A new chapter

Posted by Danvers Baillieu on February 23, 2023

Over the past 11 years, I’ve had the privilege of working for two incredible founders and helped both of them develop successful businesses. When I left InfoSum in October, I thought perhaps I would go and find another founder to work with, but an even more tantalising prospect presented itself, when Riki Dolby told me he was keen that we should build something together. 

Although I like to mess about with tech, my skills top out somewhere around excel pivot tables and a WordPress install (I was pretty pleased with myself when I figured that one out) – I am definitely not an engineer.  Riki, on the other hand, most certainly is – to his core, but more importantly he is able to build and manage an engineering and product team – a role he has also successfully performed for two founders.

Bringing diverse skills to the table is an obvious advantage for a founding team, but we also share a common interest in how companies scale, designing effective and efficient business processes and managing risk.  Our shared background as leaders in growing companies – but not being THE leader –  means that we’ve both had to think deeply about how to convey the objectives of a founder or CEO to our teams, including embedding these in policy and process. It’s really more fun than it sounds. 

So, for the past few months, we have been quietly working on a new idea for a tech business, only telling a few people in our network, some of whom have been kind enough to offer us funding. Being stealthy is all well and good, but we now feel we’ve reached the point that we want to talk about it more widely, as we are looking for potential beta customers and partners, as well curating a wider range of problems that we could address. 

Today, I am delighted to announce that we are building ApprovalDeck, which will be a tool for actioning, managing and providing insights into approvals and other business governance activities within your organisation.  ApprovalDeck will help with the approval flow itself, as well as with the decision-making process – for example when managers are faced with a decision about which they know nothing and are told “it is up to you”.  

ApprovalDeck will use AI as a true virtual assistant within an organisation to trigger and manage approvals, based on existing policies and procedures and using existing tools and systems.  However, we intend to unlock real value and efficiencies for customers by providing better reporting into the decision-making process and the decisions themselves – as this will give leaders deeper insight into their business operations as well as making audits faster and cheaper. 

We’d love to hear from you if you have an approval process in your organisation which needs improvement.  Perhaps your gift and hospitality approval process is a hot mess or there is an HR process not covered by your current tool? Or does your sales team have a simple way to request a customer discount and can you easily generate corresponding analysis for the end of the quarter?  We’re interested in the processes where you already have a tool but it does not quite do the trick as well as those that you’re doing on email, spreadsheets or post-it notes.