Trends in hiring and operating remote workforces, and recent major structural upheavals in many industries, have reshaped and disrupted the concept of teams at work. While some may return to the office, many of us won’t see each other face-to-face, and even if we see each other in person or in person, our peer groups may be changing rapidly. Now, a startup that built a platform to run events to help work groups feel connected to each other is announcing some funding on the back of high demand for its services.
Teamraderie, which offers short, live virtual lessons and other content led by experts in various disciplines to manage experiences alongside software at team-building events and process feedback on event impact, has raised $7 million. Using the platform to expand with more content and more customers.
The star-studded list of beginners running the 45-minute courses includes icons like former gymnasts Nadia Comaneci and Bart Conner, Pulitzer Prize winner Marsha Chatelain and more. chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov; And it is. He counts Google, IBM, Twitter, Cisco, Microsoft and Intuit among his 200 clients, and says he’s done 50,000 courses in 50 countries so far. (The cost of the service starts at $300 and varies depending on the content, number of users and whether the company is a subscriber or using Teamraderie à la carte.)
Founders Fund is leading the round, and Teamraderie is engaging more than 12 “Chief Human Resources Officers and Chief People Officers” (which says who it’s targeting as customers). The company has now raised about $9 million, and from what we understand, this Series A will value the company at about $60 million.
The rise of Teamraderie is coming at a moment of rapid evolution in the world of work, as Covid forces, layoffs and changing consumer habits.
The broad category of “productivity software” certainly had the impetus to address the changes in the way we work today – Zoom has become a kind of palimpsest for many video collaboration tools; Slack is one of dozens of virtual chat platforms; Workflow and project management go beyond Asana and Trello; And so on and so on. But with all the other productivity boxes checked, Teamraderie talks about another challenge in the workplace, especially the knowledge worker workplace, as a way to improve our relationships with each other to work better together.
At its heart, Teamraderie is a bit like MasterClass-meets-LinkedIn Learn, but focused exclusively on business users. And It can be used with the physical facilities used as part of the session.
As with other team building concepts, the idea is to put people in unfamiliar environments and refocus them on discussions related to their actual work to work together, think collaboratively, and get to know each other. (One example: A NASCAR supplier — in the words of Michael McCarroll, CEO and co-founder of Teamraderie — “reinvented the tire change,” leading a team by making a tire change on a car model.)
“Our raison d’être is to get the teams working really well together,” McCarroll said in an interview. Teams have different relationships, and when your team moves around, or you don’t work directly with everyone in a physical environment, it can be challenging to really get to know people and understand different perspectives. We want to get teams to a point where every member sees every member as a person. If you feel more connected and understand what other people in your group are saying, you’ll get more value.
Alongside its media and content aspects, Teamraderie offers technology to measure the effectiveness of sessions. McCarroll said this and the core concepts behind Teamraderie were developed from research from Harvard Business School, Stanford University, MIT and the University of Chicago on productivity, workplace support and inclusion. But since these will be in quantifiable workplaces and worlds that need to know the impact and ROI of it all, the idea is to invest in building and using more tools to improve those metrics. That Teamraderie will continue to grow.
“We use data to customize and develop the product,” McCarroll said. “We’re not just a content company.”
There may also be additional investment to help expand all of these. Today, the “sweet spot” for the most effective class sizes is 15 participants or fewer, McCarroll says, while generally large groups are what he refers to as “social breadcrumbs” — meaning they no longer participate. This presents an interesting challenge for Teamraderie (and really any technology product aimed at improving remote productivity): How can you achieve the same impact when delivering your product to larger teams?
Keith Rabois, who led the Founders Fund investment, said in an interview that the funding environment for startups, whether it’s early or late stage, is definitely shrinking. In the year So far in 2022, it has only filed papers twice for new companies (not including those in its portfolio), at this point “twelve or thirteen” in 2021. Teamraderie was an easy investment, though, not because it was doing something different and seeing traction with popular customers, but because of unit economics. “It’s basically unusual for a company at this stage of growth,” he said.
