Adam Sah’s Post

Monochrome Capital is proud to be investing alongside Slow Ventures, Blitzscaling Ventures, and Jim Messina in Ando - a significant increase in our stake following the initial pre-seed check we wrote to help get the business off the ground in 2024. I’ve spent a significant portion of my career in the "pre-AI" era of logistics digitization - from the early days of Uber to working closely with Paul Wellons at Jyve. While we solved massive problems back then, the frontline workforce was often left behind by the technology meant to manage them. Having seen Paul’s leadership firsthand at Jyve, we knew early on that he was the right person to tackle the 'last broken supply chain': labor. What is Ando? They are building the world’s first AI infrastructure for the global hourly workforce. By using high-accuracy demand forecasting and intelligent staffing tools, they match the right people to the right shifts at the right time - turning a chaotic scheduling process into a precise, stable system. As our industry moves toward an AI-driven future, I am especially focused on what happens to blue-collar and hourly workers. I’ve always believed a "win/win" is possible where optimization for the employer also means better, more predictable lives for the workers. Paul is charting that course responsibly, and I believe Ando will lead to better outcomes for everyone involved than a world without it. Excited to continue our partnership with this additional financing! #FutureOfWork #AI #Logistics #HourlyWorkforce #ResponsibleAI #VentureCapital

Ando, a San Francisco–based company building #AI infrastructure for the global hourly workforce, has raised $4M in Seed funding. The round was led by Slow Ventures, with participation from Blitzscaling Ventures, Zero Capital, Monochrome, Gaingels, Mana Ventures, Fireroad, and additional investors. Led by Paul Wellons, Ando is purpose-built for the hourly W-2 workforce, supporting both frontline employees and the managers who schedule them. The platform helps businesses reduce turnover, eliminate labor waste, and deliver predictable, reliable schedules workers can depend on. The company plans to use the new capital to expand its AI platform and scale deployments with enterprise customers, addressing one of the most operationally complex segments of the global workforce. #Ando #SeedFunding #AIInfrastructure #FutureOfWork #WorkforceTech #HRTech #StartupFunding #VentureCapital

Today, we're announcing Comp's R$100 million Series A, led by Keith Rabois at Khosla Ventures, their first-ever investment in Brazil. Joining Khosla are our insiders KASZEK and Canary doubling down, as well as new investors Abstract Ventures and Endeavor Scale-Up Ventures. From day one, we've been building around two core convictions: 1/ People are the most important thing in any business 2/ The way companies manage people (aka "traditional HR") doesn't work anymore We're not another HR software tool. We're not a consulting firm. We're something new entirely: an AI-Native HR Function. We embed forward-deployed HR experts and engineers directly inside our customers’ organizations, building custom policies, processes, and AI tools that make the People function both more strategic and more efficient. Think of us as your superpowered HR teammate -- supporting everything from the most complex organizational decisions to the most operational day-to-day work. We are deeply grateful to our early customers for their trust in us to challenge the status quo in compensation.. and we are thrilled to already be supporting innovative companies across all their HR work. We are growing extremely quickly and hiring ambitious builders to reinvent HR from first principles. If you want to help define a category and build at the frontier of application-layer AI, send me a message. We were born in Brazil, but we are building for the world.

🎉 Celebrating our partnership with absence.io! We’re excited to partner with absence.io, a smart HR solution that helps startups simplify their daily operations and focus on growth 🚀 From absence management and time tracking to digital personnel files and expense management, absence.io brings everything into one central platform. Employees can submit vacation requests or expenses in just a few clicks, while managers approve them in real time. Clear processes, less admin, and more time for what really matters 💡 🎁 With an exclusive offer for SSA Members! 👉🏼 Check them out here: https://hubs.li/Q043cHYY0 #SwissStartupAssociation #Partnership #HRTech #StartupTools #SwissStartups #StartupEcosystem

Khosla’s Keith Rabois backs Comp, which wants to bolster HR teams with AI After graduating from Cornell University, Christophe Gerlach spent nearly two years investing exclusively in HR tech startups for General Atlantic. Investing was exciting, but Gerlach was yearning to get back into entrepreneurship. While at Cornell, Gerlach (pictured above, right) built and sold a food delivery startup alongside classmate Pedro Bobrow (pictured above, left), a Brazilian native. Then in late 2022, Gerlach and Bobrow (previously a product manager at Lyft) teamed up again, merging their sector expertise and cultural roots to launch Comp, an HR tech startup focused on Brazil....

