Investment Notes: Index

We’re pleased to announce that Blackbird has led a A$3.5M seed round into Index alongside Bain Capital Ventures,  Y Combinator, and angels from Canva, Raycast, and Linktree.

The first Canva & Atlassian story

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This is a partnership of two exceptional individuals and long-time friends - Christian Iacullo (CTO) and Simon Kubica (CEO) - in pursuit of their dream to bring the same rigour that is applied in the building phase of software projects to the planning of them.

Christian and Simon have developed high-quality product intuition and technical skills by working closely alongside some of the world's best founders and operators at Canva and Atlassian, where they quickly built a reputation as rising stars.

Starting Index, they spent a year in Silicon Valley, taking part in Y Combinator with other world-class founders from across the world, and bringing these learnings back to Australia.

They’re the first founder duo from Canva and Atlassian, and hope to build the next generation of collaborative software based on what they’ve learned from these industry greats.

Every day we hope to uncover founders with a deep appreciation for how great products are built, and Simon and Christian exhibit exactly that.

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The Master Plan

Knowledge-based businesses shift between planning and delivery. There are amazing tools for delivery and execution (Linear, Jira, Trello, Monday, Asana) but no mission control for planning (what teams are going to do, in what sequence, and with what resources).

Planning in knowledge-based businesses is archaic or at worst, sometimes non-existent. Companies typically use some combination of spreadsheets, Notion, program managers or internal tools for their teams to plan goals and projects for upcoming cycles. For example, Canva used what they called the ‘Canva jigsaw’ - a company-wide spreadsheet to plan its 6 monthly cycles.

But, the problems with current methods are:

1. Projects within teams or across departments are disconnected and difficult to find;
2. Plans are isolated from task trackers so project progress quickly becomes stale; and
3. Team leaders have low to no top-to-bottom visibility over resource capacity meaning they are flying blind on whether they have the ‘inventory’ (human capital) to fulfil forecasted demand (goals/projects).

Can you imagine if we ran manufacturing businesses the way most knowledge businesses are run today? Just hoping the right parts were in the right warehouse at the right time so that customer orders could be fulfilled and revenue forecasts hit 🤯

A failure to plan well leads to staff being treated like a resource with infinite hours of work. Christian and Simon felt these headaches every day at Atlassian and Canva.

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Modern B2B Product Management

Index has started life as a dynamic and collaborative platform where Product Managers and their teams can plan projects and goals. They hope to become the single source of truth for up-to-date company, team and personal projects, so that everyone from the CEO through to junior employees are all in close alignment.

Starting today, Index is open to all in early access. You can visit the Index website and get started today.

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We are so excited to be supporting Simon and Christian on this journey.

Niki and Max, on behalf of Blackbird