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

Less than one year after its iOS launch, French startup ten ten has gone viral with a walkie talkie app that allows teens to send voice messages to their close…

French startup ten ten finds viral success and controversy in reinventing walkie-talkies

Featured Article

Unicorn-rich VC Wesley Chan owes his success to a Craigslist job washing lab beakers

While all of Wesley Chan’s success has been well-documented over the years, his personal journey…not so much. Chan spoke to TechCrunch about the ways his life impacts how he invests in startups.

5 hours ago
Unicorn-rich VC Wesley Chan owes his success to a Craigslist job washing lab beakers

Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump now has an account on the short-form video app that he once tried to ban. Trump’s TikTok account, which launched on Saturday night, features…

Trump takes off on TikTok

With fewer than 400,000 inhabitants, Iceland receives more than its fair share of tourists — and of venture capital.

Iceland’s startup scene is all about making the most of the country’s resources

Kobo put out a handful of new e-readers a few weeks back: color versions of the excellent Libra 2 and Clara, as well as an updated monochrome version of the…

Kobo’s new e-readers are a sidegrade most can skip (with one exception)

In an interview at his home near Reykjavík, the entrepreneur-turned-VC shared thoughts on his ventures and the journey that led him from Unity to climate tech, a homecoming of sorts.

Unity co-founder David Helgason’s next act: Gaming the climate crisis

Welcome back to TechCrunch’s Week in Review — TechCrunch’s newsletter recapping the week’s biggest news. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. Over the past eight years,…

Fisker collapsed under the weight of its founder’s promises

What is AI? We’ve put together this non-technical guide to give anyone a fighting chance to understand how and why today’s AI works.

WTF is AI?

President Joe Biden has vetoed H.J.Res. 109, a congressional resolution that would have overturned the Securities and Exchange Commission’s current approach to banks and crypto. Specifically, the resolution targeted the…

President Biden vetoes crypto custody bill

Featured Article

Industries may be ready for humanoid robots, but are the robots ready for them?

How large a role humanoids will play in that ecosystem is, perhaps, the biggest question on everyone’s mind at the moment.

1 day ago
Industries may be ready for humanoid robots, but are the robots ready for them?

VCs are clamoring to invest in hot AI companies, and willing to pay exorbitant share prices for coveted spots on their cap tables. Even so, most aren’t able to get…

VCs are selling shares of hot AI companies like Anthropic and xAI to small investors in a wild SPV market

The fashion industry has a huge problem: Despite many returned items being unworn or undamaged, a lot, if not the majority, end up in the trash. An estimated 9.5 billion…

Deal Dive: How (Re)vive grew 10x last year by helping retailers recycle and sell returned items

Tumblr officially shut down “Tips,” an opt-in feature where creators could receive one-time payments from their followers.  As of today, the tipping icon has automatically disappeared from all posts and…

You can no longer use Tumblr’s tipping feature 

Generative AI improvements are increasingly being made through data curation and collection — not architectural — improvements. Big Tech has an advantage.

AI training data has a price tag that only Big Tech can afford

Keeping up with an industry as fast-moving as AI is a tall order. So until an AI can do it for you, here’s a handy roundup of recent stories in the world…

This Week in AI: Can we (and could we ever) trust OpenAI?

Jasper Health, a cancer care platform startup, laid off a substantial part of its workforce, TechCrunch has learned.

General Catalyst-backed Jasper Health lays off staff

Featured Article

Live Nation confirms Ticketmaster was hacked, says personal information stolen in data breach

Live Nation says its Ticketmaster subsidiary was hacked. A hacker claims to be selling 560 million customer records.

2 days ago
Live Nation confirms Ticketmaster was hacked, says personal information stolen in data breach

Featured Article

Inside EV startup Fisker’s collapse: how the company crumbled under its founders’ whims

An autonomous pod. A solid-state battery-powered sports car. An electric pickup truck. A convertible grand tourer EV with up to 600 miles of range. A “fully connected mobility device” for young urban innovators to be built by Foxconn and priced under $30,000. The next Popemobile. Over the past eight years, famed vehicle designer Henrik Fisker…

2 days ago
Inside EV startup Fisker’s collapse: how the company crumbled under its founders’ whims

Late Friday afternoon, a time window companies usually reserve for unflattering disclosures, AI startup Hugging Face said that its security team earlier this week detected “unauthorized access” to Spaces, Hugging…

Hugging Face says it detected ‘unauthorized access’ to its AI model hosting platform

Featured Article

Hacked, leaked, exposed: Why you should never use stalkerware apps

Using stalkerware is creepy, unethical, potentially illegal, and puts your data and that of your loved ones in danger.

2 days ago
Hacked, leaked, exposed: Why you should never use stalkerware apps

The design brief was simple: each grind and dry cycle had to be completed before breakfast. Here’s how Mill made it happen.

Mill’s redesigned food waste bin really is faster and quieter than before

Google is embarrassed about its AI Overviews, too. After a deluge of dunks and memes over the past week, which cracked on the poor quality and outright misinformation that arose…

Google admits its AI Overviews need work, but we’re all helping it beta test

Welcome to Startups Weekly — Haje‘s weekly recap of everything you can’t miss from the world of startups. Sign up here to get it in your inbox every Friday. In…

Startups Weekly: Musk raises $6B for AI and the fintech dominoes are falling

The product, which ZeroMark calls a “fire control system,” has two components: a small computer that has sensors, like lidar and electro-optical, and a motorized buttstock.

a16z-backed ZeroMark wants to give soldiers guns that don’t miss against drones

The RAW Dating App aims to shake up the dating scheme by shedding the fake, TikTok-ified, heavily filtered photos and replacing them with a more genuine, unvarnished experience. The app…

Pitch Deck Teardown: RAW Dating App’s $3M angel deck

Yes, we’re calling it “ThreadsDeck” now. At least that’s the tag many are using to describe the new user interface for Instagram’s X competitor, Threads, which resembles the column-based format…

‘ThreadsDeck’ arrived just in time for the Trump verdict

Japanese crypto exchange DMM Bitcoin confirmed on Friday that it had been the victim of a hack resulting in the theft of 4,502.9 bitcoin, or about $305 million.  According to…

Hackers steal $305M from DMM Bitcoin crypto exchange

This is not a drill! Today marks the final day to secure your early-bird tickets for TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 at a significantly reduced rate. At midnight tonight, May 31, ticket…

Disrupt 2024 early-bird prices end at midnight

Instagram is testing a way for creators to experiment with reels without committing to having them displayed on their profiles, giving the social network a possible edge over TikTok and…

Instagram tests ‘trial reels’ that don’t display to a creator’s followers

U.S. federal regulators have requested more information from Zoox, Amazon’s self-driving unit, as part of an investigation into rear-end crash risks posed by unexpected braking. The National Highway Traffic Safety…

Feds tell Zoox to send more info about autonomous vehicles suddenly braking