Zeb Evans is a serial entrepreneur and the CEO and Founder of ClickUp, an all-in-one productivity platform that works as an ideal place for teams to come together, brainstorm, plan, and collaborate on everything from process docs to product designs.
You’ve stated that since you were 3 years old, you’ve been an entrepreneur at heart. Could you share some of your earliest memories of having the entrepreneurial spirit?
I found my calling as an entrepreneur very early in life. My first “business” was selling candy out of my lunch box in elementary school, and I actually got suspended for it. From candy, I went on to sell toys. It didn’t matter if it was my birthday or Christmas, I always asked for wholesale novelty toys that I could sell to my friends at school.
Then, when I was 10, I was in a jet-ski accident that put me in a hospital for months. I found the one public laptop at the hospital and discovered Alibaba. I saw that Disney DVDs from the Disney Vault had great resale prices, so I started buying and selling those from my hospital room. The DVDs turned out to be bootlegged, and I got in trouble yet again. But, the time I spent on the hospital laptop getting this hustle going is the moment I fell in love with technology.
There was a transformational moment in your life, a home invasion that made you realize you were on the wrong life trajectory, could you share this story and how it reinforced your need to become an entrepreneur?
I was a sophomore in college, running my own music/entertainment company, when I was robbed at gunpoint during a home invasion. Everyone talks about how your life flashes before your eyes in moments like this, but what I experienced instead was my life flashing in front of me – I saw that I needed to follow my lifelong passion instead of following classes in school.
The very next day, I dropped out of school, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made. I focused every waking minute on my passion of building something that would have a huge impact on the world before I die.
Could you share the genesis story of ClickUp, and why you chose to abandon your first startup Fast Follwerz to focus on this more ambitious project?
I started Fast Followerz, a social media marketing company, with only $100 and myself. I leveraged growth hacking tools and within four years had millions in yearly revenue and around 25 employees. I thought I had made it for a brief period of time.
Something was missing, though. After a certain amount of money, I realized my passion and energy came from something much more than that. I knew in my heart that I was meant to be spending my time on something that had a much greater impact, but it was hard for me to just stop what I was doing and spend time on something else, especially when Fast Followerz was paying the bills.
The universe has a funny way of working. I had a seizure randomly while watching the movie ‘The Martian,’ and for about a week I was convinced I had a brain tumor, which is something that my dad had. It was just what the doctor ordered – being faced with the prospect of death forced my hand to follow the path that I knew my heart already wanted.
Instead of continuing to boost people’s egos on social media, I set out to do something more impactful. I wanted to build something that would enable me to be okay with dying the next time around, knowing I had a hugely net positive impact on the world.
With millions in revenue, I shut down the company. I drove across the country to Palo Alto with a U-Haul and a few of our employees to start the next thing. We were going to build a new Craigslist, that had great design, ratings, reviews, and would prevent people from getting scammed like I had been so often on the site.
By this time, I had already been obsessed with productivity and efficiency, thanks to my perspective on life being so short. At Fast Followerz, this led to us using literally 14 different productivity tools at once. I knew there had to be a better way.
Before building the Craiglist replacement, I challenged the team to spend one month and build our own productivity tool. One that was flexible, customizable, and enabled us to put all of our work in one place.
At the end of that month, we all knew we weren’t going to build the marketplace app. We were totally obsessed with the productivity tool instead, which became the first version of ClickUp.
Can you tell us more about ClickUp Brain and how it integrates AI assistants for knowledge management, task management, and writing?
Productivity is broken. It’s mostly because of the sheer volume of software and platforms and tools that we have to switch between in order to get work done. The time it takes to toggle between these platforms makes us less efficient and valuable context is lost. ClickUp aims to change this by delivering something no workplace tool to date has: all of your work in one place, super-charged with ClickUp Brain.
Brain connects to everything inside ClickUp like your projects, tasks, and docs, and connects to everything outside of ClickUp, too, like your Google Drive, Dropbox, Figma, and Github accounts.
We all spend so much time asking questions about work – where answers live, what the status updates are, who owns what – at the expense of doing the actual work. Imagine the time saved from being able to ask questions and get relevant, full-context answers without the wait!
