Roy Mann began a company in a room that Wix lent him. It had no window. The detail is almost too obliging: a founder who would spend years talking about visibility, starting out with nowhere to look. There was a first customer, Wix itself, and an investor in its chief executive, Avishai Abrahami. There was also a distinction Mann would later insist on. The idea belonged to him and Eran Zinman. The room was borrowed; the ambition was theirs.
The pair had met earlier in Israel’s military intelligence Unit 9900, where Mann recruited Zinman to a team he led as a reservist. Their careers then diverged, Mann going to Wix and Zinman to Conduit, before they came together to build the business founded in 2012. By its 2014 commercial launch, the operation occupied a vacated apartment in Tel Aviv. Its first board meeting followed the arrival of six customers. Boardroom grandeur could wait.
The business was called dapulse. Today it is monday.com, and Mann is its co-founder and co-CEO, sharing the job with Zinman. The company behind monday CRM has retained something of that original question about visibility: how can people work together when the picture of what everyone is doing keeps disappearing into separate tools?
Before the board, an alien
Mann’s route to workplace software ran through games. He spent years making them, drawn to the act of building things on a computer. Before monday.com, he co-founded SaveAnAlien.com, leading its technology vision and operations from 2006 to 2010. He also earned a B.A. in computer science at the Interdisciplinary Center Herzliya, now Reichman University. From 2010 to 2012, he was a senior technology leader at Wix.
The career looks tidier in a biography than it felt in practice. Mann has described earlier attempts to build and sell things as frequently unsuccessful, with side projects continuing alongside his jobs. That is a useful detail to keep beside the eventual public listing. The years before success were full of making things, rather than a single immaculate idea waiting for its appointment with destiny.
Early customers brought another complication. A sizeable organization could validate that a problem existed while making a new tool difficult to adopt. Mann has said it took about a year and a half of iterations to simplify the product. An impressive customer name was therefore an imperfect guide. The product still had to become something a team could pick up and use.
A Monday people would choose
A name can turn a sales conversation into an explanation nobody wanted. Dapulse had that difficulty. The founders changed it to monday.com in 2017. Mann later recalled senior executives hesitating over the old name, and investors having concerns about the change. The replacement took an ordinary day, complete with its emotional baggage, and put it on the door.
There is a small joke in selling workplace software under the name of the day people complain about arriving at work. There is also a fairly precise promise. Make the experience of that day better, and the name earns its keep. It gives a complicated product something human to attach to, without requiring a customer to pronounce an invented word and pretend it was obvious.
Mann’s public writing in 2019 made the ambition concrete. He described office walls covered with television screens showing dashboards, so information sat in front of employees as they worked. Customers were to get comparable powers through dashboards they could shape themselves. He wanted people to expect more from their tools, and treated ease of use as compatible with giving them greater control. The ordinary name concealed a demanding brief.
The five-minute management lesson
For a founder building an expanding software business, Mann has an unusually specific object of affection: a basic board that takes five minutes to create. In a 2020 guide, he returned to that simple setup even as he described a platform able to accommodate thousands of people. The starting point was one team and the work it expected to do in a week.
That board carries a theory of management. Show the work. Give it an owner. Establish when it should happen. Agree what the status labels mean. A team whose members use different definitions of finished can spend a remarkable amount of time politely misunderstanding itself. Mann’s suggested conversation about those definitions is wonderfully unglamorous. It belongs somewhere between setting the agenda and finding the missing cable.
He also described the satisfaction of turning the week’s work green. The appeal is recognizably related to games: visible progress, a shared goal, a moment when completing something feels good. That connection is an editorial reading of his product approach, rather than a claim that games dictated the design. What his guide makes clear is that the feeling of accomplishment matters alongside ownership and schedules. People have to live inside the system they are asked to use.
Let the numbers leave the corner office
Transparency became a daily operating habit at monday.com. Its internal business intelligence system, BigBrain, brings information from different sources into a place employees can access. A 2021 account described it tracking spending, receipts, product engagement and support response times, while processing more than 200 million events per weekday. That is a historical description of the system, not a claim about its present volume.
