Donna Litt and Joseph Fung – Kiite
The new president was coming to visit.
Along with the other co-op students in the company, a young Joseph Fung was eager to meet his leader.
But the full-timers were worried. Was the president coming to close the location? Lay people off? “The fact that there wasn’t that trust or transparency was tragically disappointing,” he remembers.
It got him thinking, though. How do you create trust and transparency in a workplace?
Joseph is a serial entrepreneur. Along with his sister Donna Litt, his high school friend Derek Hall and venture capitalist Rob Chaplinsky, he’s also a co-founder of Kiite. And if there’s one common thread that runs through their business, it’s that question.
“We spend a huge amount of time at work,” he says. “Everybody does. And if you can make sure that time creates a feeling of respect, of fulfillment, that you’re living up to your potential, it’s just a better way to live.”
“The whole fam damily!”
The idea of entrepreneurship and working together comes naturally to Joseph and Donna. After all, they grew up in a family of entrepreneurs.
“I can remember evenings around the table, stuffing envelopes, sending mailers out to clients…” – Joseph Fung
During their childhood, their parents ran a residential heating, ventilation, and air conditioning business. After that, their mother moved into financial planning, while their father started a home inspection company out east.
The duo, along with their sister, helped out from a young age. “I can remember evenings around the table, stuffing envelopes, sending mailers out to clients,” says Joseph.
“Sharpening pencils, licking the stamps…” Donna adds.
“Yeah,” Joseph agrees. “Those are the memories that stick out most for me.”
Their parents enabled them to explore and make mistakes safely. They opened up opportunities for travel, introductions, and volunteering. And they gave the kids freedom to follow their own paths.
Joseph, fascinated by the mysteries of the universe, went to space camp and read “excessive amounts” of science fiction before landing on coding (and, of course, entrepreneurship). Donna hoped to unravel the mysteries of the distant past under the ground we walk on and in the depths of the ocean.
“You’re chasing after dragons. You don’t know what’s there, but you’re still going to try to find out.” – Donna Litt
The siblings may have been searching in different directions – Joseph looking up at the stars and Donna peering below the inky waves – but they share a desire to know more, and a drive to discover what’s possible.
Donna puts it one way: “You’re chasing after dragons. You don’t know what’s there, but you’re still going to try to find out,” she says.
Joseph puts it another: “You’re trying to create the future. There’s that fear of the unknown, of what the future’s going to bring, and that skill and knowledge and data can help make educated guesses,” he says.
Either way you look at it, “That’s a nice parallel with the idea of building a company.”
A path to success paved with fridge magnets and stressful interviews
Joseph’s first stab at running a business was in high school, designing business cards and fridge magnets (and fridge magnet business cards). At about $60/hour, it was a much more lucrative endeavour than a minimum wage job.
“That gave me a really clear direction of how I wanted to run my career,” he says.
He started his first proper company, Lewis Media, during his second-year computer science program at the University of Waterloo. A few years later, still in school, he released OnMyBlock.ca, which he describes as “a social networking software platform before we used the phrase social networking.”
Then came TribeHR, Joseph’s third company, focused on making employees and managers more engaged and self-sufficient on the job.
While Joseph was always eager to bring his siblings along on his (ad)ventures, Donna remembers her interview for TribeHR as the toughest one she’s ever had.
It wasn’t that she lacked the right education. With a degree in archaeology, she knew how to comb through mountains of information and surface the truth hidden beneath.
“Archaeology’s dirt and garbage, but you can apply that to your digital artifacts in the technical world.” – Donna Litt
“When I went to university it was, how do I optimize for playing outside in the dirt and storytelling, like fairytales and myth and folklore?” she says. “Ultimately what I learned was real human stories,” something she originally planned to turn into a career in nautical law.
The same skills apply to a career in tech, by the way. “Archaeology’s dirt and garbage, but you can apply that to your digital artifacts in the technical world,” she adds.
It wasn’t that she lacked experience, either. In fact, Donna got her start in tech from a rather unusual place: signing donors for the SickKids Foundation on the corner of Bay and Bloor St. in Toronto.
“You’re talking to all these people, you’re collecting all these stories, but what’s going to make you stop is going to be different from what makes another person stop,” she says.
But no one was formally capturing that data. “No science had been applied to that, and so that was really interesting to me, because I like patterns – probably why archaeology makes sense,” she says. She stepped up to fill that gap, working with NGOs to analyze that donor data and surface the trends and truths underneath.
So the reason her interview with TribeHR was so tough? The expectations.
“There’s the zeitgeist around startup life: you’ve got to be the best, you’ve got to be the person that Google’s going to pluck up,” she says.
Plus, “I recognize that Joseph’s in a tough situation because he doesn’t want to in any way elevate preferential treatment, right?”
Though she thought otherwise, the interview actually went well. Really well. That was in 2011, and spoiler alert, they’ve worked together ever since.
It’s called Kiite – the Japanese word for “listen” – with good reason
Kiite was born six years later, in 2017.
In a nutshell, it’s an AI-powered assistant that sits in your company’s chat platform. Ask it a question and it’ll fetch an answer in real-time, so sales teams don’t need to search through mountains of documents or disrupt others with a tap on the shoulder.
The idea is rooted in their work at TribeHR. “We spent a ton of time talking to researchers who are looking at leadership and studying management. We spent a ton of time shadowing managers and seeing how they’re using their time,” says Joseph.
“The inspiration was really coming back to the basics: how do we make work better for front-line employees and front-line managers?” – Joseph Fung
And that’s where they noticed two problems.
The first: there’s a huge time sink when people try to be self-sufficient, either hunting down hard-to-find information or interrupting colleagues and managers to figure out the answers.
The second: as the company was acquired by NetSuite and grew larger, “we spent more time with HR and the administrative departments, and less time with front-line employees and managers,” Joseph says.
Both were solvable with Kiite. “The inspiration was really coming back to the basics: how do we make work better for front-line employees and front-line managers?”
The first version cast a wide net, providing support to universities, IT departments, HR departments, sales teams, and service teams. Never ones to stop listening, though, Kiite honed in on areas where the pains of wasted time were felt most acutely: sales and customer success.
“It’s a place where you have a sense of belonging, where you’re respected, where you have a say and can contribute your best work.” – Donna Litt
They don’t just talk the talk about positive workplaces – they walk the walk, too. Within their own four walls, they’ve created an environment that values trust and transparency, where no one should be nervous about talking with the president like the full-timers were at Joseph’s co-op job, and where atypical career paths like Donna’s are valued.
They’ve also worked hard to spread that message to other leaders as active advocates of diversity and inclusion in tech – because a positive environment that includes everyone makes work (and life) better, says Donna.
“When I think about the workplace that I want my friends or family or anyone else in my network to work at, it’s a place where you have a sense of belonging, where you’re respected, where you have a say and can contribute your best work,” she says.
“In order to make that reality, we have to be the ones to create it.”
Learn more at:
www.kiite.ai