Introduction ✨
We are designing the presentation experience that the future deserves ❣️
Roles at Chronicle 💻
Engineering
Note: These roles are for candidates based in Australia or with significant time-zone overlap
Principal DevOps / Infrastructure EngineerSenior QA EngineerKnow someone who would love to work at Chronicle? Refer them by writing to us at [email protected]
Our values define how we work ⛳️
💪 Solve with passion and rigour
We are extremely passionate about our vision. As overused as the word is, nothing else better describes how we feel about shaping the future of work.
🔥 Put rationale over ideology
At Chronicle, the sanctity of the debate is the most sacred thing for us. We love to work with people who are opinionated but are not married to their ideology.
🤩 Settle for nothing but awesome
We approach building a product with the same goal that we approach storytelling - to wow our audience. At Chronicle, we want to build a world-class product that elicits an emotional response from our users.
🙏 Take ownership
We feel a strong responsibility for our own work but also have a strong sense of overall ownership of the organisation. There is no place for a "not-my-job" attitude within Chronicle.
🧑🚀 Approach with optimism
We are at the start of something huge, building a product that will impact millions of people. Optimism informs our approach at this early stage in the journey. We are bound to face challenges on the way but as long as you believe in the vision, we will get there!
Benefits of working at Chronicle 🎉
Compensation - We offer competitive salaries and attractive stock options are offered to all employees. We review compensation regularly to ensure it remains fair, rewards performance, and remains generous relative to the market.
Flexibility - You can work from anywhere and we will support you with the best equipment, home office expenses, and remote working allowances. Our work hours are flexible, so long as you’re available to collaborate with the team during core hours.
Growth - We operate a performance-oriented culture, with regular opportunities for growth and potential promotion. We empower employees to self-direct their professional development and access learning and development opportunities.
Benefits - We have a generous annual leave policy and offer budget that can be used on health and wellbeing or learning and development. Periodically, we come together as a team to celebrate wins, socialise, and relax in fun locations.
Life at Chronicle 🕺
Our Journey
Presentations have been a consistent theme in our lives for the last decade.
Here is our story of starting Chronicle.
Frequently asked questions❓
How do I apply? How do I get in touch?
Email at [email protected] + include your CV and portfolio if relevant
What is Chronicle’s hiring process?
- Screening — We will review your CV and Portfolio to determine whether your experience and interests represent a strong potential fit.
- Initial Interview — You’ll be invited to an initial interview with a Founder and our Chief of Staff get to know you, answer any questions you may have, and share a bit more about Chronicle and the role.
- Technical Interviews + Assignment — We will conduct an initial technical interview, and then provide a take-home assignment for you to complete and then present your findings back in a second discussion with our Functional Lead.
- Final Round — You’ll have a final interview with a Founder to ensure alignment with our vision and product taste.
- Offer Stage — We will call your reference(s), finalise and discuss our offer. We may consider offering a paid work trial for a few days.
Why did you start Chronicle?
Chronicle is born from Mayuresh’s decades-long affair with presentations. From his days at university through to the boardroom, Mayuresh became renowned for presentations. Chronicle was founded from Mayuresh’s insights around the optimal form factor for communicating information and standing out visually.
→ Read more about our founding journey here.
What stage is the product at?
We are currently in closed beta - working on beta 4.0 - a delightful, highly valuable product that we intend to launch publicly this year. It has taken us 2+ years, 3 major builds of the product and countless feedback and learnings from users to get here.
2024 is shaping as our biggest year yet. We have deep conviction in our product vision, are building at high quality and velocity, and we’re laying the groundwork for launching Chronicle to market. We’re hiring one senior, experienced and talented designer and engineer to work on some core parts of this product we will launch this year. We are feeling extremely excited about how all of this has come together and are confident this will be a great launch.
Have you raised money? How much?
We are fortunate to be backed by some of the best investors in the world.
We have raised US$7.5M from top VC’s Accel and Square Peg. We’re also supported by a set of angel investors who have designed, built, and grown exceptional software companies Facebook, Google, Superhuman, Apple, Slack, Lattice, Intercom, Product Hunt and more.
We are well set up from a capital standpoint with several years of runway and the opportunity to accelerate on our mission to build a world class product, attract world class talent and build a strong foundation.
Where is Chronicle located?
Chronicle is a remote-first Company with employees in Australia and India. We work flexibly, but in-sync in the APAC timezone. This enables us to work efficiently and collaboratively, and to come together as a team from time to time.
What is Chronicle’s culture
- Design-led
Chronicle is a design-led team that puts thought and craft at the heart of everything we create. We take design burden upon ourselves and away from our users. We bring our own perspectives to design work and have a high threshold for quality - we do not believe in rushing design or doing things because other startups do.
