Zeb Evans is a serial entrepreneur and the CEO and Founding father of ClickUp, an all-in-one productivity platform that works as an excellent place for teams to come back together, brainstorm, plan, and collaborate on every little thing from process docs to product designs.
You’ve stated that because you were 3 years old, you’ve got been an entrepreneur at heart. Could you share a few of your earliest memories of getting the entrepreneurial spirit?
I discovered my calling as an entrepreneur very early in life. My first “business” was selling candy out of my lunch box in elementary school, and I actually got suspended for it. From candy, I went on to sell toys. It didn’t matter if it was my birthday or Christmas, I all the time asked for wholesale novelty toys that I could sell to my friends at college.
Then, after I was 10, I used to be in a jet-ski accident that put me in a hospital for months. I discovered the one public laptop on the hospital and discovered Alibaba. I saw that Disney DVDs from the Disney Vault had great resale prices, so I began buying and selling those from my hospital room. The DVDs turned out to be bootlegged, and I got in trouble yet again. But, the time I spent on the hospital laptop getting this hustle going is the moment I fell in love with technology.
There was a transformational moment in your life, a house invasion that made you realize you were on the improper life trajectory, could you share this story and the way it reinforced your must develop into an entrepreneur?
I used to be a sophomore in college, running my very own music/entertainment company, after I was robbed at gunpoint during a house invasion. Everyone talks about how your life flashes before your eyes in moments like this, but what I experienced as an alternative was my life flashing in front of me – I saw that I needed to follow my lifelong passion as an alternative of following classes in class.
The very next day, I dropped out of college, and it was top-of-the-line decisions I ever made. I focused every waking minute on my passion of constructing something that may have a huge effect on the world before I die.
Could you share the genesis story of ClickUp, and why you selected to desert your first startup Fast Follwerz to deal with this more ambitious project?
I began Fast Followerz, a social media marketing company, with only $100 and myself. I leveraged growth hacking tools and inside 4 years had tens of millions in yearly revenue and around 25 employees. I believed I had made it for a temporary time frame.
Something was missing, though. After a specific amount of cash, I spotted my passion and energy got here from something way more than that. I knew in my heart that I used to be meant to be spending my time on something that had a much greater impact, however it was hard for me to only stop what I used to be doing and spend time on something else, especially when Fast Followerz was paying the bills.
The universe has a funny way of working. I had a seizure randomly while watching the movie ‘The Martian,’ and for about per week I used to be convinced I had a brain tumor, which is something that my dad had. It was just what the doctor ordered – being faced with the prospect of death forced my hand to follow the trail that I knew my heart already wanted.
As an alternative of continuous to spice up people’s egos on social media, I got down to do something more impactful. I wanted to construct something that may enable me to be okay with dying the subsequent time around, knowing I had a hugely net positive impact on the world.
With tens of millions in revenue, I shut down the corporate. I drove across the country to Palo Alto with a U-Haul and a couple of of our employees to start out the subsequent thing. We were going to construct a brand new Craigslist, that had great design, rankings, reviews, and would prevent people from getting scammed like I had been so often on the positioning.
By this time, I had already been obsessive about productivity and efficiency, because of my perspective on life being so short. At Fast Followerz, this led to us using literally 14 different productivity tools directly. I knew there needed to be a greater way.
Before constructing the Craiglist substitute, I challenged the team to spend one month and construct our own productivity tool. One which was flexible, customizable, and enabled us to place all of our work in a single place.
At the top of that month, all of us knew we weren’t going to construct the marketplace app. We were totally obsessive about the productivity tool as an alternative, which became the primary version of ClickUp.
Are you able to tell us more about ClickUp Brain and the way it integrates AI assistants for knowledge management, task management, and writing?
Productivity is broken. It’s mostly due to sheer volume of software and platforms and tools that we’ve got to change between with a purpose to get work done. The time it takes to toggle between these platforms makes us less efficient and helpful context is lost. ClickUp goals to alter this by delivering something no workplace tool up to now has: all your work in a single place, super-charged with ClickUp Brain.
Brain connects to every little thing inside ClickUp like your projects, tasks, and docs, and connects to every little thing outside of ClickUp, too, like your Google Drive, Dropbox, Figma, and Github accounts.
All of us spend a lot time asking questions on work – where answers live, what the status updates are, who owns what – on the expense of doing the actual work. Imagine the time saved from with the ability to ask questions and get relevant, full-context answers without the wait!