Khosla’s Keith Rabois backs Comp, which wants to bolster HR teams with AI After graduating from Cornell University, Christophe Gerlach spent nearly two years investing exclusively in HR tech startups for General Atlantic. Investing was exciting, but Gerlach was yearning to get back into entrepreneurship. While at Cornell, Gerlach (pictured above, right) built and sold a food delivery startup alongside classmate Pedro Bobrow (pictured above, left), a Brazilian native. Then in late 2022, Gerlach and Bobrow (previously a product manager at Lyft) teamed up again, merging their sector expertise and cultural roots to launch Comp, an HR tech startup focused on Brazil....

Considering that #trends emerge at #tech companies in Silicon Valley, it wouldn’t be long before what is happening there becomes part of our professional reality here. Are #startups still considered role models for passionate and creative work, with purpose? Is working at a tech startup still compatible with personal growth? Or is #disruption of greater importance? Individuals at tech companies still seem to be working exceptionally hard toward the ultimate goal — the #AI revolution. This highly ambitious goal though may threaten their own jobs and the careers of many employees in other industries. Are doubts growing over the inevitability of the AI-driven era? ------------------------------------ "Startups have never been particularly glamorous. When I started reporting on the industry a decade ago, people were cashing in on the new mobile app economy, and coders were chugging Soylent to stay at their desks longer. Startups then, too, were defined by hustle culture, high-octane energy and the pursuit of growth at all costs – ideas that, to some extent, have remained in the bloodstream of the industry. But in the last year, as the magic dust of artificial intelligence has settled in San Francisco, the vibe among tech workers does seem different. The excitement about a new epoch in tech – and all the money that comes with it – is now tempered with anxieties about the industry, and the economy. Some workers are going all in on AI while also questioning whether all that AI is good for the world. --- Investment in artificial intelligence companies reached record highs in 2025, yet workers are feeling scarcity in ways they haven’t before. “It’s definitely something that’s on everyone’s mind,” says Kyle Finken, a software engineer at Mintlify, which makes an AI tool for developers. “I think a lot of people are concerned like, ‘Oh, am I going to have a job in three years?’” --- The Anthropic CEO, Dario Amodei, has suggested AI could eliminate about half of all entry-level jobs in white-collar industries within the next five years. --- Robbins, the executive coach, says that companies once looked to Silicon Valley as a model of how they should operate, down to emulating policies like unlimited vacation days or adopting perks like free lunch in the office.   “There was an idealization of tech and Silicon Valley for a long time across the business world. Some of that has changed,” he says. “Now, people aren’t asking me to tell them what’s going on in the Valley so that they can adopt it, the same way they were a decade ago.”   Rather than a model of how we should all work, the tech industry may be a premonition for the anxiety and attempts to compensate that are coming for all of us." --- Read more on: https://lnkd.in/ddq8eGGJ

Your 25-person startup is bleeding €2,400/month on tools nobody asked for. Most founders don’t realize how much they spend on SaaS until someone does the math for them. We did. The average early-stage startup (10–50 employees) runs tools for documentation, project management, HR administration + 3 more. Total: €2,000–€3,000/month. That’s a junior developer’s salary. Every month. X-HR replaces 80% of that stack. One platform. €3–4/seat. Use our free SaaS Cost Calculator https://lnkd.in/eJQNcm7e Slide through to see the breakdown ↓ #SaaS #StartupOps #ToolSprawl #HRTech #LeanStartup #CostOptimization #WorkOS #AIatWork

SF startups are now asking employees to take their shoes off at the office. Cursor, the AI coding startup worth billions, went viral for it. Shoes lined up outside the door. Slippers provided inside. Employees working in socks. Replo, Spur, Speak, Flowhub, Composite all followed. Stanford economist Nick Bloom called it "the pajama economy in action." Workers brought their home habits back to the office after remote work. Spur's co-founder said it "disarms you in a positive way" and makes the office feel like a second home. Here's what I think is actually happening. The new generation of founders doesn't care about looking like a "real company." They care about building like one. And if that means everyone works in socks, so be it. We have a different vibe at Imagine AI (YC F25). We moved into our new office a few weeks ago. No shoes-off policy. But we do have a whiteboard we didn't have before, monitors we bought from Best Buy, and a team that's outgrowing the space already. The startup era isn't defined by dress codes or office aesthetics. It's defined by how fast you ship and whether your customers are winning. Though I'll admit, after the rainy walk to the office this morning, taking shoes off doesn't sound so bad. Would you work at a shoes-off startup? [Created by Imagine AI]