collaboration-software
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IdeaScale Built a Suggestion Box for 4.5 Million People - Then Learned the Hard Part Starts After the Vote
The bootstrapped software company rode Washington's open-government wave into 25,000 organizations. Its sharper lesson came later: collecting ideas is easy; proving that one shipped is the business.
System Surveyor’s $50 Bet: Turn the Messy Security Site Walk Into a Living Map
Security projects used to shed context at every handoff - from yellow pad to PDF to spreadsheet to technician. System Surveyor built a visual record that follows the cameras, doors and decisions from first walk to final maintenance call.
The Startup Trying to Kill the Military's Most Dangerous Weapon: PowerPoint
A West Point officer watched treatment units get built where the virus had already left. He sketched the fix on a napkin. Six years later it is worth $2.15 billion.
Atlassian
Two Sydney graduates put $10,000 on credit cards in 2002 and built the software that runs the world's software teams. Today Atlassian's Jira, Confluence, and AI teammate Rovo power more than 300,000 companies - without ever relying on a traditional sales force.
Switchboard
Switchboard was a cloud coworking platform built for remote and hybrid teams. Instead of screen-sharing and tab-juggling, it put video and live, editable web apps - Google Docs, Figma, Jira, Trello and more - side by side in persistent virtual rooms, so a team could return to a project exactly where it left off. Founded in 2020 by serial entrepreneur Amir Ashkenazi, the company raised roughly $38 million from investors including Sequoia Capital, Icon Ventures, Spark Capital and HubSpot Ventures, and held five patents. In late 2024 Ashkenazi wound down Switchboard and pivoted the company into Airtop, an AI web-agent and browser-automation platform.
Clearstory
Clearstory is a cloud-based change order communication platform for commercial construction. It gives general contractors, specialty contractors and project owners a shared, real-time system to create, price, track and align on change orders and time-and-material (T&M) tags - the extra work that traditionally gets buried in email, PDFs and spreadsheets. Founded in 2018 as Extracker and rebranded to Clearstory in 2023, the company runs a business network where contractors exchange roughly $1B in change orders every month, and counts many of North America's largest general contractors as customers.
Mio
Mio is an Austin, Texas company that makes enterprise chat platforms talk to each other. Instead of forcing a whole organization onto a single tool, Mio sits in the middle and federates the public APIs of Microsoft Teams, Slack, Google Chat, Zoom Team Chat and Cisco Webex so a message typed in one app lands natively in another. Founded in 2015 by Tom Hadfield and James Cundle and backed by Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures, Zoom and Cisco, Mio turns the messy reality of multi-platform companies (and the partners they work with) into a single, interoperable conversation.