and scale Parabol’s infrastructure to match
our rate of growth,” said Husney in a statement.The tools Parabol developed allow workers to conduct retrospective meetings and check-ins,
the company said.The software allows teams to work through five structured meeting phases, where teams evaluate their processes and make
improvements at the end of a project, said the company.“Parabol is transforming the way agile teams across industries work together,”
said Izhar Armony, partner at CRV, in a statement
“We’ve been tracking the rapidly rising need for teams to collaborate at a distance, and believe in the way Parabol is enabling people
to meet and work more effectively together.”
