After two wild years of pandemic-fueled growth, I’m proud to announce that OfficeTogether has been acquired by Envoy, a leading workplace platform. As a small team of 17, we served thousands of users across the US, Canada, Europe, India and South America, built industry-leading hybrid work tech and were featured in top publications like WSJ and CNBC for our insights into the bleeding edge of flexible working trends.
Envoy took notice and saw an opportunity to strengthen their position as a leading brand in workplace tech. We agreed to come onboard because the CEO Larry and I saw that together, we could shape this industry faster, better, and more flexibly than as two separate entities and could serve our customers even better.
The acquisition helps us deliver on our founding mission better: To make hybrid work. I left my job at Coinbase to start OfficeTogether a few months into the pandemic when I saw what has now become obvious: that knowledge workers are taking a radically new approach to the office and work, and that technology has to catch up to these dramatic behavioral shifts.
Beyond getting excited about the hybrid work trend, I was excited to build something and to experience being the CEO. I had gotten to the point in my career where being one small part of a large company wasn’t as satisfying, so I figured I should try my hand at entrepreneurship. My main goals were (1) be my own boss and (2) build something valuable to others. I ended up achieving that and so much more than that from the last two years.
One, I built a world-class team and culture. The team had a fast, smart rhythm to it that got me fired up daily. We had so much fun together, traveling to Panama, Mexico, New York, SF for offsites and bonding. It was easy to enjoy downtime together because we executed so well as a team. The main trap I had always hoped to avoid was being too in the weeds with execution and not leaving enough time for bigger picture thinking. The team I recruited was able to take direction and really FLY, from launching our MVP in 4 weeks, to pivoting to free vaccine tracking during the omicron cases uptick, to opening the floodgates to Microsoft Teams users when noticing O365 had a huge demand for hybrid work planning. Our value #ShipIt was always front and center.
Two, I saw more dimensionality in every situation. When I was an individual contributor at Coinbase and Meta, I would come to my manager and complain about my teammates not doing enough or making bad decisions. As the CEO, I didn’t have a manager to complain to. That meant that I started to question my own judgments and get curious. It became a lot easier to give people the benefit of the doubt when I was directly responsible for everyone’s success. I feel more open and my edges have softened, which feels much more lifetime sustainable.
Three, I am hungrier for risk than ever before. As the daughter of a poker player and scientist, my desire for safety was always warring for my desire to bet big to win big. After having taken enormous bets — first on crypto then on hybrid work — my confidence in myself has grown and I’m ready to take bigger and bigger swings at the fences. As a statistic, women take less risk than men, and it often translates to lesser career outcomes. I’m not falling into that trap, and I plan to take a bunch of women with me in my ascent.
It’s been an amazing two years, and I’m really pleased with the outcome. Ten members of my team and I will continue working together at an awesome company in a space that is only in Chapter 1 of its writing. Office occupancy is at an all time high for 2022 and at a low compared to the last decade of attendance. We have not yet reached the steady state of what working together will look like, which means the opportunity is enormous. Employers are taking a step back to understand what the purpose of the office is and why we want to gather folks in person, now that it’s no longer the default. They still have some of the previous challenges of the office — checking in visitors, scarce meeting rooms, packages piling up in delivery rooms — and are experiencing many new ones because of the high degree of variability in daily office attendance. My team, as part of Team Envoy, are ready to take these challenges head on.
This has been a crazy founder journey for me, and my first as CEO. I’m very grateful to active investors like Ali Partovi, Brian Rothenberg, Steve Bartel and many more who spent hours on the phone with me, mentoring and coaching me to be the best possible CEO I could be. Grateful to my coaches Semira Rahemtulla, Carla Camou, Hilmon Sorey and Cory Bray of CloseLoop University and On Deck Mastermind facilitator LJ Heller. Thank you to my amazing colleagues Willy, Becca, Jacquelyn, Nathan, Vikas, Geoff, Lauren, Lindsay, Sarah, Sash, Alex x4, Rahela, Maria, Sebi, many of whom left their prestigious jobs in tech at Google/Meta/Coinbase etc to bet on this seismic shift in work. Thank you to our customer advisory board and amazing customers, who met with us monthly to provide feedback and dogfood our product. Thank you to my trusted advisors Liza Haskell, Alyson Watson and many others. To my parents who always reminded me that they raised me to be a CEO and to go for it. And thank you to my loving partner Guthrie, who has cheerleaded me, supported me when I was emotional and was empathetic when I was too tired to socialize, as well as my amazing friends and support network for making introductions, strategizing with me and giving me encouragement and energy every step of the way. I could not have gotten to this point without all of you!