ClickUp Brain is your company’s personal AI assistant with infinite knowledge that makes you 10x more productive, and gives everyone in your company an executive assistant and a project manager available 24/7. It can brainstorm to write initial drafts, refine final work, build workflows, automate tasks, manage projects, and share progress updates. ClickUp Brain consolidates all of your company knowledge across docs, wikis, connected apps, and more.
How do these AI features differentiate ClickUp from competing AI productivity tools?
There are so many AI tools in the market, but they all kind of do the same thing. And they aren’t integrated into your workflow, so whatever you do with AI, you then have to copy/paste back into your work tools.
ClickUp Brain has native and integrated access with all of your work both inside and outside of ClickUp. We didn’t want to build just another AI tool. We wanted to build the first AI tool truly made for companies that has real features that save you time.
Yes, we have writing (and our writing tools can write just like you or your company brand), but we also have AI Project Updates, StandUps, and even Sprints.
ClickUp is known for its comprehensive project management solutions. How do features like custom templates, OKR planning, and complex project management at scale improve team efficiency and project delivery?
Custom templates provide a huge head start on projects and our users have access to our template center with more than 1,400 pre-built templates to choose from. Many teams also create their own custom templates specific to their workflows to save valuable time on future work. The OKR planning feature aligns daily tasks with overarching objectives, enabling teams to track progress and maintain focus on key goals. For those massive, complex projects, ClickUp’s hierarchy system keeps everything organized, from the big rocks down to the tiny details.
All these features work together like a well-oiled machine. You can kick off a project with a template, set up your goals, and then use ClickUp Brain for task prioritization and automation. It allows teams to focus on the important work instead of getting bogged down in work about work.
ClickUp offers all-in-one solutions for marketing and product management. How do these tools help teams build visual plans, manage agile workflows, and reduce development time?
Our platform is intentionally flexible to let all teams work the way that they want. Teams can choose to use the features that make sense for them, customize them to match their work-style, and ultimately streamline their workflows and boost productivity.
For visual planning, we primarily leverage our Whiteboards feature, where teams can brainstorm ideas, create diagrams, and map out product roadmaps. These visual tools integrate with the task management system, so teams can turn ideas directly into actionable tasks with just a few clicks.
We also offer flexible project views including Kanban boards, Gantt charts, and sprint planning tools. Teams can easily adapt these views to suit their preferred methodology. Almost every part of our platform can be altered to allow teams to tailor their workflow with features like views, custom fields, automations, and task types.
Combined with features like built-in docs, time tracking, and goal setting, any team can manage entire projects just within ClickUp.
How does ClickUp AI accelerate project plans and execution?
So much of work is just work about work. ClickUp Brain kills this so you can focus on doing the actual work that gives you energy and joy, without the crap that usually comes with it.
You don’t have to ask people for updates, write your own updates, add daily summaries, ask for priorities, or even create tasks yourself anymore. By automating routine tasks and offering informed suggestions, ClickUp Brain allows project teams to focus on high-value work, reduce manual effort, and bring projects to completion more efficiently.
ClickUp integrates with over 200 tools. How do these integrations benefit users, and what are some of the most popular tools integrated with ClickUp?
Toggle tax, or the productivity loss you experience due to frequent task or app switching, is very real. An average user toggles between different apps and websites about 1,200 times a day. Just think about how much time is wasted every single day across the world! ClickUp integrates with your tools and apps to bring all of your work in one place. For example, you could create a task directly from Slack messages or sync your Google Calendar with ClickUp. With integrations, you also unlock the power of connected AI because ClickUp Brain can actually search through those apps and give you a full-context answer across all of your work.
Some of our most popular integrations are Slack, Teams, GitHub, Figma, and Google Drive. Our users find that it’s more efficient and easier to use those tools through ClickUp rather than constantly switching between platforms.
What is your vision for the future of humans and AI collaborating together?
Our mission from day one has always been to save time. Time really is our only finite resource. We don’t need to ask our colleagues to schedule a meeting, or for a progress report on a project, or if we have the next holiday off. These are tasks for AI, and this is stuff that AI can do today.
And as for the future, I believe we’ll see incredible productivity gains that enable humans to do so much more with the very limited time we have. I want people to spend their energy on their most creative and stimulating work, and have more time to spend with their loved ones or on their passions outside of work.
Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit ClickUp.
