Case Studies and Tools

• Canva, a collaborative graphics tool, is currently valued at $40 billion and was co-founded by a teenager. As opposed to using social collaboration, the company creates an environment for social collaboration. As OpenExO’s Sophie Krantz has written, Canva “is building a strategic network of investors and advisors before they are needed. These investors are positioned to provide investment in future funding rounds and enable a funding pipeline to be developed. Beyond this, these strategic investors and advisors are also positioned to provide valuable introductions, insights, and influence, all of which open important doors for future growth.” Canva is predicted to play a key role in powering the next generation of DAOs.

• Whatsapp currently reaches about 2 billion people worldwide and is the most-used mobile messenger app in the world. During the pandemic, WhatsApp became the go-to platform for communications by companies, governments, non-profits, and international organizations. By 2020, these institutions had sent more than 4 billion messages, often to remote and low-income communities. Whatsapp recently added Community functionality to its product.

• Miro Boards. An estimated 35 million users (including 99% of the Fortune 500) depend upon Silicon Valley’s Miro to provide virtual whiteboards for real-time and asynchronous collaborative brainstorming and note-taking. Team participants can be co-located, distributed, or fully remote.

• Slack. The granddaddy of internal social tools (it was bought by Salesforce in 2021 for a staggering $27.7 billion), Slack provides a messaging platform designed specifically for workplaces. Slack offers several distinctive apps, notably chat rooms organized by topics and direct messaging. Slack is used by 12 million people daily through more than 2,000 integrations into other applications. Seventy-nine percent of business customers say that Slack improves their workplace, while teams say that productivity grows by more than 30%.

• San Francisco’s Asana is a web and mobile work management platform that has created a software-as-service platform. It is designed to help teams organize, track, and manage their work. Teams using Asana can develop projects, manage tasks, assign work, communicate about tasks, and specify deadlines. The product also includes a wide range of supporting apps—and can even track a company’s progress on moonshots and toward its MTP. 

• Notion is a versatile and all-in-one productivity platform that is perfect for collaboration, as it allows teams to create, share, and manage a wide variety of content, including notes, databases, calendars, and project boards. By consolidating multiple tools into a single, user-friendly interface, Notion enables seamless communication and organization among team members, streamlines workflows, and enhances overall efficiency. Its customizable templates and rich integrations with other popular apps make it an ideal choice for teams seeking to boost their productivity and collaborative efforts. With a recent valuation of more than $10 billion and a user base exceeding 20 million, Notion has demonstrated its significant impact on the productivity and collaboration landscape.