Sure the latest initiatives from the Teslas, Apples and Googles of the industry tend to dominate the tech news space — and with good reason. Still, the tech titans aren’t the only ones bringing innovation to the sector.
In an effort to highlight up-and-coming startups, Built In has launched The Future 5 across eight major U.S. tech hubs. Each quarter, we will feature five tech startups, nonprofits or entrepreneurs in each of these hubs who just might be working on the next big thing. Read our round-up of Colorado’s rising startups from last quarter here.
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Most people hate meetings, especially ones that are unproductive or, let’s face it, could have been an email. Employees’ feelings about meetings haven’t improved much over the years either, and at the beginning of the pandemic, their calendars became chock-full of meetings.
Some companies are taking drastic measures to increase productivity and reduce the number of meetings employees attend. Shopify, for instance, canceled most reoccurring meetings in 2023 and encouraged staffers to decline calendar invitations. Other businesses are turning to tech to make meetings and workdays more productive. Software company DreamTeam helps them reach that goal.
Founded in 2020, DreamTeam developed an organization and alignment tool called KATA that helps employees across departments coordinate and make decisions quickly. Intended for teams working to build a product, KATA is available for early-access users and will launch to the public in Q2 2023.
“The problem is we have all of these individual tools for work and every department has its favorite tools, and within that, every job function has its own very specific tools. It’s the nature of this SaaS world we live in,” Brent Barkman, DreamTeam founder and CEO, told Built In. “For any singular problem you have, there are at least five different tools [to solve it], so there’s information everywhere, focus is fragmented [and] team are staying in tools that don’t talk to each other.”
This problem is especially true for engineers, developers and other tech teams working to build a product. Barkman said these “builder teams” have a lot of autonomy to get things done, but in reality, getting a product launched is a connected effort.
Barkman said if employers want their teams to move faster and communicate better, they need to adopt an asynchronous style of work, something DreamTeam helps with.
We knew we couldn’t go replace the SaaS tools that we’re using … so our take was, can we build them this common unit of organization?”
Prior to launching DreamTeam, Barkman worked at Snapchat’s parent company Snap Inc. as a software engineer and software engineering manager. He also worked at Amazon and IBM. Working at these large companies, Barkman said he became fascinated with how larger organizations work.
Barkman’s initial plan for DreamTeam was to focus on career development. Once he started talking to VPs of engineering and HR, he saw a greater need for alignment across departments.
“I found there’s information spread everywhere and everyone’s trying to go really quickly. But it’s almost like police cars trying to jam onto the highway. They’re getting in each other’s way. … So speed isn’t actually the problem; it’s the directions. … We knew we couldn’t go replace the SaaS tools that we’re using … so our take was, can we build them this common unit of organization?”
DreamTeam sees people and projects as the base of an organization, according to Barkman. Right now, DreamTeam is helping people work on projects more efficiently, but in the future, it wants to offer career development opportunities as well.
DreamTeam currently has 13 employees in Denver, Boulder, Seattle and London. The company plans to scale and hire additional staff as needed when it launches KATA later this year.
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