Startup Intro: Peakon

Thanks Rasmus. I know for one that I hate dealing with this shit that's called VAT and payrolls and bookkeeping. That's why we're using Dixie. Hi Phil. Hi Christopher. Welcome. Thank you very much. Please meet Phil from Pigen. Hi everyone. How are you doing? Thank you very much Christopher and Marie for inviting us. I'd like to say, if you'd have asked me three years ago if I'd been working in HR, and you'd have probably asked Caspar Hultin the same question, I'd say, you're fucking joking. However, that is where we find ourselves. And I'm standing in front of a side saying, create the best employee experience. But how did we end up here and why did we decide to do it? The genesis of this really was the idea that if you worked in startups for a while, and I think I just thought about it a minute ago. The first startup I did was in 1998. Particularly over the last 10 years, everyone's been saying the most critical thing you can do is create the best customer experience in the world. And Net Promoter Score and all of these kind of movements come out of this. And indeed, some of the best businesses in the world that focus on customer experience, such as Zendesk, have come out of Copenhagen. Yeah, on the other hand, you know, Jerry Sanders from AMD, many moons ago, didn't have the money to compete with Intel. And he said, if you treat your people well, and if you do right by them, then the products and the profits will follow. And we were like, well, if that is true, and a lot of people believe in that, then why is it that the only person who comes to the board meeting with, you know, no real-time dashboard, no predictive insights, no trend data is your chief people officer? If the people who work in your company are the most important thing. And that's really why we set out to create PECON. So this is a little bit of a look at what we've done. So this is what the product looks like. Generally, PECON is targeted at slightly larger organizations than maybe many of the companies here today. So we generally start at about 100 employees, although we have sold to a few startups in Copenhagen. You get a real-time dashboard, which basically gives you insight into exactly what's happening in your organization. And we can slice and dice the data in any way. So the flexibility of PECON is probably not a surprise if any of you guys have used Podio, and that's kind of the world we came from. But if you want to look at kind of, you know, split by gender, if you want to look at female millennials who work in Aarhus versus, you know, XYZ, then really you don't have to go through all of this data. Our kind of machine learning concept will pick out anything that's changing, and then we'll instantly alert anyone who manages people in your organization who gets access to this data. So it's really a tool for creating better understanding between employees and management, and kind of raising the bar for everyone. So how did we get started with this? Well, I went to some house in a place, which I'm going to try and pronounce, called Hrovi. I don't know whether that's any good. In July 2014, there were five of us, and we pitched different ideas. So it was kind of fashionable at the time, everything from food delivery to, you know, Airbnb for self-storage, which I think is still available if anyone wants to take that. But the idea that won was Peacon. We founded the company in January 2015. That's a picture of my living room there. I've since changed the wallpaper. We spent January till March raising a seed round, so sort of cap in hand to any rich people that we knew, and my brother, for example. And that's a photo from a summer house in Hornbeck, actually Tommy's summer house. We launched in private beta over the summer. We had 20 companies who'd reached peak happiness, which is what we called. So we wanted 20 companies in Europe who would say they would be very disappointed if they couldn't use Peacon anymore, even if we weren't charging it for them. So we managed to do that, and on the back of that, we got ID Invest. Guillaume, I'm sure, has pitched to many of you, or if not all of you. And we launched and started to charge people and kind of raised our Series A with ID and Sunstone. And then in April, another big milestone, we opened up in London. It was a kind of slightly bigger town, so we moved sales and marketing over there, but we're keeping all of the engineering here. A couple of the kind of early believers in Peacon, I'm sure, you know, I already mentioned Zendesk. Obviously, we worked for Podio before. I was most proud that people I'd worked for would invest. This is quite an interesting fact, though. So Nicholas Ostberg and Christia Lang were both customers of Peacon. And they'd seen the way that this software transformed their organizations. And really made things better, and then decided to invest on the back of that. So that was really, really good news for us. We've also managed to sell slightly outside of the scene. So our first customer ever, and I have to give a big shout out to Gabby at NAM Games, who was our kind of office mate in Founders House. I think she just felt sorry for me, and I sold her 20 seats in the middle of last year. But since then, you know, I'm pretty pleased to see we've sold to companies like Opera Software, you know, Electronic Arts. I've got customers pretty much on every continent. So, yeah. This all wouldn't have been possible without this great team. So that's a picture of our, not the greatest advert for diversity, but we're working on it. So if you'd like to be a part of this, then we'll be at the bar later on. And thank you very much for listening. Cheers.