- Ownership, autonomy, and flexibility
We are a small team of highly capable operators, exhibiting high degrees of ownership for our work and outcomes. We empower our teams to work autonomously and flexibly. We believe the best work happens when teams are driven and passionate, rather than held accountable.
- High performance
We operate a high performance culture, and love pushing each other to be the best versions of ourselves. We all are driven to leave a positive mark on the world and challenging each other to learn, grow is a big part of that. We value open debate and rigour over complexity
What compensation and benefits does Chronicle offer?
- Compensation. We offer competitive compensation and benefits, including ESOP for all employees, regular feedback and review cycles, and discretionary performance-based bonuses.
- Flexibility: We work remotely but in sync and flexibly, empowering our people to do their best work when and where it suits them, and to live fulfilling lives outside of work.
- Autonomy: We maintain a high performance culture, providing significant autonomy to our team to own and deliver high quality, creative output.
- Benefits: We offer generous benefits including top-tier equipment and allowances for remote work, learning and development, and wellbeing.
How will Chronicle make money?
We expect to follow a subscription-based business model, charging for some premium features and for higher levels of usage. We intend to offer a free version of Chronicle, providing for users to create and deliver beautiful presentations and collaborate with others.
How large is the opportunity?
Chronicle is playing in the fast growing $50B+ presentation software market. With 1.2-1.5B presentation software users, the addressable market is significant.
As a starting point, we aim to target modern tech teams that form a 40-50M target user group. This represents ~$1B obtainable market.
How is Chronicle different from existing solutions?
Existing tools not only make it very hard to create high quality presentations but also make it very easy to end up with bad ones by default. Chronicle is different from traditional slide design tools as well as modern AI powered tools.
More convenient- traditional tools like Powerpoint, Keynote and Slides need you to be a designer to create a decent output from scratch on a freeform canvas. Chronicle’s widgets ensure you always have a stellar output without any pixel pushing.
More thoughtful- AI powered presentation tools like Gamma and Tome simply speed up the process but eventually lead to an even poorer quality of output due to their powerless and constrained form factor. Chronicle’s form factor does not compromise - it is designed for you to do powerful things - elevate to a story or dive as deep as needed.
More impactful- Chronicle is built with consumption experience in mind - borrowing interaction patterns from social media apps. So unlike document tools like Notion or whiteboards like Figjam or Miro, Chronicle is designed to engage and capture attention in a world of limited attention spans.
In a nutshell we marry the convenience of tools like Notion with stellar quality and impact of your output - as if Steve Jobs was sitting next to you designing your presentation.
Chronicle is the best way to share your ideas and thoughts impactfully!
Who are Chronicle’s target customers?
Chronicle is a horizontal tool built for modern teams. We expect Chronicle to appeal in particular to:
- Aspirational mid-level to senior leaders who care about delivering high quality presentations but don’t have the time or capability to do so today
- Working in cross-functional teams spanning Operations, Sales, Marketing, Product, and Customer functions
- In scale-up companies where increasing organisational complexity and cross-functional collaboration increase the need for quality storytelling
- Working in cultures that are willing to adopt new tools like Notion and Slack that drive productivity, and have a storytelling / presentation culture
Initially, we will be focused on internal presentation use cases like All Hands, Stand Ups, Team Syncs, and Showcases, as well as OKR, Metric, Business, or Decision Reviews. We also expect to support use cases like L&D trainings, Product Updates and Demos, Project or Research findings, and Customer / Sales / Pitch presentations.
This is because we feel Chronicle’s value proposition is likely to be strongest when there are multiple functions involved in preparing the presentation, the presentation collates information from multiple external tools, and it is important to deliver an engaging consumption experiences such as in live meetings.
How will Chronicle reach customers (what is the go-to-market strategy?)
Chronicle will aim to drive customer adoption using a product-led-growth playbook. Since presentations are inherently collaborative, we expect to drive discovery and adoption through viral actions within our product as users and teams collaborate in creating, sharing, and delivering presentations.
We expect to be able to accelerate this growth flywheel via effective growth levers such as company, influencer, and user-driven content including templates, as well as community initiatives and channel activation, SEO, and PR.
What is Chronicle’s tech stack?
What we’re consuming 📚
Inventing on principle by Brett Victor (Video)
Envisioning Information by Edward Tufte (Book)
Design is storytelling by Ellen Lupton (Book)
Knowledge Project by Shane Parrish (Podcast)
Inside by Bo Burnham (Netflix Video)
Why is blue so rare in nature? by Joe Hanson (Video)