Startup Interview with Bryan Schuldt, Tability Co-founder

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

I come from a fine arts background – studying and practicing in illustration and printmaking. The thing everyone tells an art student is that their degree is a waste and they will have zero job opportunities after school, so I decided early on that I would find ways to make my talents in drawing and design a way of life. Started out designing clothing brands with my friends, to making concert posters, to eventually working in marketing and brand for Atlassian, where I had the opportunity to work with really smart people and tell some inspiring stories.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

Tability. It’s a focus and accoun'tability' tool for businesses looking to align on business goals and OKRs, stay focused, and measure impact in a more meaningful way.

What is the origin story?

I met my co-founder, Sten, when we both worked at Atlassian. There we saw first-hand the power of product management software like Jira and Asana to accomplish day-to-day tasks and drive productivity in a company, but also saw how it fell short when it came to high-level objectives and alignment in a company. We didn’t know what shape or form it was going to take but started talking to people and found that this was a problem that really resonated with them.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

I love that we’re scrappy and willing to do the work fast. We care deeply about the problem, not the solution, and we’re driven to provide a great product and experience.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

I’d either be working as a creative director somewhere or trying to open my own art and design book store.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

Weekly active users.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

We see sign-ups from organizations of all sizes. There’s a clear shift of OKRs being a thing for the C-Suite and tech giants like Google to being adopted by startups or even smaller internal product teams within a bigger org.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

The normalizing of individual streaming services like Twitch during the past year. It’s bringing people together when we can’t be – and with many people transitioning fully to Remote Work, I’m excited to see how this will influence the new way of being connected with your remote co-workers (async meetings in Loom, collaborative editing, and open channels in Slack and Discord come to mind).

Not so much a specific technology that worries me, but just seeing the way we use everyday tech and how we’re developing as humans to rely on that tech. Relying on Maps to get around the town you live in, relying on Google to fact check everything anyone says, relying on Twitter to tell us how to feel and when to be outraged, etc. I try to be more mindful these days and try to memorize more things without tech help.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

To win Startup of the Year 🤪

In all honesty, I hadn’t heard about Hackernoon before being nominated. Once I saw the platform, the community here, and our fellow Aussie startups also being nominated, it made sense to contribute and be part of this community as well.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Stay true to yourself, and you’ll be successful.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

I’ve been working remotely on my own for a few years already when the pandemic happened, so the switch to being full-remote and being a real self-starter wasn’t anything new for me. As we started to grow out our team though, the challenge wasn’t so much about working together, but more about building a healthy company culture.

• Make an effort and find enjoyable ways to celebrate successes. It’s hard to replace the after-work happy hours, but make it work. Buy the team a beer and have one together every once in a while.
• Schedule calls that aren’t always about work - it’s too easy to fall into a routine where it feels like you only call each other when there is work to do or something is wrong.
• Every week share a non-work photo and a story from the past week/weekend - we actually do this and share it through our socials as well.