Standing Desk is OVER | Pitch.Tech EP1

HumbleWorks' founder Shayne Panthe pitches investors TaeHea Nahm of Storm Ventures and John Whaley of Inception Studio on a desk-and-app ecosystem built to fight sedentary remote work. He claims it can unlock 17% more productivity and cut sick days by 25%, and says the standing-desk business alone had already generated about a million in sales before its 2023 pivot. Nahm pushes back hard on whether data collection alone justifies a 5x valuation jump, while Whaley questions whether the product can really change human behavior. By the end of the Q&A, Panthe himself admits the pitch needed more evidence, not a better story.

Hannah Lee (PD @ EO STUDIO): Welcome to Pitch Tech, where innovative startups showcase their technology in the heart of Silicon Valley. We'll pitch their solution to a panel of esteemed investors.

TaeHea Nahm (Storm Ventures, Managing Director): Hi, I'm TaeHea Nahm. I'm co-founder of Storm Ventures. We've raised seven funds for a total of $1.2 billion. We've had 12 unicorns, companies such as Marketo and Workado.

John Whaley (Inception Studio, Founder): I'm John Whaley, so I'm now a three-time founder. I also teach at Stanford. I teach CS224G, which is one of the most popular classes at Stanford, about building applications using large language models.

Hannah: Pitch Tech is dedicated to highlighting startups that use disruptive technologies to forge innovation. Let's meet the innovators shaping the future of tech.

Shayne N Panthe (HumbleWorks, Founder): My journey has been from the UK all the way through San Francisco. We're very grateful for the opportunity that's come to us. We're buzzed about this.

Hi, we're HumbleWorks. I'm here to tell you about a problem that is costing the world around a trillion pounds. My background is in sustainable design and renewable energy. To help with this crisis, I pulled together the team that I thought would be best fit to solve this.

There are 1.3 billion information workers around the globe who are sitting at their laptops hunched over as they're working remotely. We're going to focus on 145 million remote employees in the UK, the EU and the US. 88% of managers don't believe their remote work teams are working as productively as they could be. Here's how we solve this problem: by moving during the course of the workday, we can unlock 17% more productivity and drop sick days by 25%. How do you move during the workday and stay productive?

We've built an ecosystem, an adaptive ecosystem, fully sustainable, sophisticated, that feels right at home or works at the office, and that allows you to move from position to position and stay productive. It's all well and good promising managers and CEOs a 17% improvement in productivity. Can we prove that? Yes, we can. The 17% improvement in productivity is captured by and measured using the HumbleWorks app. Our goal from Move to Measure is to then create a report.

The report will be buffered and anonymized, so individualized data isn't available, but it will be presented to a manager who then understands where the information or the work gaps are between him and his workforce. At some point over the next year, if all goes to plan, we plan to create an AI manager to supplement and possibly replace managers in some cases, to have entire teams being managed through an AI dashboard. Our revenue model is to charge £119 per employee. In year one, employees will get the full HumbleWorks suite.

The full HumbleWorks suite includes the standing desk, the workstation, the Rochester and the HumbleWorks app to help you track movement as you progress from one point to the next. Year two will be the manager report; that's now going to show you the granular data that we've gathered in year one and give you live, real-time feedback on how you're working and optimize your entire workday. By year three, we'll have the app, the manager dashboard and an environment scan used through the existing camera on your laptop. By year three, we're planning to take on the insurance industry.

It's a fragmented industry that needs work, and with the granular data that we've gathered, and the root cause of the health issue being sitting down all day leading to all of these other issues, will teach us exactly where those health preventative indicators will come from. This is the saving in year one compared to what people usually spend right now per employee: we will save employees and employers £1,400 in year one, £1,680 in year two and £2,600 in year three. Here's how we'll do that: they're currently spending around £750 per employee in health insurance.

Loss in productivity and loss in sick days are all the mitigating points that we're going to bring to the market and save in all of those costs across the board. Can we do this? Can we pull this off? With just the standing desk alone, we generated a million in sales at the end of 2023. Just a standing desk by itself. At that point we pivoted and decided movement was the bigger play at hand. Thank you for your time, really appreciate it.

TaeHea: If you raise the money, say £2 million, what are you going to achieve and by when?

Shayne: So in year one we'd like to build the AI Manager dashboard, and the AI Manager dashboard will take the data from year one and build an entire framework for how you should be working. All of that data is then going to be presented back to you as a full breakdown of where you should be. At the end of year two, we would like to have the environment scan built in.

TaeHea: Well, what I'm trying to figure out is, if I invest today, will the next round be like double or triple the price? Otherwise, there's no reason for me to invest today. Right?

Shayne: Let's imagine you invest today. In two years from now, the data that we would have gathered from movement, that nobody else is gathering, on how people are working from home, will put us in a position where the following round that we go for will be 5x what we're aiming for now.

TaeHea: Just saying, collecting data will be enough to get 5x the price?

John: That to me feels like a really different business, where it's like, okay, let's spy on the employees, make sure that they're being productive and working. We have desks that move up and down.

