Our Seed Investment in Venue: Transforming Video Meetings Into High-Value Moments

It’s no surprise that some of the best, most ambitious companies are rethinking every aspect of their operating model. I spent the last few years at Faire, and like so many others, we had to make radical transformations to how we worked. 

One of the most important experiences to rethink and get right was our All Hands Meeting. These rallying points had always been critical to culture and performance against plan as well as contextualizing everyone's work within the broader organization. And after March 2020, they also became one of the few moments of human connection our whole company could enjoy together. 

I saw firsthand how powerful it can be when an organization invests deeply in these moments. They drive not only alignment – what were we focused on, who was driving what — but also reinforcing connectivity among teams and the sense of community we all crave. 

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In Faire’s case, it paid off, but it was the result of a ton of work from tireless friends and teammates. Today's communications tools simply can't stretch to the production value needed for today's team meeting. Too often, in a virtual world, these moments can be our least productive. When attendance size goes up, video goes off, employees tune out, and chat falls into either chaos or crickets. It is an incredibly expensive loss of engagement, and a missed opportunity to align, inspire, or otherwise achieve the goal of congregating the group in the first place. And despite the acceleration in remote work, most companies haven’t figured out how to solve this perennial problem.

These experiences are why I’m excited to share that Accel has partnered with Jason Goldlist and Venue to lead their seed round. Venue is a simple-yet-powerful platform for creating engaging one-to-many moments, making it easy for anyone to quickly and easily produce exceptionally high-quality meetings for large audiences. I sat down with Jason to share a preview of Venue:

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Venue transforms key internal meetings – like all hands, team kickoffs, and AMAs – into events that engage and inspire.  From an employee lens, quite simply making large-scale meetings more fun and engaging. For employers, Venue helps them ensure a higher ROI of these critical moments. Venue has already been adopted by remote-first employers like Shopify and PwC and is serving over 100K employees. 

Jason launched Venue after co-founding TechTO.org. Born out of Toronto, Venue joins portfolio companies like 1Password, Ada, Slack, TailScale, and more in contributing to this critical tech hub. Jason embodies an obsession with positive culture, which flows through Venue’s team and into their product. We are inspired by Jason and his team, and excited to be joining arms with Venue as they reimagine the future of work.

-Sara Ittelson