Welcoming Ally to the Founders’ Co-op Family

I’m thrilled to announce that we’ve just led a seed investment (our largest first-check investment to date) in Ally, the intelligent operating system for business execution. Ally helps businesses tightly connect strategy to execution, and leverages ML to orchestrate alignment and transparency throughout an organization. Step one of their mission is to bring a highly effective Objectives and Key Results (OKR) process into organizations of all sizes, through a workflow that engages team members within the tools they’re already using, like Slack.

So far so good.

Today they’re already working with companies like Slack, Remitly, Plaid, Teleperformance and UrbanClap, and are adding new customers at a rate I haven’t seen since the early days of my former startup, Simply Measured.

But like it says in our name, we invest in founders first and businesses second. We didn’t chose to partner with Ally founder Vetri Vellore just because of the amazing business he’s built, but also because of the passion and thoughtfulness with which he is building it. In fact, we almost passed on our first introduction to Vetri because of our existing bias against OKRs.

Over the past decade I’ve been part of over a dozen OKR deployments, including one as the lead product executive tasked with rolling it out to a large organization. I’ve now used everything from spreadsheets to disastrously complex HR-focused solutions that tie business performance to employee performance, and I just couldn’t wrap my head around how an organization that wasn’t Google (famous for successfully using OKRs), could really put them to good use. That was until I met Vetri, who not only utilized OKRs extremely successfully at his previous startup, but also showed me a product that I actually wanted to use. One that I wanted all of my portfolio companies to use as well. One that would make them better and give them an edge over their competitors.

Welcome Vetri, to the Founders’ Co-op family! We’re honored to be part of your mission to fundamentally change the way high-performing companies operate.

PS: If you or one of your friends is a marketing leader and a sales development rep looking for a once-in-a-career opportunity, shoot Vetri an email @ vetri [at] gotoally.com.