Visibility in a Remote Organization

How outcomes & notes maintain continuity across Prime Movers Lab

At Prime Movers Lab we are constantly asked how we do what we do without an office and without interacting with one another face to face. Fortunately for us, Prime Movers Lab was founded from day one to be a remote organization, so our systems and processes were designed with this in mind. As a remote organization we love defining systems and processes that give everyone on our team the opportunity to be informed with what is going on… and there is a whole lot going on! There are two processes in particular I want to highlight here: frequent communication and weekly goal setting.

Notes & Slack

How many words per minute can you type? In recent months, one of my core responsibilities has been onboarding new team members and this is a question I frequently ask, because taking notes is a core responsibility for everyone on the team. We don’t have the luxury of stopping by a coworker’s desk so we have to be intentional with our communication. We designed a template that works very well for us and has six sections:

• Attendees: Who is attending the meeting?
• Outcomes: What are the objectives that we must accomplish during this call?
• Actions: What follow up is needed post-meeting?
• Summary: What is the most important information that came out of this meeting?
• Context and Pre-call Prep: What information should we be aware of prior to the meeting?
• Raw Notes: What were the talking points and contents of this meeting?

As you can imagine, our calendars look like a big game of Tetris and the amount of communication and information that is exchanged is large and extremely valuable. So how is it all shared? Notes and Slack. Every member on our team is expected to take notes at every meeting they attend, summarize, and share them. There is a tremendous amount of information being shared today and if you had the time to read every notes doc you would know exactly what is going on within the organization at a very granular level. We like to categorize our meetings into five different Slack channels:

• Portfolio: On Mondays our partners meet with our portfolio CEOs. In these 30 minute one-on-ones our partners seek to deliver on our promise that the capital is the least valuable thing we provide our companies. Each PML portfolio company CEO has a standing meeting on his or her calendar every Monday with one of our partners giving us an opportunity to support and serve the founders in a very direct and consistent way.
• Fundraising: These meetings are with current or potential investors in our funds.
• Hiring: As we have been scaling our organization since raising the second fund, we’ve invested meaningful time in hiring for our own team. Generally, hiring meetings can be divided into two categories: (1) our team interviewing candidates for roles at Prime Movers Lab, (2) our team interviewing a leadership candidate for one of our portfolio companies.
• Deals: Last year we reviewed over 3,000 deals and while we didn’t meet with 3,000 founders we met with A LOT! Notes for these meetings are taken in specific templates containing key questions that are integral to our diligence process.
• Ecosystem: As the Prime Movers Lab ecosystem grows the meetings we have in this area grow as well. These meetings are with other VCs and advisors. One of the greatest parts of investing in scientific breakthroughs is that we reside in a very collaborative side of the market. This means that we are constantly sharing deal flow and diligence with other investors in this space. Our mission is to invest in breakthrough scientific startups that transform billions of lives and we know we’re not on this journey alone.

Weekly Outcome Docs

The second pillar that ensures visibility and transparency across the organization is our weekly outcome docs. The purpose of these documents is to track our ongoing projects and meetings that we are working on. Anton and I started creating these documents with Dakin about a year ago so that Dakin could have visibility on what we were working on as well as provide feedback and suggestions when we hit a roadblock. This document is made up of four sections:

• Top Outcomes: In this section we outline our top outcomes (usually 3) from last week and the top outcomes we are working on this week along with the status of each.
• Days of the week: The next section of the document is each day broken down into daily outcomes and action items that feed into our top 3 outcomes.
• Most exciting moments from the week: Here we can highlight amazing moments from the week.
• Biggest learning from the week: An opportunity to reflect on the week and write down learnings and reflections from the week

Today, this process has been extended to the whole firm and we submit our weekly outcome docs every Sunday in our #all-hands Slack channel. At Prime Movers Lab we are all driven by outcomes rather than goals because outcomes are specific and measurable. Every Monday at our all hands meeting we read off our firm-wide 2021 outcomes to ensure the vision and the mission are being carried out. This process has been so effective that this week we had to revisit and update our yearly outcomes because we have already surpassed most of them.

Prime Movers Lab invests in breakthrough scientific startups founded by Prime Movers, the inventors who transform billions of lives. We invest in companies reinventing energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, human augmentation, and agriculture.

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