We’re delighted to welcome The Org to the Balderton portfolio today, investing at Series A alongside Founders Fund and Sequoia.
After 20 years as an entrepreneur in the Valley and Europe, uncovering corporate org charts became something of an obsession. They became a secret weapon as I led the charge for growth for companies like Uber and Dropbox through strategic partnerships. In fact, I would regularly get companies together, incidentally at Sequoia’s offices, to conduct org chart hackathons.
Org charts are an indispensable tool for anyone trying to forge a new partnership, build a relationship or indeed, hire new talent. They can even be a useful tool for employees looking to navigate within their own company. Yet, org charts have traditionally been a closely guarded secret and, worse, are rarely up to date even inside companies.
This means we’re often in the dark about who the decision-makers are, and/or who does what within a team. For startups, finding the right decision-maker in a large organization you want to partner with or sell to, can be like a going on a treasure hunt without a map. You want to find the person who cares most about technology or software purchasing. But that’s rarely obvious. The real decision-makers are not always the most senior people on the reporting line. The matchmaking happens the moment the startup finds someone in the organization that shares the same pain point and seeks a technology solution for a specific problem, typically within the product team.
