Why We Invested in Hoop

If there is one thing that we have learned at Origin Ventures in our 25 years, it’s that venture capital is a people business: the success of our funds ultimately rests on portfolio company leadership.

That is reflected in our strategy. In the last two years, we have backed the most experienced set of founders in our history. Our last six deals count three IPOs among the founders, and $15B of enterprise exit value. 

One other benefit to our longevity is the opportunity to back these experienced founders for a second time. One of those people is Stella Garber. 

Stella and I met right after she graduated from Northwestern and joined the founding FeeFighters team in 2009. I was an investor in FeeFighters, and Stella made an early impression. She was a marketing mastermind and a big contributor to the success that led to FeeFighters’ acquisition by Groupon in 2012. In just five short years, Stella founded her own company, got an MBA at Chicago Booth, and joined Trello as its first marketer. Altassian acquired Trello for $425M in 2017. We kept in touch over those years, especially at Stella’s professional inflection points. 

After she completed her stint at Atlassian, Stella shared that she was assembling a dream team of former team members to start a new company called Hoop. We were excited to back Stella, which was reinforced after we met co-founders Justin and Brian, who led product and business teams at Trello and shared Stella’s big vision and approachable confidence. 

Another thing we have learned at Origin Ventures is that humans are lazy. Even small shortcuts, like not having to pay when you get out of an Uber, can feel like magic. Hoop delivers magic by observing your communication channels– Slack, email, Zoom meetings– automatically assembling a task list using AI. This task list includes due dates, task assignments and summaries. In my second week of using Hoop, it caught a time-sensitive task that I had neglected to identify in a Slack conversation.  

In the future, this task automation will expand to an entire team, allowing managers to have unprecedented insight, while simultaneously reducing overhead.  

It was easy for us to see the parallels between what this team accomplished at Trello and the product they are building at Hoop. We are pleased to have participated in Hoop’s initial funding round, reuniting with Index Ventures.

We cannot wait to see what Stella, Justin, and Brian will build.