Shayne: They are standing and they don't use it.

John: And yeah, I think that, well, usually what typically happens is we've got the ones that have the memory setting and everything like that, you can just push a button and it immediately goes to the next setting. Pretty much every single person either keeps it up or keeps it down. They're not moving it up and down all the time. This kind of gets to the other part of the problem, which is you're trying to change people's behavior. How do you do it in a way that it's going to be accepted by the users?

Is it like the nag screen that's going to come up and say, hey, it's time for you to get up and walk around? Or, I mean, because I think it would be, if you just give people the options of putting my desk up or down, putting my laptop on higher or lower, the stuff that I've seen is that people often aren't doing that, which is part of the root of the problem, where people have bad posture because they don't even realize they have this bad posture.

But then also, it's challenging to be the kind of nagware that's going to be like, well, the camera shows that you're slouching, why don't you sit up straight? So what are your thoughts there?

Shayne: Brilliant question, and I'm glad you asked. In fact, the house we were kindly staying in has a hack house, and they have standing desks. We all have standing desks. We don't use them. And in fact, I'm going to say something that's probably going to sound controversial, but standing isn't the answer, to go from sitting to just standing. It's recently been proven that you'll burn a few more calories, but it's not solving the problem, which is why we pivoted in 2023 towards movement and towards creating behavioral change by benchmarking using the HumbleWorks app.

Once you understand where you are in the context of a leaderboard, because that will be part of the next step, the metrics that you're now playing with, or the switches you're now turning up and down, are mood, move and productivity. So our goal is to show you, over a period of time, as a baseline: here's where you are. And after a few weeks, it takes 21 days.

John: And so what's the time period? In terms of, hey, I implement this, at what point am I going to see the ROI?

Shayne: Our goal is to go into a company and propose a 25% rollout to their work-from-home staff, to find the teams that would be reluctant, resistant, and the teams that would jump on and say, yeah, I'm up for this, the early adopters, all the way through to the ones that can be reluctant. And the app is going to set a baseline over three weeks.

The baseline for that app would be: here's where we are before the HumbleWorks suite comes in and allows us to move from position to position, here's me sitting down hunched over my laptop, like everyone else in those 1.3 billion information workers. Then three weeks later, we introduce the HumbleWorks suite. From that point onwards, within three months, our goal is to show a productivity spike, whether it's a few percent or goes all the way up to what we're promising at 17%, there's going to be a marked difference in productivity.

TaeHea: So maybe you could talk about what the current status is: how many units are deployed, how much data are you getting per month?

Shayne: Right now, we've just completed the full build. The entire HumbleWorks suite is bootstrapped, so I built it from scratch, and at the end of 2023 I pivoted away from just selling standing desks by themselves to focus on building the tech, building the full suite.

TaeHea: You're right now in the process of getting the data and all that?

Shayne: Right now, absolutely. So right now we're in the process of market penetration and adoption to encourage movement.

TaeHea: Some of the meetings are just walking meetings. We just walk around the block. So that's why I'm not sure this app or chair would make a difference.

Shayne: No, of course. Imagine this: at this point, nobody's done this before. Up until this point, everyone's very easily said, I'll spend £3,000 on an expensive ergonomic chair, that'll go up, back will go in, and that's it. And nobody's really embraced this idea of what if we change the entire status quo, if we change the dynamic and built this homogeneous way of working, where all of my employees are now working in the same way.

If I set up an office, I wouldn't allocate and just throw a budget out and say, right, you can have a sofa if you'd like, you can have this sort of chair, you're more than welcome. The office would be very sterile and look quite homogenous with a similar setup along the way. Thank you, I appreciate it.

I think today's Q&A helped me understand the gaps, the linear storytelling and the presentation of the pitch. But that can then mitigate the gaps you would get towards the Q&A. I feel like I answered the Q&A as best as I could, but possibly having more tangible and statistical evidence at the Q&A would have helped, because it's almost like you have your appendix ready, and your appendix could then validate the rest of the questions there and then. So possibly having an appendix and helping shape the framing of the pitch in a structured order, that would help.

The tech is just this absolute logical next step, to have an easy way for people to understand it's not a standing desk company anymore, it's now a technology company, and this is where we're going. And tech shortcuts that process, or I imagine, hopefully shortcuts that process of people going, oh, that's HumbleWorks, they do standing desks. No, they're HumbleWorks Tech, and they must have a tech side to this. What is that tech? Oh, there's an app, and now there's a manager report, and now there's AI built into it.

TaeHea: I found that the quantitative benefits to be a little questionable. What I mean by that is his product is just starting to get deployed right now, and as a result, he doesn't have a lot of data back yet. And so he can't say, because of his product, we get these benefits.

Instead, what he's saying is that if you do these kind of things, like more mobility, you get these benefits, and the product can do these things, and therefore the product will be able to provide. And so I see logically what he's trying to do, and if I were him, I would try to sell too. But when it comes to presentation, I thought HumbleWorks was by far the best presenter.