Founding Story: Mark
I first pitched AI at WeWork in 2019, and I was blown away by the findings (turns out, people drink coffee in the morning). Every year someone retweets this coffee anecdote (I see you Austin Rief), but very few know why I was mentioned in a WeWork article about Masa to begin with. The experience behind this helped shape the thinking around the company we’re starting today.
One night in 2016, in advance of a VIP guest coming to the office, a couple of us organized everything that WeWork had built into a demo on the third floor of our Global HQ in New York. Tucked away in the back corner of our HQ, visitors could see how WeWork managed its growing portfolio. The vision was clear, WeWork was going to revolutionize Real Estate tech.
The following week, the VIP guest arrived at the office, and during his famous 14 minute visit to HQ, Masa saw the tech vision in action. $4 billion dollars later, Adam had fallen in love with this tech demo and made it clear that everyone who entered the space had to see it. My boss, who had an org to run, could not stop every hour to give these presentations to investors. So, one day while he was in a meeting, I was asked to present to a large group of investors. That evening, I received a call from my boss: “Adam liked your pitch, you’re going to do most of these going forward.”
Over the next three years, in addition to my actual job, I probably gave over 1,000 tech demos (at least two a day for 3 years). It became a critical part of new hire onboarding, our sales pitch and our investor visits. When WeWork attempted to go public, I traveled on the roadshow and presented at the start of every meeting.
I knew I was adding value, but these contributions lived across dozens of teams, and when it came time to review my performance, there wasn’t any clear record of my contributions. Understanding employee contribution and impact at high growth companies is impossible. Managers change constantly, systems are changed out for new ones, and through it all, team members are left feeling undervalued. At WeWork and more recently at Saturn, I had the pleasure of working with world class people. But, despite the talent, I saw the chaos and confusion that comes with scaling and managing high performing teams.
Alongside Max Shaw and Brian Distelburger, we’re building Windmill to fix some of the fundamental flaws with people management, and to arm the next generation of managers with the tools they need to eliminate layers and process, while cultivating a high performance culture of feedback and recognition. As someone who has felt the pain of broken management as both an IC and as a manager, I believe this is a significantly better use case for AI than understanding if people drink coffee or not…
Sign up today: www.gowindmill.com
