Enterprise
Read the pitch deck this former Google employee used to nab a $4.5 million seed round for his corporate podcasting startup, from investors like CRV and Slack’s venture fund
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- Former Googler JP Gooderham wants people to use audio and podcasts as a method of communication and collaboration within the workplace.
- In late 2019 he left Google to found Storyboard, which helps make it easy for the over 1,700 companies using it to create and distribute podcasts across an organization.
- In December, he raised $4.5 million in seed funding — here’s the pitchdeck Storyboard used to convince CRV and other investors to fund its seed round:
- Visit Business Insider’s homepage for more stories.
By now, most people are accustomed to using video and chat tools at work. However, not many companies have tried out asynchronous audio for communication and collaboration.
Former Googler JP Gooderham wants to change.
He raised $4.5 million in seed funding in December for his enterprise podcasting startup Storyboard, in a round led by venture firm CRV.
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“We want people at all levels of the company to be able to use audio to be more collaborative, more engaged,” Gooderham told Business Insider in a December interview.
Harry Stebbings of popular venture capital podcast 20MinuteVC, Operator Partners, Slack’s corporate VC arm the Slack Fund, and private investors Dave Ambrose and Matt Ziskie, also participated in the round.
Before founding Storyboard, Gooderham worked at Google for roughly seven years until late 2019, holding various roles in its ads division, including product leader and account strategist. He says he can pinpoint the “light bulb moment” he realized that companies could use audio and podcasting as an enterprise tool the same way they use Google Docs or Zoom.
While working in a product lab near the end of his time at Google, he needed a way to quickly get new information about tools his team was creating to other colleagues that needed to be up-to-date when talking to customers that were testing them. He decided to start recording his weekly meeting with customer -facing teams so people could listen to it on their own time and soon realized there were many more ways to use the podcasting format in an enterprise setting.
After officially launching in November 2019, Storyboard now has over 1,700 companies using it to record and launch internal, on-demand audio content. The content ranges from training for sales teams, to a CEO’s all-hands meeting, to podcasts about career development.
Gooderham sees the future of work as less desktop-focused and increasingly done using smartphones on-the-go, and thinks podcasting can help make that transition more seamless. While video conferencing requires people to be focused on something at a specific time while stationary, asynchronous podcasting lets people easily get or give information from wherever they are and on their own schedule.
It also opens up new opportunities to collaborate asynchronously. Events that would have once required everyone to be available at the same time, like a town hall meeting, can be recorded and distributed and the following discussion that would normally happen in person can take place virtually.
“These companies are trying to answer the question of, ‘How do you build those communities in a space where people are more spread out geographically than they’ve ever been before?'” Gooderham said. “Our vision for Storyboard is really one where those moments that maybe we used to have at the micro kitchen or the water cooler, it becomes virtual, it becomes collaborative.”
CRV investor Anna Khan, who led Storyboard’s seed round, said she has rarely sees products that get so much virality so quickly.
Here’s the pitchdeck Storyboard used to convince CRV and other investors to fund its seed round:
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