Up-and-Coming Start-Ups: Hugo Opens for Trudeau at Collision ’19

Hugo was honored to be first on stage before 29,000 people at Collision 2019 in Toronto.

If you’re not familiar, Collision is often described as North America's fastest-growing tech conference. The event brings together the people and companies redefining the global tech industry.

At the very beginning — before keynotes from Justin Trudeau, Ev Williams (Medium founder), Seth Rogan, Ryan Holmes (Hootsuite founder), Tobias Lütke (Shopify CEO), and Joseph Gordon-Levitt — we had the supreme privilege of being the first of a handful of up-and-coming startups that got to share what we did with the crowd.

Why was Hugo chosen to talk about connected meetings notes and kick off this massive event?

We weren’t told — but, perhaps the core problem we work on struck a chord with the organizers.

Because, as Darren Chait said on stage, “the way we meet is broken.” There’s nothing worse than when you have a meeting but your time is wasted.

I’m sure that’s something even Justin Trudeau could agree on.

Check out the 3-minute pitch

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Transcript:

Sunil Sharma

Before that, we have a great treat for you. We're going to, every morning on this stage, we're going to introduce to you some of the most up and coming seed stage startups you'll find anywhere. And so you're going to meet companies that are scaling incredibly rapidly. And the question will be, "are these going to be the very companies that the world is going to talk about in 2020 and beyond?".

Many investors who are here — there are more than 800 tech investors in the building over the course of the next couple of days — believe these are in fact those companies.

So we want to introduce to you our very first company on stage. These founders are eager to come out from backstage and tell you their stories on how they did it. So let's get started.

Our first company is Hugo.

Hugo's built a platform for your team to save and share meeting insights in real time. To hear more please welcome the co-founder and COO Darren Chait to the stage.

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Darren Chait

We discovered something interesting in building a business: How you meet determines how you work.

It's no surprise. Meetings influence everything.

That's where decisions happen. That's where tasks are generated. Knowledge. Culture. Think about all the time you spend in meetings. Problem is: the way we meet is broken.

Why? Because there's no connection to the way we work.

Think about how we work in 2019. The average company is using more than 128 different SaaS tools — more than 90 percent of them are specific to one department — and at the same time, three-quarters of millennial managers have a team that's part remote.

What does that lead to? Data fragmentation. And people fragmentation.

That's why we built Hugo.

Compare these trends in how we work with how we meet. Most meetings we attend end up with nothing decided hours of your time of no value to the people out of the room. So we take pages of notes. We send emails. Slack messages. Action lists. All you end up with is isolated documents and gigabytes of data.

And at the same time, it's near impossible to translate meeting takeaways into action. 128 different SaaS tools. People all over the world. Different buildings. Time zones.

So Hugo solves that. We make connected meeting notes software. Centralized searchable meeting notes that connect with your favorite tools.

We turn the simplest activity — taking meeting notes — into an easy way to connect everything about the way you meet to the way you work. Here's how we do it.

You take your meeting notes in Hugo. We help make those insights shareable and actionable in more than 20 of your favorite business apps. You can create a Trello card, sync to Salesforce, send a bug to engineering, share insights to Slack for those who weren't in the room — directly from your notes. Then after being shared with others in the business who weren't in the room and should know, we transform your meeting insights into organized product and customer intelligence that will never get lost.

We're built on top of your calendar, so it's easy to make meeting notes centralized and easily accessible, and we organize them by customer, company, tag, project — however you organize your knowledge.

And remembering how you meet determines how you work — Hugo powers the right process. With the likes of Team templates and collaborative agendas, everyone in the business meets prepared and in the know every time. Best of all, talking to our customers and companies all over the world, we are being successful at completely destroying team silos. Check it out — Hugo.team. Thanks very much.

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