I’m excited to announce K9 Ventures’ recent investment in Workona. K9 led the initial financing for Workona in December 2017. What is Workona? Well, this video does a great job of explaining that… so I’ll let the video do the talking…
Quinn Morgan and Alma Madsen, the co-founders of Workona are alumni from another K9 Ventures’ portfolio company, Lucid Software (the company behind Lucidchart). Alma was the first employee at Lucid and I was already impressed by the quality of product he could build by having seen what Lucid built with a very small team in the early days. Together, Quinn and Alma launched and ran Lucid’s second product, Lucidpress. One of the amazing things about some of the best startups (I definitely include Lucid in that category) is that they then become the source of other companies in the future.
When I was first introduced to Quinn and Alma, I was incredibly skeptical of the idea, but within the first 30-45 minutes, Quinn had me convinced that they had discovered a massive problem. A problem that is staring us in the face every single day, but we haven’t noticed it yet. Mostly because we’ve never stopped to think about whether there might be a better way.
That problem is simple and it is pervasive. And if you’re reading this on your desktop computer, then it’s probably staring you in the face right now! The problem is that the modern web browser was designed for exactly that — browsing. But today, every single person who is “working” on a computer is probably doing so in a browser. Just think about that for a second… you are “working in a browser.”
Rewind 20-30 years or so, and both Microsoft and Apple were spending a lot of time optimizing the “desktop.” There was design and engineering that went towards thinking about how to save context, restore context, switch context, and more. You could minimize windows to hide them away, organize the windows on your desktop. We have files, and folders, and search. But as we transitioned away from the desktop to just doing everything in a browser, all the effort that went into engineering that desktop OS was left behind.
Today in browsers we have Tabs. Yes, we live in Tabs. We work in Tabs. And we love our Tabs. But really, is this the best Google, Firefox, Microsoft, and Apple have for us? What happened to all the effort that used to go into making the user productive at work?
That’s where Workona comes in. Workona has recognized that we spend the majority of our working hours in a browser. And for most of us, we do that while being buried in a sea of Tabs. Google Chrome has done a great job of making sure that it autosaves and restores tabs when the browser is closed/re-opened or recovers from a crash; but just having tabs and windows is not enough.
Workona introduces the concept of Workspaces, which they describe as smart browser windows. Workona’s workspaces make it possible to logically group together all the tabs related to one project and then be able to close and restore all of them in one click. And you can also share the workspace so that you can collaborate with people.
Workona is just getting started, with more good stuff to come in the future, but already their product has made my ability to manage and keep track of my work so much better. If you’re the type of person who appreciates order and cleanliness, you are going to love Workona. If you’re the type of person who is super messy, well, then you need Workona. So don’t take my word for it, try it yourself at https://workona.com