In an unprecedented work environment defined by distributed teams and virtual-only communication, two co-founders think their 2018 bet reigns truer than ever: mentors need mentorship, too.
Christine Tao and Lori Mazan, the brains behind Sounding Board, want to coach any leader within a corporation to be a far better leader. The San Francisco startup connects anyone from first-time managers to C-suite executives with coaches through a marketplace.
Revenue has doubled or tripled per annum since 2016, which the corporate says hovers within the “multi-millions” range. But within the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, Sounding Board has seen demand for its platform grow even more. Quarterly bookings have increased 3.4 times from Q2 2020, and within the last five months, monthly revenue has doubled.
On the heels of this growth, the co-founders say that Sounding Board’s next step as a startup is to grow beyond coaching services and into a platform which will show leaders how those newfound skills are impacting business development. The new product is supposed to function a hub and roadmap where a participant and coach can track insights, progress and behaviors.
Within the platform, a user can schedule sessions with a teacher , get matched to someone, also as check out resources and complete tasks assigned to them. Beyond that, there's a feature that permits the coach and therefore the manager to live goals on an ongoing basis, almost like OKR-related software.
“The content is great, but unless you'll apply that content, it’s not very useful,” Mazan said. “So this coaching may be a thanks to help people apply the insights and therefore the learning they’ve gotten from some quite content and really utilize that within the workplace.”
The new product takes the monthly in-person summit that your organization wont to call executive coaching and turns it into a living, breathing a part of a manager’s workflow.
Beyond helping its users have a far better temperature check on their progress, the merchandise will help Sounding Board scale its services. Now any tutor on Sounding Board has more ways into a user’s mind and workflow, so every call isn’t synchronous and may be managed more evenly.
The co-founders see their long-term differentiation living during this feature. Anyone can create a marketplace, but it takes seamless, easy-to-use tech to trace the effectiveness of what happens post-coaching.
Tao admits that the startup isn’t for everybody . Sounding Board has seen early adoption around enterprise companies that are during a late-stage, hyper-growth mindset heading toward an IPO. That level of maturity may be a sweet spot for a third-party like them to return in and scale leaders across teams. Customers include VMware, Uber, Plaid, Chime and Dropbox.
That said, within organizations, 60% of Sounding Board’s users are first-time managers, 30% are middle-tier and 10% are C-suite. The co-founders think these numbers indicate a broader demand for mentorship beyond what their competitors offer, which frequently sticks to C-suite life coach territory or stress management.
“Everyone is beginning to realize that we’re getting to need to offer coaching broader than simply within the C-suite, and sometimes they don’t really know what meaning ,” said Mazan.
The realization, along side COVID-19 tailwinds, has helped Sounding Board attract new millions in risk capital . The startup tells us that it's raised a $13.1 million Series A led by Canaan Partners. Other investors include Correlation Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, Precursor Ventures, also as Degreed founder David Blake and Kevin Johnson, the previous CEO of Udemy.
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