Our Investment in Spoke

Over five years ago, before I joined Greylock, I was invited by several friends to angel invest in a smart phone app testing service called Appurify. Two short years later, Google acquired Appurify to build a cloud service for mobile developers. During the Appurify journey, I had the chance to work with with Jay Srinivasan, Pratyus Patnaik and David Kaneda. A lot of VCs and founders will say investing is “all about the team”. I agree, and I consider it one of the highest compliments that Jay and the team want to walk a second journey together. 

 One of the most important groups of people that any company serves are its employees. There are countless questions an employee may have about the latest updates on IT security protocol, where to find certain HR forms, what is company policy on travel reimbursements, or the right person to talk to about parental leave benefits. 

 Every minute that an employee spends hunting down the answers to these questions is a minute they are not spending on creative, high value work. Complicating matters, this information is saved in different places, distributed over many channels. When employees finally do find the right person to ask, or ticket form to fill out, those teams are often answering the same questions over and over and over again. 

 As my colleague Saam Motamedi and I dug into the internal ticketing and knowledge management space, we saw that many of these organizations suffer from ticketing systems that are clunky, slow, and hard to understand. And, while tickets are a useful construct for all internal facing employee requests, many of these tasks and requests could be automated.

The industry needs to rethink internal ticketing and knowledge management with modern UX and AI as fundamental primitives. This is why I’m excited to announce that Greylock has led the Series B in Spoke, and I have joined the Board of Directors.

A Beautiful, Modern Service Desk for the Entire Team

Spoke is an AI-powered, beautifully designed service desk that simplifies information and service management for everyone at the office. Using machine learning, Spoke intelligently routes internal requests to the right team and automatically resolves frequent requests, allowing employees to work smarter and be more productive.

 Spoke was designed to be anintuitive and easy-to-use “System of Engagement,” but is advanced enough to replace traditional IT ticketing systems for many companies. Employees can ask questions cross functions, like HR, Ops and Finance, and get answers from Spoke through channels that they are already using, such as Slack, Email, SMS and more.

Using Automation to Unconstrain Teams

Spoke is one of the first enterprise applications with AI built in. Its human-in-the-loop request flow combines human curation with machine learning to take away the repetitive aspects of jobs. Every time an employee’s request is resolved by a teammate, a corresponding knowledge asset gets created, which allows Spoke to automate about 50% fat head of tickets received by teams. Employees no longer need to fill out long ticket forms or go through a complex work process to get answer to questions like “how do I book a conference room?” or “what’s our 401K policy?”

Building the Backbone for Knowledge

Knowledge is becoming increasingly distributed in the enterprise across files, wikis and unstructured conversations, like emails and texts. Finding basic information is becoming harder and harder. Spoke uses requests as an interface to create and maintain institutional and tribal knowledge. This is the magic of Spoke’s “System of Intelligence.”

By resolving tickets, Spoke implicitly creates a knowledge base, ensures that it’s updated so the information doesn’t become stale, and leverages assets distributed across other systems. This is one of the most clever product loops we’ve seen, solving some of the significant problems that have plagued historical attempts at cracking knowledge management inside the enterprise.

Exceptional, Repeat Founding Team

At Greylock, we have a long history of working with entrepreneurs who build next general application companies, like those at Workday, ServiceNow, Domo, Gladly, and others. In its early customers, Spoke has already become the single destination for employees to go to with any request.

 I am excited to partner with Jay and the entire Spoke team to build the future of knowledge and service management inside the mid-market and enterprise. Hear more directly from the Spoke here.