Aussie Innovation raises $6.1m seed round from Google, Slack and others

Cofounders of Hugo, Josh Lowy and Darren Chait have just raised a $6.1m seed round led by Google’s AI-focused investment fund, Gradient Ventures. Slack Fund, Founder Collective and Entrée Capital.

The Pain 

With more and more virtual meetings taking place , insights from meetings stay siloed inside different teams and get lost.

 

There needs to be a methodology of sharing and collating meeting notes across teams within companies, to reduce redundancy and improve information accessibility.

The Painkiller 

Hugo is a productivity app that does this via collaborative note-taking - it’s sort of like a wiki software.( Notion, which recently reached a $2 billion valuation. )

Hugo’s innovation is a platform that integrates deeply within a user’s calendar, recognizing things like past notes from a meeting with a specific person.

The platform uses various software integrations such as Jira bug reports , Zendesk ticket requests, Slack and Google’s G Suite.

Hugo is free for up to 40 users, charges a flat $399 fee up to 100 users and relies on custom pricing beyond that. 

The Customers

Hugo’s customers include teams at Netflix, Dropbox, Shopify and Twitter.

How’s this for an advisory board

President Donald Trump Sure knows how to pick his team!!!

This week named dozens of executives from industries including technology and healthcare task  force to work with the White House to outline how the U.S. can reopen parts of the economy post COVID-19 pandemic. 

Here are 15 executives who have joined the White House's tech task force: 

1. Apple CEO Tim Cook 

2. Google (Alphabet) CEO Sundar Pichai 

3. Oracle co-founder and CTO Larry Ellison 

4. Oracle CEO Safra Catz 

5. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff 

6. SAP co-CEO Jennifer Morgan 

7. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella 

8. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg 

9. IBM CEO Arvind Krishna 

10. Intel CEO Bob Swan 

11. Qualcomm CEO Steve Mollenkopf 

12. Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins 

13. Advanced Micro Devices CEO Lisa Su 

14. Broadcom CEO Hock Tan 

15. Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotta 

Are you positioning your business for a 20X value by 2027?

Paul Bassat has given some great advice to his portfolio companies at Square Peg today 

“Cash is king and make sure you have a profitable and sustainable business.“

In the last few years, Markets have been rewarding growth at all costs 

No more

Going forward markets will be rewarding profitable growth. ”

The next few years will be tough - be sure to make your business profitable and sustainable .

Cash is king.

More money must come in than go out

Be cautious in the immediate term and identify innovative ways to reduce expenditure, ideally, in a way that minimises the impact on your teams.

Seeks experience in the Dot Com Crash and beyond 

For Seek - The period from 2000-2003 - the dot com crash was both a tough period of managing through a crisis but also a major period of value creation. 

They entered the Dotcom crash as the market leader, albeit in a highly competitive market and with a large cash burn. 

Seek emerged from the Dotcom crash as a profitable business and with a dominant market leadership position. 

As a result its share price increased more than 20x from 2003-2007. 

Your daily zoom call - best comic strip wins a prize!

Share a comic strip of a zoom call - 

Copy and paste your screen ..... 

get an app like “Pixomatic” - and put  text on your picture .

Best comic strip wins a prize !

Here’s an example of bsi E’learning’s daily zoom call .