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In the heart of the Amazon rainforest, a butterfly flaps its wings, and across the globe a poor business decision is made. Good decisions are at the heart of business success, however today most businesses cannot afford to spend hours contemplating the “right” decision. 

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The mantra now is implementation, facilitated by tools like Jira, Asana, and Notion, orchestrating perfectly-timed pivots for triumphant outcomes. But amidst this sprint, the art of sound decisions, that are aligned with company values, company goals, and are tracked, are forgotten. 

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Enter the innovative antidote: AsyncBrain.  

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Founded by Beto Moreria, who previously co-founded Good Pair Days, AsyncBrain is an AI-assisted brainstorming and decision-making platform and one of Startmate’s Winter23 Accelerator companies. 

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Explaining the platform’s mechanics, Beto said, “Say a team has a big decision to make that they don’t have documented processes for. They can use the platform where they’ll be asked a range of questions such as ‘What’s the kind of decision you’re trying to make?’, ‘How much time do you have?’ etc. The tool already has data about the company vision and goals. We then use an AI model to assess this information and the tool recommends the best decision-making framework for that specific situation.” 

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From conception to obsession

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“I first had the idea for AsyncBrain during my time building Good Pair Days. During COVID, like a lot of other businesses, we struggled to ideate together. Before the pandemic, we could go for a coffee and scribble some ideas together, but we completely lost that. We tried to fix this with more and more Zoom calls, but it wasn’t working. I started cancelling all the open ended ideation meetings, and that was when I started to think about options for asynchronous brainstorming and wrote down the idea for AsyncBrain”, Beto said. 

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While the idea had manifested around 2020, it wasn’t until 4 months ago that Beto started to explore it again. 

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Commenting on the initial development, Beto said, “I really wanted to build something that could help with asynchronous brainstorming and better decisions for global teams and businesses. I built a prototype for the idea within a week and started showing it to people. At this time I applied to Startmate’s Accelerator Program, met with teams at Atlassian, and very quickly people started to see that there was a very real gap in this space.” 

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While the initial concept for the platform focused heavily on brainstorming, as Beto had more conversations, he realised that there was a real need to add discipline to decision-making.  This resulted in the concept evolving to encompass the entire ideation-implementation journey from the initial brainstorm to the final decision. 

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Mastering decisions through purpose and principles

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Amid the frustration that often accompanies misaligned projects, AsyncBrain emerges as a strategic remedy. It tackles the issue upstream, preventing countless hours, dollars, and effort from being poured into projects that aren’t aligned with the company's goals. 

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Drawing inspiration from Ray Dalio’s book Principles, Beto raises an important question, “Businesses often have a conceptual understanding of the principles, derived from a company’s strategic vision, that guide decisions. However, these are rarely written down or documented. This also only works when most of the decisions are made by the executive team. So, the question that I’m trying to answer is: how can a company scale knowledge of its guiding principles and a strategic vision as it scales and global teams need to make critical decisions?”. 

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Traditionally, businesses have attempted to answer this question with cultural inductions and intensive training. AsyncBrain offers an innovative approach by capturing some of the most elusive elements of success: strategic vision and frameworks. AsyncBrain renders obsolete the need to sift through internal resources for frameworks. Instead, these frameworks seamlessly integrate into daily workflows, accessible whenever decisions need to be made. The platform also maintains a decision log, ensuring greater transparency and accountability. 

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“Out of a 100 companies right now, only 3 have decision logs and one of them was not even using theirs! This is because it takes discipline to remember to document every decision made over say email, Notion, or a verbal discussion. What AsycBrain does is the opposite. If we are embedded into your day and you start the brainstorming through AsyncBrain, the output is the log”, Beto elaborated. 

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Innovation, ambition, and big decisions

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Though only 4 months into the making, AsyncBrain has made significant progress through the Startmate Accelerator program. During this brief but pivotal period, Beto conducted market research and built a customer pipeline, speaking to over a 100 companies on their needs and built a minimum viable product within 3 weeks. Next, AsyncBrain received investment from one of GitHub’s co-founders: Preston Werner Ventures. 

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Commenting on the journey after the Accelerator, Beto said “The next step for us is to complete our official pilot program with the 15 companies we're working with and open up for more companies as we validate our hypotheses. This will give us an opportunity to be more precise about the best use cases for the platform. After that, we will look to raise seed capital to build a team.” 

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Beto has a big vision for AsyncBrain. In the future, he hopes it will evolve into a tool that people can use in their everyday life to make better decisions. 

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“I think there is an opportunity for AsyncBrain to become a decision making tool for everyone. It has the potential to evolve into a tool that can be used for both personal and business decision making. When it comes to big decisions like choosing whether to move overseas, or choosing a preschool for your child, that’s also where I see AsyncBrain being used. People can also use it to reflect on past decisions, principles, and learn to become better decision makers”, he shared. 

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In a world where decisions are made in minutes and shape destinies, AsyncBrain promises a path to an exciting future where individuals and organisations are empowered in their journeys towards better, more purposeful choices. That’s a future I’m excited to live and work in. 

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PSA: Summer24 Accelerator applications are OPEN. ‍

Apply here.

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