Source: Inc.com
The business Ryan Alshak started up in 2018 began life as Time by Ping, the trailblazing creator of AI time software for professional service firms. Six years later, the company has raised $55 million in venture funding, undergone a complete platform rebuild, and rebranded to a new name.
Now known as Laurel, the San Francisco-based company has clients that include a Big Four accounting firm and one of the world’s top five law firms. It has an average contract value of ~$200,000, with multiple contracts topping seven figures.
Alshak’s inspiration for the business came when he was a corporate litigator who abhorred the manual logging of his time required for billing.
“I was billing out $650 an hour and yet was being asked to manually record every six minutes of my time,” Alshak says. “I had a very strong thesis that in the future machines would remind humans what they did at work versus humans reminding machines.”
The first phase for the company was introducing the technology that proves a machine can track and bill time better than a human. Alshak says Laurel is now in its second phase, focusing on supplying professional service firms with time data so they can evolve from billing time to billing outcomes. The third and final phase will be to expand the adoption of machine-first timekeeping to all one billion knowledge workers globally.
In the meantime, Alshak applies the principles he hopes will revolutionize those industries to the operation of Laurel itself— for example, adopting outcome-based management. And his employees have embraced the mandate to always honor time belonging to their clients and their co-workers.
Read the full article: https://www.inc.com/inc-custom-studio/an-ai-startup-that-sanctifies-time/90987555
