Startups

Experts from Front, Mural and WorkBoard discuss how to manage a distributed workforce at Disrupt

Comment

What does the future of work look like in a (quasi) post-pandemic world? That’s a question all companies — from startups to major corporations — are asking as they consider how to distribute and manage their workforces in 2022 and beyond. 

Airbnb, for example, chose a live anywhere, work anywhere policy, while Twitter has gone hybrid. Distributed work comes with challenges and, as Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal noted, “Anyone who has joined a meeting remotely while others are in a conference room knows this pain.”

Whichever course startups choose, they will have more remote staff than ever before. That’s why we’re excited to announce that Mathilde Collin, co-founder and CEO at Front, Deidre Paknad, co-founder and CEO at WorkBoard and Adriana Roche, chief people officer at Mural, will tackle this topic onstage at TechCrunch Disrupt on October 18-20 in San Francisco.

In a session called “How To Manage Staff In A Remote, Asynchronous Reality,” Collin, Paknad and Roche will identify the various challenges and help founders understand how to manage remote staffers and hybrid workforce culture. They’ll talk about what does and doesn’t work when it comes to maintaining a productive distributed workforce.

This is a challenging, timely topic and, like you, we have lots of questions. Here’s more information about the three women we invited to provide the answers.

Mathilde Collin, co-founder and CEO at Front, a customer communication platform, is known for her values-driven leadership style and for championing top-down radical transparency. Since founding the company in 2014, Collin has raised more than $204 million in venture capital funding, including a $65 million Series D round last month.

Collin mentors aspiring entrepreneurs through All Raise’s Female Founders Office Hours and the Pioneer Fund. She has been recognized in Forbes’ Next Billion-Dollar Startups 2019, Inc Magazine’s Female Founders 100 2019, and Forbes 30 Under 30: Enterprise Tech 2017.

Deidre Paknad is the CEO and co-founder of WorkBoard, a strategy execution platform that ranked No.162 on the 2021 Deloitte Technology Fast 500 list and number six on the list of companies led by female CEOs.

Paknad works with senior leadership at some of the world’s largest companies — including AstraZeneca, Ford, Humana, Walmart and Zendesk — to clarify, align and drive strategic priorities with greater speed and agility. She has founded and led three tech companies, a high-growth business as an executive at IBM and has 17 patents either granted or pending in her name.

Adriana Roche is the chief people officer at Mural, a collaborative intelligence company with more than 900 people working remotely across 29 countries. She leads a team responsible for recruiting, growth and team member development. 

Prior to Mural, Roche served as vice president of people and places at Segment, where she led a team that, over the course of nearly five years, increased the company’s headcount tenfold and earned Segment multiple awards as a best place to work. 

Previously, Roche held recruiting positions at Google, Salesforce and Dropbox, where she managed distributed SaaS teams undergoing a steep growth curve. She is fluent in English, Spanish and French and holds a master’s degree in organizational psychology from NYU.

TechCrunch Disrupt is back in person on October 18-20 in San Francisco. Early action equals bigger savings. Buy your pass now and save up to $1,300. Student, government and nonprofit passes are available for just $195. Prices increase July 29.

More TechCrunch

Go Digit, an Indian insurance startup, has raised $141 million from investors including Goldman Sachs, ADIA, and Morgan Stanley as part of its IPO.

Indian insurance startup Go Digit raises $141M from anchor investors ahead of IPO

Peakbridge intends to invest in between 16 and 20 companies, investing around $10 million in each company. It has made eight investments so far.

Food VC Peakbridge has new $187M fund to transform future of food, like lab-made cocoa

For over six decades, the nonprofit has been active in the financial services sector.

Accion’s new $152.5M fund will back financial institutions serving small businesses globally

Meta’s newest social network, Threads is starting its own fact-checking program after piggybacking on Instagram and Facebook’s network for a few months. Instagram head Adam Mosseri noted that the company…

Threads finally starts its own fact-checking program

Looking Glass makes trippy-looking mixed-reality screens that make things look 3D without the need of special glasses. Today, it launches a pair of new displays, including a 16-inch mode that…

Looking Glass launches new 3D displays

Replacing Sutskever is Jakub Pachocki, OpenAI’s director of research.

Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder and longtime chief scientist, departs

Intuitive Machines made history when it became the first private company to land a spacecraft on the moon, so it makes sense to adapt that tech for Mars.

Intuitive Machines wants to help NASA return samples from Mars

As Google revamps itself for the AI era, offering AI overviews within its search results, the company is introducing a new way to filter for just text-based links. With the…

Google adds ‘Web’ search filter for showing old-school text links as AI rolls out

Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket will take a crew to suborbital space for the first time in nearly two years later this month, the company announced on Tuesday.  The NS-25…

Blue Origin to resume crewed New Shepard launches on May 19

This will enable developers to use the on-device model to power their own AI features.

Google is building its Gemini Nano AI model into Chrome on the desktop

It ran 110 minutes, but Google managed to reference AI a whopping 121 times during Google I/O 2024 (by its own count). CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the figure to wrap…

Google mentioned ‘AI’ 120+ times during its I/O keynote

Firebase Genkit is an open source framework that enables developers to quickly build AI into new and existing applications.

Google launches Firebase Genkit, a new open source framework for building AI-powered apps

In the coming months, Google says it will open up the Gemini Nano model to more developers.

Patreon and Grammarly are already experimenting with Gemini Nano, says Google

As part of the update, Reddit also launched a dedicated AMA tab within the web post composer.

Reddit introduces new tools for ‘Ask Me Anything,’ its Q&A feature

Here are quick hits of the biggest news from the keynote as they are announced.

Google I/O 2024: Here’s everything Google just announced

LearnLM is already powering features across Google products, including in YouTube, Google’s Gemini apps, Google Search and Google Classroom.

LearnLM is Google’s new family of AI models for education

The official launch comes almost a year after YouTube began experimenting with AI-generated quizzes on its mobile app. 

Google is bringing AI-generated quizzes to academic videos on YouTube

Around 550 employees across autonomous vehicle company Motional have been laid off, according to information taken from WARN notice filings and sources at the company.  Earlier this week, TechCrunch reported…

Motional cut about 550 employees, around 40%, in recent restructuring, sources say

The keynote kicks off at 10 a.m. PT on Tuesday and will offer glimpses into the latest versions of Android, Wear OS and Android TV.

Google I/O 2024: Watch all of the AI, Android reveals

Google Play has a new discovery feature for apps, new ways to acquire users, updates to Play Points, and other enhancements to developer-facing tools.

Google Play preps a new full-screen app discovery feature and adds more developer tools

Soon, Android users will be able to drag and drop AI-generated images directly into their Gmail, Google Messages and other apps.

Gemini on Android becomes more capable and works with Gmail, Messages, YouTube and more

Veo can capture different visual and cinematic styles, including shots of landscapes and timelapses, and make edits and adjustments to already-generated footage.

Google Veo, a serious swing at AI-generated video, debuts at Google I/O 2024

In addition to the body of the emails themselves, the feature will also be able to analyze attachments, like PDFs.

Gemini comes to Gmail to summarize, draft emails, and more

The summaries are created based on Gemini’s analysis of insights from Google Maps’ community of more than 300 million contributors.

Google is bringing Gemini capabilities to Google Maps Platform

Google says that over 100,000 developers already tried the service.

Project IDX, Google’s next-gen IDE, is now in open beta

The system effectively listens for “conversation patterns commonly associated with scams” in-real time. 

Google will use Gemini to detect scams during calls

The standard Gemma models were only available in 2 billion and 7 billion parameter versions, making this quite a step up.

Google announces Gemma 2, a 27B-parameter version of its open model, launching in June

This is a great example of a company using generative AI to open its software to more users.

Google TalkBack will use Gemini to describe images for blind people

Google’s Circle to Search feature will now be able to solve more complex problems across psychics and math word problems. 

Circle to Search is now a better homework helper

People can now search using a video they upload combined with a text query to get an AI overview of the answers they need.

Google experiments with using video to search, thanks to Gemini AI