Origin Story

Built for the future of support

I think it's helpful to know why we started the company.

Jump in your Delorean back to 2016. I sold my last company and exited stage left. I'm not a lounge-around-the-house kind of guy, but at the same time I was completely burnt out.

I realized part of my own burnout was the burden of running an organization without the systems and processes (or machines as Ray Dalio would say) in place to scale. I didn't want to do that again.

I also have a passion to see people use their gifts and talents for good. But so many people don't spend their day working out of their gifts/talents, they spend their day answering stupid emails and agonizing through repetitive tasks.

This burden is shared throughout organizations, but it is felt most acutely by support teams. Support teams in HR answer questions about vacation policies. Support teams in IT answer questions around password resets. Contact center teams answer customer questions by email, phone and text. Even marketing teams focused on customer acquisition are often a form of support. There's nothing wrong with answering questions — but repeating the same thing over and over might make for an entertaining movie, but it is madness in the workplace.

All of these threads were bobbing around in my head when — during that Christmastime of 2016 — the top selling item on Amazon wasn't a book or a video game or a toy. It was Amazon's Alexa. For the first time in the history of this planet, the top selling item was an (albeit rudimentary) form of AI.

So I had this idea — if AI was going to be big for consumers, what if it could remove the mundanity of the average workplace? What if automation could make those repetitive tasks go away? What if support teams could focus on level 3 and 4 questions while shifting level 1 and 2 questions to a virtual agent? What if we had the audacity of putting these various types of technology together so that we could help teams do their best work?

It was like a rock in my shoe. I became obsessed with this idea that AI would change the way we work. I knew this wasn't a page turn or a chapter turn but a fundamental rewrite of the way people work.

I had a list of potential business ideas to pursue. But this was the one idea where I knew if I didn't pursue it, I would regret it for the rest of my life. So I joined with cofounder Chris Sims in 2017 to launch Capacity and build a team that's all in on solving this problem ever since.