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These days it’s not enough to have meetings. Now tech companies need to have meetings about meetings — and to ensure that this can happen efficiently(?), a Los Angeles company called Parabol has just raised $4 million.
Founded in Brooklyn with a workforce that’s mostly virtual, the new-ish company managed to raise cash from three firms which know a thing or two about enterprise operations — CRV, Haystack, and the SlackFund.
Parabol’s software allows distributed and in-house teams to talk about how effective different processes and meetings have been.
The company says that over 500 organizations use the company’s suite of software services.
Think of it as a programmatic view of structuring a meeting and feedback — “Robert’s Rules of Order” for the Internet age.
“There are about 20 million engineers that run the agile development process today,” says Parabol founder and chief executive, Jordan Husney. “In the past, everyone would show up to the same office and they would have these highly structured meetings. But as soon as great video conferencing software developed people started thinking more openly about labour and started hiring people all around the world.”
These distributed workforces required even more organizational structure for their meetings as they collaborated on projects, Husney said. This is especially true for adherents to the agile development process, who break down work into sprints that then need to be assessed, he said.
“Parabol was created so that every meeting held amongst team members is actually worth the time invested. With the support of CRV and Haystack, we will make Parabol useful to more kinds of teams, and scale Parabol’s infrastructure to match our rate of growth,” said the company’s chief executive and founder, Jordan Husney, in a statement.
The tools Parabol developed allow workers to conduct retrospective meetings and check-ins, the company said.
The software allows teams to work through five, structured meeting phases where teams evaluate their processes and make improvements at the end of a project, said the company.
“Parabol is transforming the way agile teams across industries work together,” said Izhar Armony, Partner at CRV, in a statement. “We’ve been tracking the rapidly rising need for teams to collaborate at a distance, and believe in the way Parabol is enabling people to meet and work more effectively together.”
