Founder Stories: Base, the First Software for Executive Assistants

Base CEO Paige McPheely explains how High Alpha became part of the Base team in order to build a new category of software.

Transcript
Executive assistants provide amplified output for their executives. They really provide leverage. But the question we ask ourselves is, "What happened if you give your leverage more leverage, what happens then?" We're seeing EAs support multiple executives more and more frequently, and so we wanted to provide an easy way to toggle back and forth from their executives and have everything that they need right there at their fingertips.

Base is in a unique position because we're not riding any waves, we are the wave. So when you're creating a category, you have to define a lot. So that's the place where we are right now, is defining what it means to be software for executive assistants. So as we get past that, what we're looking to is really wrapping this robust layer of community around our product.

There are not that many people that know as much as we do about executive assistants, but we're not claiming to be SaaS experts. So it was really important to us that when we started Base we had someone we could lean on, someone with the benefit of pattern recognition just like we had in the executive assistant space. High Alpha met that need for us above and beyond. Their team not only gives us that industry experience, but then having access to their entire team immediately got us off to a running start right away. You have product design, product engineers, product manager, everybody there to help you. So from the start, I had four full-time engineers getting started on the MVP. We had people helping us figure out what that MVP was going to be, doing product research, user interviews, and that gave me the freedom to really focus on building up my team. High Alpha is really unique because they're not just an investor. In so many ways, they're a co-founder, and that's not something that they're just saying either. They really take that to heart. They very quickly say, "We," instead of, "You," and, "Us," and, "Our team," and so immediately you feel like you've got this big team who's really, really invested in the success of your company and what you're building together.