1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Mark Selcow of Costanoa Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about some examples of what you have invested in. In particular, talk about when you encountered the company. At what stage did you invest? What did they have that convinced you that this is a really interesting opportunity that you would like to bet on?

Mark Selcow: Skedulo is a company founded in Brisbane, Australia where the product development team, the founder, and CEO were based. They had just moved to the US to come after the North American market. That’s when we were introduced.

What they were doing was really familiar to me. They’re building a system for work for deskless employees. People who are working in the field need to get to their location. They need to deliver a unit of work. The work needs to be documented, managed, and measured in some closed-loop fashion.

So, when a home healthcare nurse goes to a house for a visit, a home infusion nurse goes and delivers the medication, or an inspector goes to the home to make sure that the installation is correct and ready to be turned on.

What I’ve personally liked about the opportunity was the indelible trend towards gig work and 1099 work. Thanks to the ubiquity of mobile phones, the increasing ease and reduced friction in enabling workers to get to these locations, deliver the work, and then have the task be documented. We didn’t see a natural incumbent.

Of course, we looked at people who were in the traditional field service market who are building technology for the Comcast guys in the van or the Verizon truck. Those weren’t the same. Those systems are frankly really large. Multi-hundred million-dollars or billion-dollar companies were built in those sectors. A big part of what they did was service and repair in which keeping track of parts and inventory was a part of what they did.

What Skedulo is doing is a much wider set of use cases where no leading vendor existed. We thought about the big trend towards more mobile workers, driven primarily by mobile phone availability. Nobody was already there to occupy the space. So we had a chance to invest and be part of the building of a company that could be the winner in what we thought was the big trend.

In my second company, Merced Systems, after we were acquired, I managed the unit and scheduling for call center workers. So I understood the value of that application. I was in the workforce management sector so I understood how mission-critical it is to buyers. These guys had built great algorithms and great mathematical solutions to the optimization and the matching of the skills for the task.

But more so, they built a design studio so that some tasks needed a signature on the mobile phone and some needed a photograph like the home healthcare nurse takes a picture of your health insurance card. Some needed a simple workflow. They made it easy for customers to get what they needed. So we thought it was a great market. It was a chance to be the winner with a superior product.

We got really excited. Of course, the thesis for us was the future of work. We’ve been really pleased with that investment. They just announced their series B investment. They’re growing, thriving, and fully capitalized in the next chapter.

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Mark Selcow of Costanoa Ventures
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