Kona — Overton Venture Capital

Meet Kona

A future of work engagement platform for remote teams to build trust, relationships, and emotional intelligences (EQ).

 

Meet Kona (formerly known as Sike Insights) (https://www.heykona.com/)

HQ: Los Angeles, CA (Team is fully remote)

The team: Sid Pandiya, Corine Tan, Andrew Zhou (Co-Founders)

The problem: One of the hardest parts about working remotely is relationship building. The lack of in-person social cues and passing conversations makes remote interactions forced and impersonal. Recreating office-like trust takes time putting team managers in a tough spot. Employees often leave because of managers, not companies. Pre-COVID, the team behind Sike Insights began interviewing hundreds of workers and managers to understand what they struggled with when working remotely. Most of the complaints centered on the difficulty of building authentic relationships with their teammates.

Meet “Kona” from Sike Insights:  Sike Insights is a software startup helping remote teams build trust, relationships, and emotional intelligence (EQ). Their first product, Kona, is an AI-powered Slackbot that analyzes how remote teammates communicate with each other in Slack channels. First, it creates a unique profile for each team member and then provides actionable recommendations to managers and team-members on how to deliver feedback, motivate, or collaborate best with individual coworkers. Kona helps remote teams master EQ to drive performance and retention.

Why we’re betting on it:  Company culture and managers are intricately connected. According to a July 2020 study by The Society of Human Resource Management (SHRM), nearly 60 percent of employees who quit a job due to workplace culture say that their managers are the main reason they ultimately left. And the cost of this turnover? $223 billion in the past five years.

Companies are investing heavily in new tools and technologies that assist in strengthening their culture muscle. Company culture goes beyond just happy hours and office parties. It also relies on the everyday interpersonal connections that people have with their managers, coworkers, and direct reports.

Co-founders Andrew, Sid, and Corine are the ultimate builders, problem-solvers, and EQ experts. They have assembled a world-class team of advisors including UCLA workplace psychologists and future of work experts. The company completed the Techstars LA accelerator in October and Kona will “officially” launch in early 2021, although early traction and a growing roster of customer adoption (even expanding within companies) is proof of product-market fit and their ability to create a successful product. It is also the strength of this team that has driven interest from well-known investors including Kleiner Perkins, Zillow co-founder Spencer Rascoff, and Amazon exec Jeff Wilke.

Our take:  There’s been a permanent shift in the future of work. Post-pandemic, we expect a hybrid remote / in-person office to become commonplace. Therefore, companies will need innovative new tools (like Kona) to not only facilitate remote employee productivity, but also build EQ and trust. With the latest cash infusion, we expect the team to continue to release additional products that meet the needs of other aspects of remote work. This is only the beginning.