If your team subscribes to 10 different software tools, you’re not alone in wrestling with the overwhelming sprawl of productivity apps. Entrepreneurs have taken notice.
ClickUp, which launched in 2017 to consolidate everything from project management to document collaboration and now chat into a single tool, has grown explosively to a $4 billion valuation, hitting $278.5 million in revenue in 2024.
Twelve million people at companies like IBM, Netflix, and Spotify now use ClickUp, which recently launched an AI-powered chat feature to take on Slack, Teams, and other communication hubs.
Fast Company spoke with CEO Zeb Evans about why he’s betting on teams using fewer—not more—platforms, and how the company hopes to stand out in the increasingly crowded productivity marketplace. The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Beyond the rise of remote work, what do you see as the biggest changes in how teams work together in recent years?
I saw a report recently that said even smaller organizations average 150+ SaaS apps. This leads to so many issues, from reduced productivity for individual employees to lack of alignment across teams.
If your marketing team has one tool and your engineering team has another, multiply that across your company and you have a major app-sprawl problem. The more apps your team needs to use, the more disconnected and frustrating work will be.
