Coda's Shishir Mehrotra on reinventing team collaboration with AI

Coda's Shishir Mehrotra on reinventing team collaboration with AI

Author: Unusual Ventures December 10, 2023 Duration: 47:21

In this episode, Sandhya Hegde chats with Shishir Mehrotra, CEO and co-founder of Coda.

Coda is a collaborative workspace that brings together teams and tools to create organized workflows in docs. Started in 2014, Coda serves over 80% of the Fortune 100. Last valued at $1.4B,  Coda is used by over 25,000 teams including ones at Figma, The New York Times, Square, Doordash, and Toast. 

00:00 Preview: Coming up with product insights

01:38 Shishir’s experience at YouTube

03:32 YoutTube Shorts versus Tiktok

06:03 Product-market fit is not a binary

08:04 The founding insight behind Coda

11:16 Positioning Coda against incumbent products

18:05 Coda’s alpha launch

24:36 PMF scores versus disappointment scores

29:53 Shishir’s approach to product rituals

38:05 The launch of Coda 4.0

43:50 Advice for new founders in enterprise productivity

Sandhya Hegde is a General Partner at Unusual Ventures, leading investments in modern SaaS companies with a focus on AI. Previously an early executive at Amplitude, Sandhya is a product-led growth (PLG) coach and mentor. She can be reached at sandhya@unusual.vc and 

Shishir Mehrotra is the CEO and co-founder of Coda. Prior to Coda, Shishir was the Vice President of Product, Engineering, and UX at YouTube. 

Unusual Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm designed from the ground up to give a distinct advantage to founders building the next generation of software companies. Unusual has invested in category-defining companies like Webflow, Arctic Wolf Networks, Carta, Robinhood, and Harness. Learn more about us at https://www.unusual.vc/.

Further reading from Unusual Ventures:



Behind every so-called overnight success in software, there's a long, often messy journey of finding exactly what customers need and how to deliver it. That's the central theme explored in Startup Field Guide by Unusual Ventures: The Product Market Fit Podcast. This series is built for those in the trenches of early-stage software companies, from founders just starting out to leaders tasked with building something from nothing. Each episode moves beyond theory, offering grounded conversations with people who have actually navigated these challenges. You'll hear them unpack the real work of identifying a true market need, the nuances of early hiring decisions, and the practical steps of crafting a go-to-market strategy. Fundraising, often a opaque process, gets broken down into more understandable components. The focus remains consistently on the actionable and the specific, providing a kind of audio manual for the foundational phase of a business. Tune in for a candid look at the less-glamorous, critical work that separates an idea from a viable company, all brought to you by Unusual Ventures. This podcast serves as a resource for turning those initial concepts into a sustainable operation, one hard-won lesson at a time.
Author: Language: en-us Episodes: 53

Startup Field Guide by Unusual Ventures: The Product Market Fit Podcast
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