When Aydin Mirzaee and his co-founding team grew their first company in their early 20’s, FluidSurveys, they embodied true tech entrepreneurship: they moved fast, focused heavily on the product, and built an incredible culture fueled on passion. In 2014, Mirzaee and team led the organization to a successful acquisition by SurveyMonkey.
Post-acquisition, Mirzaee remained onboard at SurveyMonkey. He found himself suddenly embedded within a mature organization that counted over 750 employees and was rich in processes, structure, and methodical focus – operational elements which FluidSurveys pre-acquisition hadn’t had.
“Looking back, it’s almost incredible how we made it to just under 100 people and a successful acquisition without ever hosting a single one-on-one meeting, performance review, town hall or quarterly business review.”
The “meetings problem”
Realizing that structured management processes were highly important to SurveyMonkey’s success, Mirzaee understood the power of meeting cadences – but saw an opportunity to optimize them.
“Managers at SurveyMonkey held some very important meetings – just like most companies in the world do,” said Mirzaee. “We know that leadership teams spend a large portion of their time in meetings – but there was no way of gauging how effective, productive or enjoyable any of those meetings really were.”
Indeed, 31% of managers attend over 16 meetings each week – but over 46% of meetings do not have a clear purpose or goal. Moreover, we know that 80% of employees leave a company as a result of their direct manager. Marketers had their own tools like Marketo; Sales teams had Salesforce; HR teams had HRIS systems like Greenhouse; but there was no tool for managers.
The world runs on meetings led by managers – but equally so remains the bane of many a team’s existence. The “meetings problem” had yet to be solved.
Mirzaee and his co-founding team saw an opportunity for a tool for leaders and managers which could not only bring a deeply-lacking efficiency structure to meetings but could make them more enjoyable.
The future of meetings
Fellow was officially launched in September 2019 – and Mirzaee confirms the product reflects in many ways the founding team’s own growth as leaders. “With our first two startups, regardless of their success, we were running them like entrepreneurs. As we built and grew Fellow, we understood and learned how to be true Operators – knowledge and best practices which we built into the product for managers to benefit from.”
Committed to “never build[ing] in isolation,” Fellow pitched Shopify as a first beta-client in their shared hometown of Ottawa – and the feedback from Shopify’s leadership team was exceptionally positive.
“We spent an incredible amount of time simply listening to managers, both at Shopify and beyond,” said Mirzaee. “We wanted to understand their needs, the reality of leading teams and their associated processes, and how we could best support them.”
Fellow founders, from left: Aydin Mirzaee, Samuel Cormier-Iijima and Amin Mirzaee.
Today, Fellow counts 40+ employees and has recorded 2M+ meeting notes on their flagship product, a platform which allows for collaborative agendas, meeting action items, to-do lists, team OKR’s, feedback exchange, real-time notetaking and more. Fellow connects with major tools like Slack, Google Calendar, Jira, Asana, and others, making it easy for organizations to seamlessly integrate Fellow with their existing productivity and project management stack.
Growth & scale
Fellow raised an impressive initial seed round of $6.5M USD in 2019, which they leveraged to perfect the product in terms of features and scalability.
Since then, their customer roster has grown into an impressive one, with multiple enterprise-level organizations including Motorola, Uber, Shopify, Stanford University, Vidyard and others powering up their meetings with Fellow.
Fellow’s Series A of $24M USD, with participation by Formentera Capital, will help support the next phase of their growth by focusing on commercialization, building better workflows, expanding their reach and developing more integrations with their partner ecosystem.
When asked about their decision to bring on Formentera Capital as part of their investment team, Mirzaee was clear: “We saw in [Formentera Capital] a team of skilled Operators. We were really excited to continue to learn from them.”
The team at Formentera Capital are also users of Fellow at their respective organizations. “Aside from being advocates for the product,” said Mirzaee, “they are supporters and advisors who are there when we need them.”
The story of Fellow, a product which mirrors the evolution of its founders from entrepreneurs to operational business leaders, is an inspiring one – and the future is bright for the company. Their goal to solve a universal problem, ineffective and joyless meetings, is well on its way.
Formentera Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm investing in tech-enabled companies that are good for the world.