The useful part of the number is what sits behind it. Decisions can draw on a picture shared across the company. A colleague need not rely entirely on someone else’s summary of what happened. The dashboards make information available for inspection, which gives a discussion something firmer than rank to rest on. A screen cannot abolish office politics, but it can make an unsupported assertion considerably less comfortable.
Mann has also spoken about learning to let go as the company grew, allowing employees to make decisions without waiting for the founders. His phrase for the desired arrangement was “loosely coupled and highly aligned.” The tension is deliberate: freedom requires a common direction. For a person building software around shared information, his own authority became another thing to keep from obstructing the work.
“loosely coupled and highly aligned”Roy Mann on organizing teams, 2019
Growth without a magic trick
Asked about growth tactics in a 2019 public Q&A, Mann emphasized analysing data, making advertisements people wanted to respond to, and giving those people a product they would recommend. “sorry no magic tricks here either,” he wrote. It is a refreshing answer from someone whose business could easily have supplied a more glamorous vocabulary.
He said the company had pursued a global strategy from the beginning because Israel was a small market. By that Q&A, customers were in more than 145 countries. He described public relations as useful for familiarity with the brand, while distinguishing that effect from adoption of the product. He was willing to separate being known from being used, an awkward but necessary distinction for anyone spending money to attract attention.
The milestones then changed the scale of the story. On June 10, 2021, monday.com became publicly traded on Nasdaq. By July 2025, monday CRM had reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue. The latter is a product milestone, separate from the broader company’s results. For Mann, an idea about teams seeing their work had become a business serving different functions, with sales among them. The original board now had much more company.
An open door beyond the business
Mann’s interest in access extends into the company’s social impact work. In August 2026, he joined Chief People and Legal Officer Shiran Nawi on the opening episode of the foundation’s Inside the Hub podcast. He described planning the foundation before the IPO, when the company could discuss the commitment with existing investors and make its intentions clear to incoming ones.
He also traced the Community Hub to a practical opportunity: office space that could be opened to nonprofit organizations for meetings, events and training. The gesture suits the larger pattern of his work. Start with something that already exists, then ask who else could use it. An office has purposes after the ordinary working week ends.
The company’s 2024 ESG report, released in June 2025, put numbers around related efforts. Its nonprofit program supported 19,523 active accounts. Startup for Startup, its community for entrepreneurs sharing experience and advice, facilitated more than 3,140 connections. These are company program figures, rather than personal accomplishments to assign solely to Mann. His role is part of a wider group of people building them. The shared credit belongs in the story too.
Now the board has new colleagues
By 2026, Mann was describing another change in the job software should do. In an April conversation with Liam Lawson, he discussed a move from managing work toward having AI agents perform it. He described putting agent technology into employees’ hands so they could understand its possibilities by using it, with security measures around the internal rollout. Participation was still developing, rather than universal.
The same conversation included Agent Talent, a marketplace organized around finding and qualifying agents for work, and a discussion of charging for consumption alongside software seats. The question becomes more complicated when the system can execute tasks. An account count describes one thing; the amount of work performed describes another. Mann was treating that change as a business problem as well as a technical one.
On May 6, monday.com formally announced its AI Work Platform. Native agents could be configured by team members and operate with human supervision, using the business’s existing permissions and governance. The announced tasks included qualifying leads, drafting campaigns and processing purchase requests. The familiar ambition of giving people more control was moving into a system in which some of the participants were software.
The August results showed the company earning $364.6 million in second-quarter revenue, up 22% from a year earlier. AI products represented 17% of net new annual recurring revenue in the quarter. Mann and Zinman also described restructuring the organization and sharpening its product portfolio. A change of direction can arrive with growth on the spreadsheet and difficult decisions in the office.
The open question is whether agents will earn their place in everyday work as the original boards did. Mann has reached this point through games, an awkward name, borrowed space and years of trying to make a team’s progress legible. His recurring concern remains close to the person using the tool. Can they see what is happening? Can they act on it? And can the person nominally in charge leave enough room for them to get on with it?