Our Investment in Guru

Rick Nucci and Mitch Stewart founded Guru around one simple belief: that the information you need to do your job should find you.  We’ve all witnessed the coordinated movement of work from centralized content repositories (SharePoint) to email inboxes (Gmail/G suite) to structured cloud apps (Slack, Jira, Figma, Dropbox, Zendesk, Trello, etc), with bottoms-up distribution models blurring the lines between enterprise software and consumer productivity.  The result is a more bespoke and efficient work experience but an explosion of content across the workplace. Teams are distributed, workflows are intertwined, information is dispersed across dozens of fragmented sources of truth.  

Against that backdrop, Guru is the thread weaving it all together.  Imagine an account executive looking for a customer case study while typing notes into Salesforce, a product manager searching for a roadmap document while working in Jira, a support rep in need of product FAQs while resolving tickets in Zendesk, or any worker at any company searching for the wifi password, building access code or benefits enrollment tutorial.  Guru surfaces the knowledge you need without disrupting your work. By creating the unifying meta-layer to serve up the right content from the right data store at the right time, directly into a user’s workflow, Guru is shaping the market for content collaboration.      

We’ve been lucky at Accel to work from day one with the companies defining modern collaboration software: Atlassian unified teams with its agile project management tools, Slack changed the way we communicate in the workplace, and Dropbox re-imagined file access for the cloud-native world.  These are daily active use products with exceptional engagement rates, so when we saw similar adoption patterns at Guru we knew Rick and Mitch were onto something special. Guru’s customers live in the product, whether at Square (whose sales reps interact with Guru 5.5x a day), or Checkr (where 92% of employees accessed a Guru card in the last week), or Shopify (which sees 70% of support tickets resolved through Guru). We think this relentless focus on product and commitment to user delight will continue to set Guru apart.

What also sets Guru apart is the character of its team.  We are in uncertain times, and Rick begins each of our conversations with, “how are you, and how’s your family?”  He has the steady hand of a proven, previously successful founder but the humility to always learn more. He’s the CEO who goes into painstaking detail forecasting the business, then sings karaoke with a new hire in Fishtown until 1am.  It’s no surprise that Rick attracts both longtime team members (several have been with him 20 years, since he founded Boomi) as well as some world-class new hires who’ve joined recently from places like Dropbox, Atlassian, Zendesk and more.  We’ve long believed the next iconic technology companies are being built in places like Sydney, Provo, Amsterdam and LA. Based proudly in Philly, Guru drives forward this trend.    

We’ve had the pleasure of knowing Rick and Mitch for a few years, though the product resonates with us now more deeply than ever.  As I write this post from my kitchen table in a makeshift remote office during a period of forced quarantine, I toggle back and forth between Gmail, Slack, Dropbox, Zoom and a half dozen other productivity apps.  Guru ties these services all neatly together, putting at my fingertips the knowledge I need to confidently make decisions with my team asynchronously. So while I’m not surprised to see Guru emerge as a component of the “remote work stack,” our conviction in Rick, Mitch and their team transcends the current crisis.  Guru is building the next big thing in collaboration software, and we’re excited to be a part of the journey.

-Miles & Ben