Adam Nathan is convinced that modern knowledge work is broken. Between the influx of messages that flood workers’ screens on Slack, the constant toggling between documents and comments left in track changes, and meetings in perpetuity, Nathan believes it’s harder than ever for knowledge workers to achieve meaningful productivity. That’s why he started Almanac, a document collaboration platform where all communication on a project can be housed in a central hub. Since its founding in 2019, the company has raised $45 million from a variety of investors including Leore Avidar and Indicator Ventures.
Nathan spoke with HR Brew about his thoughts on the issues pervading modern workflows and how he hopes to make a difference for organizations big and small.
What product or service does your company offer?
Almanac is a structured collaboration platform for modern teams, or really for remote teams. At its core, it’s a document editor, but it has workflows and version control to help automate basic types of collaboration, like getting feedback, or approvals, or making suggestions. So you can work across time zones without meetings.
What specific issue in HR does your company tend to solve?
We model Almanac after how the most productive engineering teams work in GitHub. What GitHub does through version control and these automated reviews is that it allows people to basically work asynchronously across time zones and geographies. Because there’s a lot more structure and more transparency in [Almanac], you don’t need to meet all the time to get basic answers to basic questions.
Quick-to-read HR news & insights
From recruiting and retention to company culture and the latest in HR tech, HR Brew delivers up-to-date industry news and tips to help HR pros stay nimble in today’s fast-changing business environment.
It’s a way to keep documentation updated over time and in a way that reduces all the manual work for someone on the HR team.
What kind of companies are your primary customers?
Engineering and HR ops teams are our two biggest early adopters, but it tends to spread pretty quickly to the marketing team or the product team, because most collaboration is cross-functional. Our earliest customers have been concentrated in the remote space—companies like Andela, or Todoist, or Credit Karma. Companies that were on the leading edge of distributed work have adopted Almanac. We have really big organizations using it as well: the American Heart Association, the Emmys, State of California, Home Depot.
How do you think your company will help drive evolution in HR tech?
The challenge is that people are spending a lot of their time doing work that’s not meaningful to them or productive to the company. We’re talking about the future of work there: the way people get stuff done, the way they work together, the way they contribute to a company. The distinction between HR tech and core productivity and collaboration to me feels blurrier than ever. Even though we think of ourselves as a collaboration platform, I think that’s the reason it’s been so strongly adopted by HR teams. In a world where we need to change how we work, teams need more structure, they need more transparency, they need fewer meetings. That’s our contribution to the landscape.