Ally Raises $15M Series B To Scale Its OKR-Focused Service
Summary
Chronus focused on mentoring, incidentally, something that Vellore said he received lots of at Microsoft and that he considers having “super-high ROI.” Vellore’s interest in how people work included reading up on how product development has changed, namely how the software development model has changed from the “waterfall” method (big, irregular releases) to the “agile” method (smaller, rapid-fire releases). Hunting for other models concerning how business might change, Vellore ran across OKRs, a neat method for corporate planning that companies seem to mainly execute in spreadsheets. It might then set up key results for that objective, like the invention and sale of three new packaged delights in the quarter, the maintenance of its current customer satisfaction scores across its entire line, and the addition of a new membership model to further entrench itself into consumers’ sweet tooths. In practice, setting intelligent OKRs is harder than you’d think (our candy example is terrible and unfocused, for example; I could use another americano), and getting employees to not only participate in the planning model but regularly track their efforts against their key results can prove irksome. Translating all of that into something understandable, Ally’s Series A investor introduced him to someone at a huge hedge fund who decided to put money into Ally quickly as it looked like an attractive bet.