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Hiring for Design Part 5: Scaling your Design Team

by The Seedcamp Team
This post is by The Seedcamp Team from Seedcamp

By Andy Budd, Designer and Expert in Residence at Seedcamp

As startups raise funding and grow their customer base, the demands placed on the engineering teams tend to scale quite rapidly. This is one of the reasons you need a solid CTO from the onset. Not only to get your product off the ground, but also to manage the complexity that comes from hiring and managing a large number of engineers. 

On the design side of things, the received wisdom is that you need one designer to service five or six engineers. As such, design tends to scale slightly later than engineering and at a slower rate. That being said, there are plenty of startups out there with a 20-person engineering team, just barely getting by on two or three designers. So once companies have scaled their engineering teams, their attention generally turns to their design and product functions.

One of the challenges of hiring designers is that there are a lot fewer of them out there, so good designers are much harder to find. And it’s especially the case if you’re not that well connected in the design space. This is one reason why your first design hire is key. 

Your Founding Design is your Best Hiring Asset

A good founding designer will have strong connections within the design community, so when it comes time to scale, they’ll already have a line of potential talent. These may be people they already know and have worked with, or (Read more...)

Sora’s HR automation software raises $14M Series A

by Alex Wilhelm

HR automation software startup Sora announced this morning that it closed a $14 million Series A round of funding. Two Sigma Ventures led the financing event, putting in $10 million, with prior investors completing the round.

The round comes after Sora raised a $5.3 million seed round in July 2020. First Round and Elad Gil led that investment.

TechCrunch caught up with Sora CEO Laura Del Beccaro to chat about the round. We were curious about why this was the right moment for the company to raise more capital — the startup noted last year that it had around 2.5 years of runway — and what it intends to do with the money.

Regarding the first question, Del Beccaro said that her company raised its seed round to validate its market after finding early traction with its product. The CEO added that her company found better problem validation — product-market fit, essentially — than it had anticipated in the following quarters, and that after a year of scaling “thoughtfully” is now ready to accelerate its growth in both financial and human terms.

Sora reached an inflection point, she said, sometime in the first half of 2020. The early COVID days, in other words. The pandemic was tough on HR teams, Del Beccaro explained: With employees going remote, and a shift to hiring over Zoom, you can imagine why HR teams were having a time and a half during the rapid shakeups of the labor market.

The startup’s growth accelerated (Read more...)

Employee engagement platform Culture Amp raises $100M at a $1.5B valuation

by Catherine Shu

Culture Amp was founded in 2009 to let companies conduct anonymous employee surveys, but since then, its focus has expanded to helping employers turn the data they collect into action. The company announced today it has raised $100 million in Series F funding, led by returning investors Sequoia Capital India and TDM Growth Partners. The round bumps Culture Amp’s valuation to $1.5 billion, more than double what it was after the company’s Series D in 2019.

New investor Salesforce Ventures, along with existing backers Felicis Ventures, Blackbird Ventures, Index Ventures, Sapphire Ventures, Skip Capital, Grok Ventures and Global Founders Capital also participated in the round.

Culture Amp is now used by more than 4,000 organizations with a total of 25 million employees. Its clients range in size from about 20 to 30 people to more than 150,000 employees, and include Salesforce, Unilever, PwC, KIND, SoulCycle and BigCommerce.

Employee survey startup Culture Amp closes $82M round led by Sequoia China

From its start as a survey platform, Culture Amp has grown to encompass analytics for managers, like turnover prediction and team goal tracking. It also has a sizable online community where users can connect and book workshops, including ones run by diversity, equity and inclusion experts. Culture Amp recently held a virtual version of Culture First, its annual event, with over 20,000 participants.

Founder and chief executive officer Didier Elzinga told TechCrunch that he sees Culture Amp’s Series F as a “validation of the HR space in general.”

“I think (Read more...)

Founder Q&A: Sebastian Fallert, co-founder of flexible workplace benefits platform Ben

by David Ola
This post is by David Ola from Seedcamp

The team behind flexible benefits platform Ben (Photo Credits: Ben)

When Seb was in his Expert in Residence role with us here at Seedcamp he identified an opportunity in the HR space. Founder of JustBook, he teamed up with David, previously at Mosaic Ventures & Soundcloud, who combines Fintech and enterprise sales experience to found Ben. Ben allows companies to offer their employees a flexible benefits package while alleviating the admin burden. In a world that is increasingly remote, Ben allows companies to cater to their increasingly diverse workplace needs. Managing Partner Reshma and Associate Kyran caught up with him to discuss his experience with the Seedcamp Nation, how Ben was founded and their plans for the future.

Reshma: So Kyran & I are super excited to be here, to speak with Seb, CEO of Ben. Seb was an Expert in Residence (EIR) with us at Seedcamp from 2019 onwards but before we get on to that – what does Ben do?

Seb: Thank you so much for having me! So yeah, what is Ben? Ben is an end to end platform for employee benefits and reward management. Why would anybody build a new platform for benefits? The truth is most benefit programs actually have very low engagement and the reason for that is not just UX and things like that. It’s literally that the things that are on offer are just not relevant for people and that’s hard to rectify. If you are a small or mid-size (Read more...)