Morning,

Let's start with great news: the 100+ team I mentioned last time decided to join, so we now have four signed (out of the six we pitched to) teams committed to giving Rise a go.

We have been mostly focussed on improving the deck and talking with a long list of investors. Thanks for helping out.

We had 11 meetings in the past two weeks with a ton of useful feedback and a lot of initially positive responses. We expect most of them to get back to us in the next week so we can move things forward. In the next two weeks there are 6 more first meetings scheduled, with more to come. It takes a lot of time, but it's interesting to hear everyones thoughts on Rise and the progression of productivity-related tools in general. Looking forward to close this phase to get back to building.

Talking about product, we still managed to ship an important feature: showing the calendar of a colleague. If you have connected personal accounts, we'll show those as busy. Here's a Loom vid to get an impression. Under the hood, we also improved our all day vs normal events handling and improved our internal event access model for guarding privacy and fixed a long list of smaller bugs and performance fixes.

Next up:

• Most of our time will go into taking our round to the next step, keeping you posted as we move things forward.
• We'll start onboarding more users. Focussing on expanding the teams that are already in, but also adding some new users. We'll reach out when your account is ready.
• Two big things we hope to tackle: API authentication (blocking before we're able to ship our desktop app) and implementing the Google People API for a lot of improvements in the way we present faces + improve searching for colleagues and friends.

Talk to you in two,

Rick