talentEd

The first focus is on the physical and emotional health of teams. We have built a health app that incites teammates to report on how they sleep, eat, and exercise. It turns out that short daily questions such as “did you sleep enough last night?” are enough to create the right amount of peer pressure for teams to take better care of their health. Emotional health is similar except that the focus is on notions of autonomy, mastery, purpose, and flow (intensity and nature of work challenges to get hyper focused). Every team that has tried the app has reported improvements in physical and emotional health, resulting in increased productivity and happiness at work. The second area of improvement is team communication. Creating an enterprise-ready, secure and encrypted chat and video conferencing app was not sufficient to markedly improve team communication. To really break communication barriers, we created tools to complement our chat & video app, including a feedback app, a polling app, and a calendaring app. The feedback app helps teams self-govern by focusing on mentorship and coaching on a hierarchy of over 1000 skills. Using the notion that feedback is a gift, by default all feedback is private and anonymous. The polling app enables teams to achieve real-time data driven, meritocratic decisions. We uniquely enable liquid democracy and weighing of results based on participants’ peer reviewed skills relevant to the question. The calendaring app eliminates the need to compute time zone differences, or lengthy back and forth on availability. A whole team can quickly schedule a meeting (e.g., in the next 48 hours) that maximizes attendance with the push of a single button. On to our third area of improvement: With our benchmarking app, we help individuals and teams measure their strengths and identify areas of potential improvements. We enable people to develop self-awareness by showing them information about one’s (or a team’s) performance with regards to physical health or emotional health, or peer feedback on their skills and performance. It is worth emphasizing that granular level information is private to the team or the individual. It cannot be explicitly consumed by an internal human resources team or by an external marketplace. This ensures that the quality of the information remains high and that the incentives to inflate or cheat are absent. The fourth area of improvement is staffing. We help enterprises and organizations quickly form project teams based on global availability and complementarity of skills, as well as give transparency for internal transfer pricing/per diem for managers. We help small consulting service providers and experts market themselves at the flip of a switch. These people and teams become easy to find for companies seeking great talent at a fair cost. The fifth and final area of improvement is logistics. We address three problems in high-density cities: a) slow commutes, b) exorbitant rental prices, and c) slow internet. More than a co-working space, we offer work friendly housing for high performing teams. We build standardized, replicable and high-speed internet-ready housing in major cities for short to medium term stays at sustainable costs. --- We expect to launch our private beta in the Fall of 2018. Please visit us at https://talented.app and https://talented.house to see our work in progress.