Productivity tools have been a white-hot space, with new startups seeming to nab funding on a daily basis.
Coda has been one of the more impactful productivity tools, pitching a richer and deeper collaborative document builder. The startup has picked up $60 million in funding from top investors like NEA, General Catalyst, Greylock Partners and Kleiner Perkins.
I recently spoke to CEO Shishir Mehrotra about how his startup has aimed to rethink the document.
Below is a chunk of my interview, which has been edited for length and clarity.
TechCrunch: Productivity is a very hot space right now. How has Coda shifted since you started it in 2014?
Shishir Mehrotra: You’ll find companies where what they’re doing today and what they said they were going to do at the beginning is totally different. We’re pretty close and I think you could attribute that to — if I was going to be really generous I’d say we’re prescient, and if I was being not so generous, I’d say we’re super-stubborn.
Our Series A was really interesting because my first company took almost a year to raise a half-million bucks. This one took a weekend to raise 25 million bucks. My Series A deck was 69 slides long, which I would never recommend for anybody. It was basically a series of mocks of what I thought the product was going to become, because that’s all that really mattered and that’s roughly what we’ve ended up building. So with the overall perspective of what the original vision was and what I thought the product would feel like, I think we’re pretty close.
