In this era of COVID-19, we’re all missing the company of our colleagues. Zoom is great, but online meetings often feel transactional.
In person, the best meetings always involve building on each other’s ideas. We arrive at fresh ideas no one had before the meeting, and come out of the meeting feeling aligned and energized. Now virtually, how can we maintain that in-person creative dynamic?
Google Docs and Slides can be great facilitators of this process, but since the collaboration process is so tied to the final deliverables, without a lot of room to muse, brainstorm, or ideate, no one is willing to “mess up” the contents. As a result, there’s a long chain of “constructive” comments filling up space on the right, and it feels like inspiration could get lost in this process. It’s so hard to build on top and generate brand new ideas.
Enter MURAL.
MURAL’s visual collaboration software invites everyone to contribute their ideas and input. And it’s amazingly easy to build on top of others’ input and move ideas forward. It is used by leading enterprises for a wide range of use cases across product, research, design, sales and consulting as well as facilitated workshops that use agile and design thinking methodologies.
We saw the power of MURAL firsthand. After COVID-19 hit the world, we explored numerous tools to continue our work with our corporate partners. MURAL was the best product, and our Corporate Innovation team ran many workshops using MURAL with over 300 people participating. A number of our corporate partners also realized the value of MURAL, and signed on as customers. It was not a surprise for us to see how MURAL added over a million MAU and tripled annual revenue in a year.
As investors, we look for global technology businesses that enable the best of the changes that are here to stay. Although personally I just can’t wait to ditch food delivery and go back to having dinners with friends at restaurants, I am not sure if there is a reason for us to go back to the old model of “if you want to participate, you need to be here”.
We believe that the future of the workplace will be a hybrid of remote and in-person, and it is a once in a generation change that is here to stay. Wherever we are, MURAL enables all of us to contribute our ideas, and empowers the team to move our ideas forward. We are thrilled to join Mariano Suarez-Battan, MURAL’s co-founder and CEO, and his team and help as many teams in the world collaborate better.