Your business is often as strong as your team and its ability to work together. Technology, while designed to make our professional lives easier, often ends up driving us apart when they various tools and platforms that we use aren’t interconnected. Enter Hive, the platform that prevents fragmentation by providing a one stop hub that integrates over 100 tools such Dropbox, Slack, Salesforce, and WordPress. Already counting major companies like Nike, PWC and HBO as clients, this NYC startup is making digital teamwork seamless and efficient.
AlleyWatch spoke with CEO John Furneaux about the company and how it plans to grow.
Tell us about the product or service.
Digital teamwork is still too hard. Hive’s teamwork platform is easy. It concentrates messaging, task management, and files onto one dashboard. Slack teams especially love it, and Hive integrates with over 100 others. Hive is basically a tailored hub for teamwork.
How is it different?
Most tools only cover one area of collaboration—chat, planning, files—and force you to invest in a whole productivity stack. Hive pulls everything into one place.
Manage your to-do list. Check on project progress. Chat with colleagues. Get updates from CRM. All. In. One. Place.
It streamlines your workday. It makes it easier to drive projects forward. It’s also deadly easy to use, with lots of flexibility (kanban boards, calendar, lists) and integration optionality.
What market are you attacking and how big is it?
Hive is all about enterprise collaboration. It’s about a $27B space projected to grow to about $50B by 2021. Gartner says that 50 percent of business coordination will occur via collaboration tools in 2018.
That makes it the fastest growing B2B software segment. Just look at the recent acquisition of Trello for $425 million and Asana’s Series C financing round of $50M at a $600M+ valuation.
What is the business model?
Teams get full access for $12 per user per month, after a 14-day free trial. We negotiate pricing for customers with over 100 team members and unique requirements.
What inspired the business?
My whole career has been about helping teams improve collaboration. First, I implemented Sharepoint as a consultant at Capgemini. Then I became global head of customer success at huddle.com. All the while, I never saw tools that met the integrated platform needs of teams, with a consumer product experience. So I left Huddle to make that tool with my co-founder Eric Typaldos who’d previously worked on platform architecture for enterprise collaboration at Oracle and on MAX.gov at the White House. We launched out of the 2015 fall class of AngelPad.
What are some interesting uses of your platform?
A wide variety of teams use Hive. Some favorites include investigation of fish stocks in Michigan by USGS and “Blade” legend Wesley Snipes for his upcoming projects.
What are the milestones that you plan to achieve within six months?
Six customers with > 500 Hive users. We are also preparing for our first 1000-seat deal.
What is the one piece of startup advice that you never got?
Not surprisingly, no one in San Francisco advised me to move to New York City to start my company. However, it was immediately clear that New York is the best place for Hive to grow. The sales opportunities and the growing tech community have been huge assets.
If you could be put in touch with anyone in the New York community who would it be and why?
Danielle Weisberg and Carly Zakin of theSkimm. My friends rave about theSkimm. I think any startup can learn a lot from their excellence and concise narrative.
Why did you launch in New York?
In a word, diversity. In every sense of the word. In New York, everyone and everything is represented. From advertising to fashion to finance, everywhere you go, you can interact with people from every profession and background. This produces a healthy cross-pollination of ideas, and it fights blinding groupthink.
New York also has a broader prospective customer base. At Huddle, in San Francisco, most of our customers were a plane ride away. Meanwhile, Huddle’s New York salespeople could do as many as four in-person customer meetings a day. Did you know that 48 Fortune 500 companies are headquartered in New York City? Only five are in San Francisco.
What’s your favorite restaurant in the city?
Ruffian Chef’s Table in the East Village. Intimate, run with passion, and goddamn delicious.
