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.
- •Target customers: SMBs across industries (construction, agencies, law firms, services)
- •Core suite: project management, knowledge management, docs, wikis
- •Positioning as an all-in-one work management platform
- •Shift from managing work to also executing work via agents
- •Agents are a major focus of the past year
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.
- •High school friends through Math Olympiad; USA Math Olympiad qualification
- •College friendships; CS background
- •Early careers in quant trading
- •Shared intensity and competition from academic contests
- •Relationships preceded the startup decision by years
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.
- •Quant trading can reach seven figures early; significant opportunity cost
- •Trading scratched the competitive itch but lacked purpose
- •Parents advised building wealth first; founders chose risk
- •One founder also deferred a Stanford GSB path
- •Framing: high risk/high reward, confidence in their own abilities
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.
- •Accepted to YC (initially), then timing adjustments before the batch
- •Original concept in sports betting ran into regulatory issues
- •YC partners helped navigate pivot decisions
- •Shifted to building a calendaring/time-management application
- •Rapid iteration during YC to find something users wanted
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.
- •Key V1 PMF moment: automatic scheduling of an entire calendar
- •From near-zero revenue to ~$1M ARR in ~2 months
- •Continued growth over 1–2 years into the ~$10–20M ARR range
- •Validated demand for AI-driven scheduling/time management
- •This era established expertise in productivity and time context
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.
- •Despite ~$15–20M ARR, long-term ceiling looked limited
- •Prosumer tools often behave as nice-to-haves with weaker retention
- •Lack of B2B-style dollar retention (e.g., near-100% net retention)
- •Hard to reach $1B ARR with this product category/dynamics
- •Forced an honest assessment: keep a profitable business vs. pursue massive scale
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.
- •Customer pull: requests to integrate with Jira/Asana/Monday/Trello
- •Decision: build a better work management platform rather than integrate
- •Targeting SMBs/mid-market where many prosumer users came from
- •B2B trust requires robust feature parity and reliability
- •Need both parity and a unique 10x advantage to win
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.
- •Desire to build a lasting business, not just a comfortable outcome
- •Motivation sources: immigrant background, proving oneself, family sacrifice
- •Another framing: not losing can be a stronger driver than winning
- •Competitive “chip on shoulder” culture across the founding team
- •Willingness to restart/pivot rather than sell early
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.
- •Winter ’20 batch disrupted as COVID hit right before Demo Day
- •Massive outreach: hundreds in CRM; many calls; ~150+ rejections
- •~98% rejection rate; seed raise stretched ~3 months
- •Raised only a couple hundred thousand dollars
- •Experience reinforced grit and a sense they still hadn’t “won”
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.
- •Agents can be assigned tasks within projects (“AI employees”)
- •Agent capability is partial today but expected to expand year over year
- •Unified system: human tasks and agent tasks share context and handoffs
- •Platform advantage: existing work management backbone to manage many agents
- •Early results: agentic product grew from ~$0 to $10M+ ARR within months
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.
- •Agents require rich context to perform reliably
- •Motion already stores customer knowledge base, projects, tasks, time data
- •Integrated platform + proprietary context improves agent outcomes
- •Sustained growth depends on repeated reinvention and expanding PMF
- •Vision: scale from work management to managing/operating hybrid human-agent teams
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.
- •Prefer highly driven, mission- and outcome-oriented people
- •Not a 9-to-5 culture; expects high effort and ownership
- •Looking for candidates eager to prove potential and grow scope
- •Motion willing to “take the bet” on talent seeking bigger responsibility
- •Founders’ ambition and competitiveness framed as a key signal for joiners
