Before the Covid-19 pandemic, Yoav Grossman never wanted to miss a day in the office.
After a year-and-a-half of no commute and added family time, he doesn't want to go back. But he's resolved that all those virtual meetings have got to become more efficient, more organized and more engaging.
As a result, Grossman co-founded Spinach. The Nashville-based company is creating an app for Zoom. Grossman and fellow co-founder Matan Talmi are starting with what they know best: The traditional stand-up meeting that product development teams hold each morning.
"Today, Zoom's like walking into a conference room with just chairs — no table, no whiteboard, no TV. It's just so much less effective than if you're in a room where you can see body language, jump on the whiteboard, and interact," Grossman said.
"Covid changed the world. The concept of going back to the office full-time is going to be rare," Grossman said. "Our bet is that's here to stay."
How it began
Grossman, 34, was living in San Francisco and working as head of global business process at Uber Technologies Inc. (NYSE: UBER) when Nashville-based Asurion recruited him in late 2017 as its director of product innovation. Grossman moved to Nashville for the job. Talmi became a senior product executive at Asurion around the same time, after Asurion acquired his Israel-based startup Drippler Ltd.
The pair left Asurion in May and June and solidified their early financing this month.
The lead investor is Cardumen Capital, which has offices in Tel Aviv, Madrid, and also Bilbao, Spain.
Zoom Video Communications Inc. (Nasdaq: ZM) is investing in Spinach through its new $100 million Zoom Apps Fund. The fund makes initial investments of at least $250,000, according to the company.
Other investors in Spinach include San Francisco-based fund Tuesday Capital, as well as Silicon Valley investor Liron Petrushka, who was an early investor in Zillow and LendingClub, among other companies. Also investing is Yoni Assia, founder and CEO of the Israeli company eToro.
What's in a name
"We all watched Popeye as a kid, so 'Spinach' came to us as a way to give super powers to meetings," Grossman said. "We were looking for a way to augment meetings, a way to give them vitamins or put meetings on steroids to make them more effective."
How it works
Spinach is starting with the area of software and product development because it's their own background, and those teams have a tendency to be partly or fully remote. Grossman said the daily stand-up is "the most important meeting of every day."
Each meeting has a set agenda, and every speaker has a set time to speak with their own "whiteboard" that displays what they're working on. The app produces a read-out of the meeting that can be shared among the team, as a way to keep tabs on what others are doing. Spinach also is adding features such as ice-breakers: "Moving out of the office, you've lost the water cooler, the thing that creates magic and camaraderie around the team," Grossman said.
Next steps
Spinach has been privately testing its app for about two months (you can sign up for that beta version here). The majority of the company's seven employees are in Nashville, including Grossman and Talmi. A third co-founder, Josh Willis, lives in Atlanta; Spinach also has one employee in Denver.
"For us, it really doesn't matter where you work. We'll look to find people in Nashville if we can," Grossman said. "We're finding such an amazing community here. Nashville is still such an advantageous place for people to live."
If all goes well, Spinach could raise another round of funding in six months to a year, which would push the company closer to begin selling its app and setting specific growth targets.
"We'll go out and raise capital again once we've proven that people love our product," Grossman said. "Early indications from users show that they use it every single day."
Spinach is focusing on Zoom first, possibly expanding to other virtual meeting platforms in the years ahead.
Food for thought
"The amount of capital out there now is unbelievable," Grossman said. "Even in stealth mode on LinkedIn, every other day I'd get a message from an investor saying 'What are you working on? Let's talk.' "