ClickUp Brain is your organization’s personal AI assistant with infinite knowledge that makes you 10x more productive, and provides everyone in your organization an executive assistant and a project manager available 24/7. It might brainstorm to put in writing initial drafts, refine final work, construct workflows, automate tasks, manage projects, and share progress updates. ClickUp Brain consolidates all your company knowledge across docs, wikis, connected apps, and more.
How do these AI features differentiate ClickUp from competing AI productivity tools?
There are such a lot of AI tools out there, but all of them type of do the identical thing. And they are not integrated into your workflow, so whatever you do with AI, you then must copy/paste back into your work tools.
ClickUp Brain has native and integrated access with all your work each inside and outdoors of ClickUp. We didn’t wish to construct just one other AI tool. We wanted to construct the primary AI tool truly made for firms that has real features that prevent time.
Yes, we’ve got writing (and our writing tools can write identical to you or your organization brand), but we even have AI Project Updates, StandUps, and even Sprints.
ClickUp is understood for its comprehensive project management solutions. How do features like custom templates, OKR planning, and sophisticated project management at scale improve team efficiency and project delivery?
Custom templates provide an enormous head start on projects and our users have access to our template center with greater than 1,400 pre-built templates to pick from. Many teams also create their very own custom templates specific to their workflows to save lots of helpful time on future work. The OKR planning feature aligns day by day tasks with overarching objectives, enabling teams to trace progress and maintain deal with key goals. For those massive, complex projects, ClickUp’s hierarchy system keeps every little thing organized, from the massive rocks all the way down to the tiny details.
All these features work together like a well-oiled machine. You possibly can kick off a project with a template, arrange your goals, after which use ClickUp Brain for task prioritization and automation. It allows teams to deal with the necessary work as an alternative of getting bogged down in work about work.
ClickUp offers all-in-one solutions for marketing and product management. How do these tools help teams construct visual plans, manage agile workflows, and reduce development time?
Our platform is intentionally flexible to let all teams work the way in which that they need. Teams can select to make use of the features that make sense for them, customize them to match their work-style, and ultimately streamline their workflows and boost productivity.
For visual planning, we primarily leverage our Whiteboards feature, where teams can brainstorm ideas, create diagrams, and map out product roadmaps. These visual tools integrate with the duty management system, so teams can turn ideas directly into actionable tasks with just a couple of clicks.
We also offer flexible project views including Kanban boards, Gantt charts, and sprint planning tools. Teams can easily adapt these views to suit their preferred methodology. Almost every a part of our platform may be altered to permit teams to tailor their workflow with features like views, custom fields, automations, and task types.
Combined with features like built-in docs, time tracking, and goal setting, any team can manage entire projects just inside ClickUp.
How does ClickUp AI speed up project plans and execution?
A lot of labor is just work about work. ClickUp Brain kills this so you possibly can deal with doing the actual work that offers you energy and joy, without the crap that sometimes comes with it.
You do not have to ask people for updates, write your individual updates, add day by day summaries, ask for priorities, and even create tasks yourself anymore. By automating routine tasks and offering informed suggestions, ClickUp Brain allows project teams to deal with high-value work, reduce manual effort, and produce projects to completion more efficiently.
ClickUp integrates with over 200 tools. How do these integrations profit users, and what are a few of the hottest tools integrated with ClickUp?
Toggle tax, or the productivity loss you experience on account of frequent task or app switching, may be very real. A mean user toggles between different apps and web sites about 1,200 times a day. Just take into consideration how much time is wasted each day the world over! ClickUp integrates together with your tools and apps to bring all your work in a single place. For instance, you would create a task directly from Slack messages or sync your Google Calendar with ClickUp. With integrations, you furthermore may unlock the ability of connected AI because ClickUp Brain can actually search through those apps and offer you a full-context answer across all your work.
A few of our hottest integrations are Slack, Teams, GitHub, Figma, and Google Drive. Our users find that it’s more efficient and easier to make use of those tools through ClickUp slightly than always switching between platforms.
What’s your vision for the longer term of humans and AI collaborating together?
Our mission from day one has all the time been to save lots of time. Time really is our only finite resource. We needn’t ask our colleagues to schedule a gathering, or for a progress report on a project, or if we’ve got the subsequent holiday off. These are tasks for AI, and that is stuff that AI can do today.
And as for the longer term, I consider we’ll see incredible productivity gains that enable humans to achieve this way more with the very limited time we’ve got. I would like people to spend their energy on their most creative and stimulating work, and have more time to spend with their family members or on their passions outside of labor.
