New Investment: Almanac

Every now and then you hear an idea that sounds great in theory, but the thought of executing it seems like an uphill, Everest-style climb. Maybe I’m an optimist, maybe I’m a visionary…or maybe I’m just a seed stage VC investor that needs those feelings in order to do what I do. Today I am proud to announce our investment in Almanac.*

100 million professionals work in (non-engineering) tech-heavy roles in the US, growing 12% per year as every business goes digital. Yet there is no singular tool to help guide those professionals in their day-to-day workflow. Increasingly workers are leveraging digitally native tools to help power their businesses e.g. Slack for internal communication, Dropbox for file storage, Notion for project and task management, Superhuman for email and a slew of other software products to work ‘more efficiently.’

But more often than not employees are recreating the wheel at work. In the words of Almanac co-founder Adam Nathan, “tech is not rocket science, it’s just really smart people following a structured set of processes to build and scale products.” And that’s exactly what Almanac lets people do.

Almanac is a knowledge management platform that comes pre populated with best practices from some of the most experienced and knowledgeable professionals on the planet, e.g. Netflix’s VP Product, Airtable’s Head of Growth, Lyft’s Head of Growth, and Dropbox’s Head of Research, to name a few. The beautiful value proposition for users is that they can now build out their own knowledge base without having to start from scratch. Users can easily write over existing content, save it, share it and collaborate with others in a simple yet powerful platform.

When you think about it, this format isn’t exactly anything new. GitHub built something very similar, but it’s designed exclusively for engineers. Almanac is essentially GitHub for non-technical knowledge workers. In addition to a robust community of experts, the Almanac platform utilizes group-based sharing, change-logs, and merge requests to help companies keep their knowledge organized at scale. In other words, Almanac is built to house the underlying operating manual for a business, customized to that business but leveraging best practices from the most experienced professionals across all relevant domains.

In case you’re still scratching your head and wondering how big this could be, consider this: US companies spend $166B annually on corporate learning and development, growing at 10% per year, with 61% of those funds spent on internal tools and resources. Meanwhile, though it feels like the internet has always been the way of the world, the digital economy is still nascent: only 3% of the US workforce works at digitally native companies.

In closing, #DigitalEfficiencies.

*Indicator Ventures first invested in Almanac in Q1 2019 before the company had publicly launched a product.