Excellent co-founders Samantha Gadd (left) and Jenny Busing. Gadd has run an HR consultancy, Humankind, for a decade. Busing has spent the past 10 years advising public and private growth companies in the US and NZ, most recently in the edtech and marketplace software space. She is based in Austin, Texas and splits her time equally across NZ and the US. Photo / File
Excellent co-founders Samantha Gadd (left) and Jenny Busing. Gadd has run an HR consultancy, Humankind, for a decade. Busing has spent the past 10 years advising public and private growth companies in the US and NZ, most recently in the edtech and marketplace software space. She is based in Austin, Texas and splits her time equally across NZ and the US. Photo / File
A startup that says it has a fresh take on HR software has raised $2 million in a seed round that's drawn some high-profile local backers - and attracted the attention of big names in the US including Netflix, Uber, Google and Airbnb.
The co-founders of Wellington-based Excellent, Samantha Gaddand Jenny Busing, say their software-as-a-service product is aimed at the emerging field of Employee Experience Design - or people managers collaborating with staff on better ways to do the likes of onboarding, pay reviews, arranging workspaces and wrangling professional development.
The seed round was led by Australasian venture capital firm Blackbird, with support from Icehouse Ventures, Sir Stephen Tindall's K1W1.
Excellent has also drawn financial backing from a clutch of business leaders, investing in a personal capacity, with Spark chair Justine Smyth, Sharesies co-founders Brooke and Leighton Roberts, Trent Mankelow (Trade Me, Vend) and Mike Carden among its lineup of early shareholders (Carden, notably, has two successful HR ventures under his belt, Sonar6 - sold to US firm Cornerstone - and his current vehicle with his brother Philip, Joyous).
"At Blackbird, thriving workplaces are our religion. We've invested in many outstanding founders creating a fairer, happier, more engaged future of work: from Culture Amp, to Applied, and more recently Multitudes and The Mintable," says Blackbird principal Phoebe Harrop. Multitudes, which measures workplace culture and performance is, like Excellent, a Kiwi startup.
Photo / 123rf
Excellent's local customers include Sharesies, TVNZ, New Zealand Trade & Enterprise, The Warehouse Group on the blue-chip side of things, plus up-and-comers like Mooven and Kowtow.
All up, 110 organisations are on its books.
And Gadd and Busing aren't short on ambition for leading the employee experience (or "EX") design revolution, with an Austin, Texas pow-wow on September 20 (Busing - an American, divides her time between Austin and Wellington).
"We're bringing together a group of global leaders - 16 in person and about 12 virtually - from organisations such as Airbnb, Uber, Google, Netflix and Patagonia to collaborate and write the Employee Experience Manifesto for the world," Gadd says. The exercise is modelled on the earlier Agile Manifesto.
"We want to create some principles or guiding values for how organisations and leaders globally can look at employee experience," Gadd says.
"That project will sit at employee EXManifesto.com. It's a very collaborative exercise, but Excellent is fuelling it. We believe it's going to be a sort of stick in the stand for organisations to aim for."
The current landscape, dominated by the pandemic shift to hybrid work, and a super tight labour market that boost employees' power, seems fertile ground for Excellent's EX push.
"The expectations of employees have never been greater than they are today. And that's definitely been accelerated by Covid," Gadd says.
"Every employee is rethinking what they need from work, so organisations and leaders need new tools, new approaches and new mindsets to be able to meet the needs of these employees."
Busing adds, "EX is about ensuring employees are getting meaningful value out of their relationship with work, so that they are retained, developing, and most importantly, thriving within the organisation."
In some areas, including the trendsetting tech sector in the US, the tide is already starting to turn. Recession fears, rising rates and falling stocks have seen Big Tech slow hiring, rescind job offers or even start to lay off staff. Flexible working perks are drying up and the new normal is starting to look suspiciously like the old normal as tech and financial companies start to lay down the law about staff returning to the office.
And while Blackbird might have a religious zeal about thriving workplace culture, some of the companies it's invested in across the Tasman are now culling staff as a VC chill sets in.
But Gadd says having had a taste of better EX, staff will be loath to return to the before-times.
"Employees can't forget what they've experienced. You can't unsee what you've seen. And I think even in recessionary times, the best businesses will want to attract the best talent and the best talent - and the best talent is attracted to organisations that have a compelling employee experience."
