Pi Labs’ investment in FLOWN

“focused success on a distracted world”

We are excited to have led FLOWN’s £2.5 million Seed round, along with our friends at January Ventures and Venrex, helping Alicia and Cat take FLOWN and deep work to a wider audience.

Background to our investment

When Calm came out, I was quick to be one of the non-believers that meditation was the answer to our ever-increasing stressful life. It took me quite a while to even try it and my disbelief was only augmented when I did, which made me sure I was not a target customer. However, it made me explore the app further and, with some chronic sleep problems, I decided to give their “sleep stories” a try — there is nothing better than hiking in a fictional world to the voice of Idriss Elba to help you fall asleep. And with that, something within me clicked and I became an advocate for anything that can help with our mental health and wellbeing.

Enter Alicia Navarro, a founder I had met a few years ago while working in the same fund. She had been the founder of Skimlinks, which, alongside her co-founder Joe Stepniewski, had been responsible for creating the category of affiliate marketing. After exiting Skimlinks, Alicia decided to take a break from being a founder (arguably, one of the most exhausting jobs) and explored the world while still being in contact with the start-up world.

While on her travels, Alicia discovered Deep Work, by Cal Newport which establishes the “Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World”. The concept of deep work revolves around not dismissing that distraction is bad but rather that its opposite, focused work, has incredible power. By establishing periods in our own routine that are meant to be undistracted crunch hours, this deep work ethic produces massive benefits that regular work does not:

1- It results in high-value creative output, since you’re not meant to check e-mails or your social media

2- It improves your ability to focus, since as you do more deep work, the more you train this “muscle”

3- It makes you more efficient, as you’re able to get more work done in less time

4- Deep work makes you happier, since sources of distraction cause us to compare our life with the highlights of someone else’s. With deep work, “we compare less and create more”

How did the investment come about

One of the “secrets” of venture capital is that you should always be in touch with founders that you believe have the ability to create something out of the ordinary. I wish this had been the case with Alicia, but she was the one that got in touch with us, due to our extensive research on the Future of Work theme — and all it took was an e-mail. Alicia, together with her sister Cat, had founded FLOWN during the pandemic, at a point in time when people were feeling lost with the changes towards working from home policies. They had taken Cal Newport’s work and productized it, in the same way that Calm or Peloton had productized meditation and cycling classes. And they were looking for investment.

After a couple of calls with Alicia and Cat, we realized the potential of deep work, got to be more knowledgeable in the space and even attended a few ‘Flocks’ — their version of group sessions for deep work. Among all of our due diligence points, these group sessions were enlightening to us all: it was impressive to see the number of attendees in each session (averaging at 60+ for a whole 2 hours) but also, sharing their neurodiversities and the impact that something like FLOWN can have in their daily lives. FLOWN was not only making them be more focused and efficient at work, but it was also helping them be more comfortable with issues such as ADHD, stress and even milder forms of autism. After my initial bias against Calm, I just couldn’t ignore what FLOWN was trying to build.

Does the “work” in “deep work” make it PropTech?

At Pi Labs, our main investment thesis is that we will back early-stage businesses that are trying to improve the way we interact with the built environment. As such, it might seem odd that something like FLOWN could fit our interest. Indeed, why should a developer, asset manager or any standard institution care about deep work? Plus, isn’t this a tool that is mostly for people that tend to work alone, such as artists, developers and contractors?

While at first sight all of the above seem to be true, the pandemic changed the way we work, play and live. According to pwc, 56% of interviewees would prefer some form of remote work or fully remote jobs. That has led a lot of US executives in particular to increase their investment in tools for virtual collaboration, upgrading their IT infrastructure and even training for managers that have a more virtual workforce. Providing an office space alone is no longer accepted as enough of a benefit to sway employees to join or remain at your company and, therefore, providing additional tools that make hybrid or remote work a reality is definitely within our Future of Work scope.

Why we invested

As I always tell founders that we speak to, there are three main criteria that we are looking to assess when we first invest in any start-up.

Quality of founding team

Alicia and Cat had been in the start-up world for their entire careers and both brought very interesting complementary skills to each other — while Alicia is responsible for vision, strategy and external communication (skills that were very valuable for her at Skimlinks), Cat has always been involved in the more operational and day-to-day tasks, making sure that, no matter what, FLOWN was always in a “deep work” state. They also managed to surround themselves with an incredible team, advisors and angel investors

Market Size

The potential for deep work tools is limitless. FLOWN focuses on ‘knowledge workers’ or, in other words, people whose main capital is knowledge, such as programmers, physicians, architects, scientists, academics, lawyers and many others. According to Gartner, there were more than 1 billion knowledge workers in 2019 and, not only that, but in many developed countries, the output of these workers is now attaining more business as a percentage of GDP than physical capital and it is expected that by the end of 2022, 32% of worldwide workers will either be remote or hybrid (with countries like the US and the UK reaching levels as high as 53% and 52%, respectively).

Product

Although not a technical innovation per se, what distinguishes FLOWN from the rest is not only a very easy-to-use platform, but also the wide array of features that it provides. While ‘Flocks’ are live 2-hour sessions moderated by facilitators, ‘Portholes’ allows people to do shorter, offline sessions working alongside VIPs (similar to what Calm does). FLOWN also takes mental and health wellbeing seriously, providing a series of ‘Recharge’ elements that allow users to relax from their ‘flow’ and get ready for the next one.

On top of the above, Alicia and Cat managed to create a very loyal userbase, with high engagement (the average number of ‘Flocks’ per week per user is between 3 to 4) and high degree of conversion. With all of that being said, we are very proud to have led their £2.5 million Seed round, along with our friends at January Ventures and Venrex, helping Alicia and Cat taking FLOWN and deep work to a wider audience. If you’ve made it this far, why have you not signed up?

What’s next

The corporate wellness market is $53bn, growing to $93bn by 2028. Meditation apps and gym memberships are common employee perks, but as more companies switch to full remote or hybrid working, tools like FLOWN that directly benefit both employee and company wellness are likely to flourish. This fund raise will help FLOWN target this opportunity.

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