Our investment in StatusToday
After sleeping, work is the activity that occupies the most time in our life. When Samsung commissioned a study to find out how we spend our lifetimes, they found that in an average 80 year lifespan, we will sleep for 17 years, and work for over 13 (we will also spend over 3 years on social media, eight months laughing, five weeks arguing and 30 hours crying (!)).
So for many of us, work is where we spend most of our waking hours. And for knowledge based businesses, workers are employers’ most valuable asset. However, most employers don’t have a great way to understand their team management, or evaluate their people risk. That’s why we were excited when we got to know Ankur and Mircea, the StatusToday founders. Ankur is an ex-Microsoft technologist, and Mircea is the ex-head of Security at JustEat. We first met them at Entrepreneur First — when they were roughly 6 weeks into their product development and invested in them pre-seed shortly thereafter. We were excited about their vision of a world where every company on the planet understands its employees, thereby improving productivity, workplace transparency and individual empowerment. Already, their incredibly ambitious goal was to become the world’s most advanced AI that understands and benchmarks internal workplace behaviour, with two goals: 1) to improve productivity and 2) to reduce people risk.
So far, StatusToday has analysed 400m actions across 170,000 employees. It’s derived patterns across companies, job functions and industries. Part of the value proposition of StatusToday is that once the AI learns employee patterns, it can alert when something seems strange — a device in an odd place, a change of pattern that indicates a hacking, or potential employee burnout. Conversely, they are able to surface patterns of individuals and teams that are performing well. I’m reminded of this Aristotle quote: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.” With StatusToday, those habits are surfaced, and managers and employees can act accordingly.
A personalised dashboard for Productivity
StatusToday’s technology allows executives, managers and employees to track behavioural patterns. If they can see that certain behaviours are correlated with high performance, they can take steps to encourage them within the organisation, e.g. a high performing sales team sending comparatively fewer emails but making more calls than a similar team.
I won’t attach some of the more sensitive Localglobe data, which focuses on output, influence metrics and key relationships internally and externally, but I got a kick out of my personalised dashboard below.
For example, it looks like my LocalGlobe colleagues respond to emails an average of 7 hours faster than I do, with an average 2 hour faster response time in turn. If I replied faster, it’s a reasonable assumption that I would get a faster response time as well, so I’ll be testing this out over the next few weeks.
Below, you can see where LocalGlobe team members spent time in Q2.
StatusToday currently offers both an entreprise solution, and a self service solution for any SME across the Google and Microsoft ecosystems, with 1-click signup companywide. New companies are signing up every week, and each new company signing up for StatusToday enriches the ecosystem as a whole, as the AI gets cleverer with more data. Their team of 15 is receiving data and servicing live customers across industries from a port authority in Australia to insurance and wealth management firms.
What’s Next
As a firm, we’ve been impressed with the company’s progress since their pre-seed round, and we are excited now to be leading the investment in their seed round. In another example of total football at Localglobe, my partners Saul and Suzanne worked closely with the company while I was on maternity leave, making the investment in their seed round alongside our friends at FirstMinute, Entrepreneur First and Notion Capital.
This is just the start. StatusToday’s new round of funding will be used to support the company’s next phase of growth by expanding their stellar engineering team. They’ll be working to scale up the data science around people engagement and driving further actionable insights into individual productivity and communication, as well as what this means in a group and team context.
If you are interested in the product, we’d love to know what you think — please sign up here !
