CHAPTERS
What Motion builds now: SMB work suite + agents that do work
The team explains Motion’s current product: an all-in-one work management suite for small and mid-sized businesses, especially service-heavy SMBs. They position Motion as more than project management—now layering AI agents that can complete portions of work, not just track it.
How the founders met: Math Olympiad roots and quant paths
The founders trace their relationships back to competitive math in high school and close friendships in college. Their shared technical background and competitive mindset set the stage for collaborating on a startup.
Choosing startups over finance: giving up 7-figure trajectories
They describe the real tradeoff of leaving lucrative quant trading roles (and other “safe” prestige paths) to start from zero. The decision was driven by a desire for purpose, compounding impact, and betting on themselves despite parental skepticism.
Getting into YC and the first pivots: sports betting to productivity
Motion entered YC with a different idea—sports betting—then pivoted due to regulatory friction and constraints. With YC guidance, they moved toward a calendaring/time-management product and iterated quickly during the batch.
Breakthrough: smart calendaring hits early product-market fit
Their first major traction came from an “auto-schedule my calendar” feature that seemed counterintuitive but resonated strongly. Launching smart calendaring quickly drove revenue growth from near-zero to meaningful ARR in a short window.
Why consumer/prosumer productivity tools don’t scale to billions
An inflection point came after an office hour where they confronted the ceiling of a “nice-to-have” prosumer tool. Even with strong ARR, they recognized limitations in retention and must-have urgency compared to B2B software.
Pivot to B2B work management: competing with Asana/Jira/Monday
They shifted from consumer/prosumer calendaring to building a full B2B work management platform for SMBs and mid-market teams. The pivot required feature parity plus a clear 10x differentiator, leveraging their time-management insights and customer pull for integrations.
The drive to win: ambition, identity, and refusal to ‘settle’
They explain why they didn’t stop at a successful mid-sized business: the team’s ambition is to build something enduring. Motivation comes from immigrant drive, personal pressure, and an aversion to the pain of failure.
Surviving Winter 2020 Demo Day: fundraising in the COVID crash
They recount raising seed capital during the early pandemic when markets collapsed and investors froze. After extensive outreach and many rejections, they ended up raising only a small amount—fueling their chip-on-shoulder mentality.
Launching “AI employees”: agents on top of the work suite
Motion’s next leap is embedding agents directly into their work management system so businesses can assign tasks to AI. They argue that managing human and agent work in separate tools is inefficient, and Motion’s unified context enables more capable agents.
The future of work: context-rich platforms will power better agents
They outline a broader thesis: the best agents will be built by platforms that already hold deep organizational context—knowledge, projects, tasks, and history. Motion believes its integrated suite and data position it to deliver superior agent performance for SMBs.
Who Motion hires: driven builders seeking high ownership
They close with what they look for in candidates: intensity, ambition, and comfort with responsibility. Motion positions itself as a place for people with a chip on their shoulder to grow quickly and take on big roles.
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