IVP's Future Of Work Podcast: Humu Co-Founder Wayne Crosby on Making Work Better Through Science and Machine Learning

Welcome to a special edition of IVP's Future of Work Podcast. In this series, IVP investors talk with experts from the fastest-growing companies and discuss the ins-and-outs of the future of work in the ever-changing environment.

In our second episode of a three-part series, IVP Partner, Cack Wilhelm, talks with Humu Co-Founder and CTO, Wayne Crosby, about the future of work. This conversation comes at a time when organizations are moving online more quickly to match the changing world.

Before Humu, Wayne spent ten years as an engineering director at Google receiving the Great Manager Award in 2012 for his leadership. He joined Google through the acquisition of Zenter, the Y Combinator-backed presentation software startup he co-founded in 2007 (that became Google Slides). Wayne led product and engineering teams at Amazon and Go Daddy, and is also the VP of Technology at his local elementary school.

IVP invested in Humu's Series B in the spring of 2018 to accelerate the expansion of the platform and help the company scale across countries, companies, and cultures. The goal? Higher productivity, lower attrition, and happier, more capable employees at companies across the globe.

Some key takeaways from our discussion with Wayne:

We All Want Happiness Because it comes as no surprise that a happier employee is the more productive one that retains longer, is more innovative.

Humu creates behavioral change technology to increase productivity and happiness in real-time. Using short, personalized coaching moments, the product improves organizational health and ensures business continuity. They rely on research that uses words like happiness and translate the research into processes that align more closely with business outcomes such as retention, productivity, and innovation.

Transformation of Work Through Machine Learning and AI There's something fundamentally human about work.

We, as humans, want to come together. We want to belong. We want to contribute to something that's bigger than ourselves. AI systems development is just starting. Today, we see tools that are helping to do specific tasks. In the future, successful companies will use technology to mimic humans behavior in the workforce. We should empower people to think more creatively, a task humans are known to execute better than technology. And machines are fantastic at doing rogue and complex tasks. If we look at where artificial intelligence and machine learning is going, many jobs will automate. Work is not going away for humans, it's evolving and transforming the future.

Humu Provides COVID-19 Resources to Improve Remote Work Habits Humu's mission is to make work better for everyone, everywhere. As part of that, they're providing email nudges that help employees form better habits for working remotely and tips to best communicate with colleagues in this changing environment. Individuals can sign up for Remote Work Nudges here.

For organizations, the company is providing a Crisis Resilience solution with 3-month packages of nudges that make it easy for enterprises to offer resources to help employees. These tools develop better resilience skills and remote work habits, especially given today's stressors of an uncertain future.

At its core, Humu reconnects and reminds employees of a company's shared values, a tool critical and helpful at a time like now.

More from the full conversation in the transcript is below.

To hear more, listen on iTunes or SoundCloud.

TRANSCRIPT Narrator: Welcome to IVP's Future of Work Podcast. In this series, we talk with experts from the fastest-growing companies and discuss the ins-and-outs of the future of work in the ever-changing environment. If you like what you hear, consider following us on SoundCloud or subscribing to our podcast on iTunes. Thanks, and enjoy the show.

Cack Wilhelm: Welcome back to a special edition podcast on the future of work. In this episode, I will talk to Wayne Crosby, who is currently the co-founder and CTO of IVP portfolio company Humu, and I think most interestingly, known as a co-creator of Google Slides back in 2007.

Cack Wilhelm: Okay, well, Wayne. Thanks for joining us today. I'm afraid if I leave it to you to introduce yourself, that you'll gloss over a lot of your impressive backgrounds, so I'm going to take a stab. Just to take a quick minute of your highlights, then I'll let you talk, I promise. So your undergrad, you are a computer science degree and then followed by a handful of software engineering roles in the post dot com bust really starting, you know, the early 2000s. My guess is in 2007, you threw caution to the wind and you entered YC, Y Combinator, and you started your company, Zenter, that was later acquired by Google and very notably became Google Slides. Then a full decade at Google in engineering, which I think directly led you to where you are at Humu today. So I'd love if you could start and just take a minute and share what Humu does in just a few sentences and then we can go from there.

Wayne Crosby: [Of course, so Humu nudges our people towards better habits. The goal is to unlock the potential of the individual, thereby making the whole of the organization better. And we do that through a mix of really understanding how people make decisions, meaningful economics, and how we can help influence those decisions to make better decisions for themselves and their organization. And then, through machine learning, helping be able to understand what is the right time in the right context to be able to deliver a very targeted message to help them make better decisions.

Cack Wilhelm: Great. Yeah, I think a lot of what you shared really ties into this theme of, I'm sure, what you're thinking about a lot and talking about a lot and what we're trying to cover on thi

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