Origins In the early 2000s, information technology had bene昀椀ted millions of organizations but it was still a challenge for leaders and their teams to master the fundamentals of running a business. While billions of dollars had been spent on modernizing systems that powered their 昀椀nancials, supply chains, and sales force automation, the technology that powered the day-to-day processes, projects, and initiatives was stuck in the 90s. The tracking and managing of work, for the most part, was relegated to email, documents, and spreadsheets. Microsoft O昀케ce ruled the day to day. We started in 2005 as Novigo Technologies, with a small but devoted team aimed at developing a tool for leaders to track and communicate organizational objectives to the people who would execute them and to provide a true, current sense of where things actually stood. But as we thought more about the opportunity, we sensed that starting at the top and working down might be the wrong strategy. Were the leaders the ones feeling the pain, or was it really the people “doing the work?” In 2006, we set our course to 昀椀rst help those doing work. Each of our early team members—Brent Frei, Eric Brown, John Creason, Mark Mader, and others—brought dedication, ideas, and capital to make Smartsheet real. ellow house Some of our founders came from Onyx, a client server-era CRM provider. Through that le y ce t i he lit sheet off experience, they witnessed a troubling and widespread pattern: because companies were T t t Smar s the fir still running large portions of their businesses on spreadsheets and email, nobody could fully know the latest version of the truth. Some information was current, while other information was stale. Valuable meeting time had to be given to sorting out who had updated what data when and where. In many companies, spreadsheets had become the digital junk drawers for operations—assorted notes, commitments, metrics, and next steps, without a consistent way to make sense of any of it. How e昀케cient. | 10 WHO WE ARE