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

The Series C funding, which brings its total raise to around $95 million, will go toward mass production of the startup’s inaugural products

AI chip startup DEEPX secures $80M Series C at a $529M valuation 

A dust-up between Evolve Bank & Trust, Mercury and Synapse has led TabaPay to abandon its acquisition plans of troubled banking-as-a-service startup Synapse.

Infighting among fintech players has caused TabaPay to ‘pull out’ from buying bankrupt Synapse

The problem is not the media, but the message.

Apple’s ‘Crush’ ad is disgusting

The Twitter for Android client was “a demo app that Google had created and gave to us,” says Particle co-founder and ex-Twitter employee Sara Beykpour.

Google built some of the first social apps for Android, including Twitter and others

WhatsApp is updating its mobile apps for a fresh and more streamlined look, while also introducing a new “darker dark mode,” the company announced on Thursday. The messaging app says…

WhatsApp’s latest update streamlines navigation and adds a ‘darker dark mode’

Plinky lets you solve the problem of saving and organizing links from anywhere with a focus on simplicity and customization.

Plinky is an app for you to collect and organize links easily

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: How to watch

For cancer patients, medicines administered in clinical trials can help save or extend lives. But despite thousands of trials in the United States each year, only 3% to 5% of…

Triomics raises $15M Series A to automate cancer clinical trials matching

Welcome back to TechCrunch Mobility — your central hub for news and insights on the future of transportation. Sign up here for free — just click TechCrunch Mobility! Tap, tap.…

Tesla drives Luminar lidar sales and Motional pauses robotaxi plans

The newly announced “Public Content Policy” will now join Reddit’s existing privacy policy and content policy to guide how Reddit’s data is being accessed and used by commercial entities and…

Reddit locks down its public data in new content policy, says use now requires a contract

Eva Ho plans to step away from her position as general partner at Fika Ventures, the Los Angeles-based seed firm she co-founded in 2016. Fika told LPs of Ho’s intention…

Fika Ventures co-founder Eva Ho will step back from the firm after its current fund is deployed

In a post on Werner Vogels’ personal blog, he details Distill, an open-source app he built to transcribe and summarize conference calls.

Amazon’s CTO built a meeting-summarizing app for some reason

Paris-based Mistral AI, a startup working on open source large language models — the building block for generative AI services — has been raising money at a $6 billion valuation,…

Sources: Mistral AI raising at a $6B valuation, SoftBank ‘not in’ but DST is

You can expect plenty of AI, but probably not a lot of hardware.

Google I/O 2024: What to expect

Dating apps and other social friend-finders are being put on notice: Dating app giant Bumble is looking to make more acquisitions.

Bumble says it’s looking to M&A to drive growth

When Class founder Michael Chasen was in college, he and a buddy came up with the idea for Blackboard, an online classroom organizational tool. His original company was acquired for…

Blackboard founder transforms Zoom add-on designed for teachers into business tool

Groww, an Indian investment app, has become one of the first startups from the country to shift its domicile back home.

Groww joins the first wave of Indian startups moving domiciles back home from US

Technology giant Dell notified customers on Thursday that it experienced a data breach involving customers’ names and physical addresses. In an email seen by TechCrunch and shared by several people…

Dell discloses data breach of customers’ physical addresses

Featured Article

Fairgen ‘boosts’ survey results using synthetic data and AI-generated responses

The Israeli startup has raised $5.5M for its platform that uses “statistical AI” to generate synthetic data that it says is as good as the real thing.

13 hours ago
Fairgen ‘boosts’ survey results using synthetic data and AI-generated responses

Hydrow, the at-home rowing machine maker, announced Thursday that it has acquired a majority stake in Speede Fitness, the company behind the AI-enabled strength training machine. The rowing startup also…

Rowing startup Hydrow acquires a majority stake in Speede Fitness as their CEO steps down

Call centers are embracing automation. There’s debate as to whether that’s a good thing, but it’s happening — and quite possibly accelerating. According to research firm TechSci Research, the global…

Retell AI lets companies build ‘voice agents’ to answer phone calls

TikTok is starting to automatically label AI-generated content that was made on other platforms, the company announced on Thursday. With this change, if a creator posts content on TikTok that…

TikTok will automatically label AI-generated content created on platforms like DALL·E 3

India’s mobile payments regulator is likely to extend the deadline for imposing market share caps on the popular UPI (unified payments interface) payments rail by one to two years, sources…

India likely to delay UPI market caps in win for PhonePe-Google Pay duopoly

Line Man Wongnai, an on-demand food delivery service in Thailand, is considering an initial public offering on a Thai exchange or the U.S. in 2025.

Thai food delivery app Line Man Wongnai weighs IPO in Thailand, US in 2025

Ever wonder why conversational AI like ChatGPT says “Sorry, I can’t do that” or some other polite refusal? OpenAI is offering a limited look at the reasoning behind its own…

OpenAI offers a peek behind the curtain of its AI’s secret instructions

The federal government agency responsible for granting patents and trademarks is alerting thousands of filers whose private addresses were exposed following a second data spill in as many years. The…

US Patent and Trademark Office confirms another leak of filers’ address data

As part of an investigation into people involved in the pro-independence movement in Catalonia, the Spanish police obtained information from the encrypted services Wire and Proton, which helped the authorities…

Encrypted services Apple, Proton and Wire helped Spanish police identify activist

Match Group, the company that owns several dating apps, including Tinder and Hinge, released its first-quarter earnings report on Tuesday, which shows that Tinder’s paying user base has decreased for…

Match looks to Hinge as Tinder fails

Private social networking is making a comeback. Gratitude Plus, a startup that aims to shift social media in a more positive direction, is expanding its wellness-focused, personal reflections journal to…

Gratitude Plus makes social networking positive, private and personal

With venture totals slipping year-over-year in key markets like the United States, and concern that venture firms themselves are struggling to raise more capital, founders might be worried. After all,…

Can AI help founders fundraise more quickly and easily?