Why These VCs Think Org Charts Are the Ultimate Source of Truth

On September 16, The Org announced the close of its $20 million Series B funding round. Led by Tiger Global, investors from Sequoia Capital and Founders Fund participated once again in the raise, as well as new faces from Thursday Ventures, Atreides Management and more.

With over 130,000 org charts in The Org’s database and more than 2,000,000 professionals using the platform this summer alone, The Org has quickly positioned itself as an important resource for mapping out team management, workplace values and organizational structure at companies, both internally and externally.

But for venture capitalists in particular, org charts have proven to be more of an invaluable source of truth than just a management tool.

Jared Furtado is a managing partner at Thursday Ventures, a Rhode Island-based venture capital firm that’s invested in a range of small to mid-sized tech startups. He launched the firm in 2018 after 15 years of working in executive recruiting and talent acquisition in tech. Furtado says he was initially drawn to The Org’s platform as a solution to what he says is a “broken” function within the recruiting industry.

“One of the biggest challenges of working in talent is that there really is no source of truth,” Furtado says.

To combat this challenge, Furtado says he’s spent countless hours weaving through professional profiles on the internet trying to find where each prospective candidate falls within their company.

“Leveling is always different internally in companies than public facing profiles,” he says. “There’s a lot of distortion between that. You never know where somebody actually sits. Are they in product or in marketing? Sometimes when I talk to candidates, I don’t know if they’re really sure how they’re working cross-functionally with their own team members.”

Organizational charts have historically been used to show the relation from one department to another. In Furtado’s experience, org charts detailing explicit roles within teams and who teams directly report to all the way up the chain of command is something that has been hidden. The opportunity for dynamic, public-facing org charts is something of a game changer for him.

“This is finally the solution that the industry has been waiting on for years,” Furtado says.

Venture capitalist Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen echoes Furtado’s frustrations of searching for a true source of truth for direct reports at companies. An early advisor at Uber and the former Head of Mobile at Dropbox, Fjeldsoe-Nielsen says that he used org charts as his “secret weapon” to form strategic alliances across the globe in both roles.

“I would painstakingly collect them, step-by-step, and get them validated by the employees at the respective companies themselves,” Fjelsoe-Nielsen says.

Having a centralized repository for accurate org charts cuts out a tedious process for him.

“There’s a deeply embedded, inherent instinct in people’s minds to correct wrong reporting lines. This is how I would get the org charts validated with pen and paper. It was an obscure imbalance in the relationship between employer and employee, which is now brought to the surface and finally made transparent.”

External transparency on the hiring and recruiting side is only one factor that org charts solve, Furtado says. Org charts also deliver a new method of effectively communicating internally at a company as well.

“A company is nothing other than just a collective of people,” Furtado says. “The more transparent, open and honest you are, the better things are. To have a platform that is solving that transparency and communication problem is a beautiful thing.”

Both Furtado and Fjeldsoe-Nielsen participated in The Org’s Series B round. Thursday Ventures joined as a new investor, while Fjeldsoe-Nielsen returns as a personal investor after being on the team at Balderton Capital that invested in The Org for its Series A.