Paddling Together with Dragonboat
Dragon boat racing is a water sport originating in ancient China. Teams compete in large, canoe-shaped boats [like the one pictured above], decorated with a dragon’s head and tail, that they propel with paddles. To win a race, the entire crew, with different roles and focuses, must be aligned and work effectively together to speed past their competitors.
What is Dragonboat.io?
Building products at scale with speed is essential but challenging. In a decentralized and agile product organization, teams struggle to collaborate with each other.
Dragonboat.io Founder and CEO Becky Flint had an intimate understanding of that struggle in her career managing cross-functional product development teams leading global expansion initiatives. While building the product portfolio management operations for fast-growing companies like PayPal, Shutterfly, Bigcommerce and Feedzai, Becky worked with dozens of project portfolio management (PPM) tools. But none adequately supported the needs of these fast-paced, outcome-focused product organizations and she had to build her own or use makeshift tools for planning and tracking.
She knew there was a better way forward. So Becky set out on her own. In 2018 she launched Dragonboat.io with a mission to connect strategy and execution across all levels and roles of product portfolios—and help technology leaders to accelerate business results—by creating a platform that enables companies to run effective product investments at scale, driven by data and AI.
Dragonboat‘s AI Portfolio Intelligence powers all aspects of a product operating model. It enables effective product portfolio decisions, and automates 80% of manual work—from planning to tracking—with real-time insights for both executives and teams, enabling them to strategize and deliver products at “AI speed to scale”—that is, twice as fast to market and with a 67% higher resource ROI, says Becky.
Dragonboat’s platform is now used across industries. Its customers include large banks, broadcasters, auto manufacturers, IT and cyber security firms, and global human resources.
What Attracted Us to Dragonboat?
In 2021, GingerBread Capital Partner Ita Ekpoudom got a warm introduction through a mutual connection to Becky Flint.
Ita herself had experienced the complexities—and frustrations—of managing cross-functional product development teams early in her career, as a product manager at American Express and later at Travelclick, a global provider of data and revenue-generating solutions for hoteliers.
Ita recalled the over-reliance on manual systems—sometimes as rudimentary as emailing attachments of Powerpoint slides and Excel spreadsheets back and forth to track product development iterations, file histories, resource allocation and budget planning—that were rife with errors and inefficiencies. Yet there were no good software tools at the time for product developers to manage it all in one place.
Becky had raised a seed round to launch a pilot SaaS solution and her impressive background in product development management piqued our interest.
While it was too early for the GingerBread Capital team to make an investment in Dragonboat (we typically invest at the Series A stage and beyond), Ita put in a call to our good friend Sergio Monsalve.
Sergio had recently launched his own firm, Roble Ventures. We were an early LP in Sergio’s Fund I, which focused on seed-stage investments in workplace productivity solutions.
Previously, Sergio had built a successful track record of big exits during his nearly 14 years at Norwest Venture Partners, where he served as an investor and board member of several multi-billion dollar companies. Among them was Adaptive Insights, a cloud-based, collaborative tool that helped finance leaders with planning, budgeting, forecasting, and financial reporting. What that company did for finance teams, Dragonboat was doing for product development teams.
Ita recognized a potential match and first investment for Roble and connected Sergio to Becky.
“When I met Becky, I knew she was building something special,” said Sergio. “Her first-hand expertise solving product scaling challenges is unparalleled. And her passion is infectious. You can’t find a better founder-market fit.”
The Deal We Made
In the Summer of 2021, GingerBread Capital joined Roble Ventures in a pre-emptive co-investment round in Dragonboat prior to the company’s $12M Series A.
“After doing our deep diligence together, it was the strength of Sergio’s conviction that got us over the edge and made us decide to invest. That conviction in a founder’s vision is exactly what we want to see when we partner with a fund.”
—Ita Ekpoudom
Sergio negotiated as the lead investor in the pre-Series A round in which we participated. The terms were structured in a way favorable to the founder, prior to a larger investor coming in for the next round.
Which is exactly what happened just six months later, when a much larger investor was the lead on Dragonboat’s Series A raise, in late 2021. Read more.
***
“The investor-founder fit is real with Roble Ventures and GingerBread Capital. Their understanding of the problem space and unbiased support for female and uncommon founders, and continued support post-investing, has been instrumental to our growth." ”