- by Mayuresh Patole
When I was at IIT Bombay, I stayed back at the campus one summer and taught myself UI design. This was around the same time that the startup boom was happening and so I started freelancing as a designer.
I started conducting design workshops to share my learnings with my friends. About 5-6 people used to show up in my hostel room to learn design (including my now co-founder - Tejas Gawande)
I was always obsessed with storytelling and presentations. Design only accentuated my passion to make presentations that leaves the audience awestruck. So I would spend hours making intricate, animated and 'interactive' presentations for these workshops. At the end of each workshop, I would always get the same question: "How did you make that presentation?".
I would always get the same question - "How did you make that presentation?"
People hardly ever enquired about the design theory I was teaching but were more interested if I was using a tool they did not know to make this presentations. So I figured I will take the last workshop on how to make kick-ass presentations. To my surprise 300 people showed up. Twice.
I learnt something that day - people are aching for a better way to tell stories. And there was some thing about my presentations that resonated with them.
Fast forward 5 years, I spent time as a management consultant at BCG, built and launched ventures as a design and a venture architect at BCG Digital Ventures. But every time I present even today, I get the same question: "How do I make presentations"
In 2020, I was returning from India to Sydney and had a layover at Malaysia. I decided to spend the day with Tejas who was living in KL back then. We ended up spending the entire time discussing how presentations today are due for disruption and there is a massive potential to solve them. After I returned to Sydney it was all I could think about and I spent the weekend chalking out how we could reimagine presentations!
It was quite clear that this is a massive opportunity and this is what we are going to work on. We both left our jobs at the start of 2021 and jumped into Chronicle full time. Since then we have:
We onboarded and validated our frictions across more than 250+ conversation
We designed more than 100 screens to test our solution with users
We onboarded 15 pilot users and test our product with them, continuously refining and iterating in 2 week sprints
We raised our seed round with Accel, a top tier silicon valley investor. Chronicle is now incorporated in US and we are building a remote team!
We have a long journey ahead of us and we couldn't be more excited to build an amazing product that impacts millions of users.