Marketing agencies are typically terrible businesses. Every client you sign, you have to hire a bunch of new people. But with AI, is that all changing? Can you now replace manual human work with AI, and scale clients without scaling headcount alongside them?

That is the bet. Tempa is how we find out.

Since the rise of hybrid work it has become very hard for employers to keep track of who is actually working each day. Are they at home, or are they taking the day off? Leave software was never built for that question, and as a result millions of dollars of leave goes unrecorded every year in Australia. It sits on company balance sheets and gets paid out in cash when the employee leaves.

Muster catches it.

After HotelFlex shut down and the world came out of the pandemic, we made a bet that flexible hybrid working was here to stay, and that Officely was the operating system for running an office that way. Employees book desks and meeting rooms. Employers finally get to see how the space is actually used.

We raised over $2m in venture capital and built a great team. Businesses then wrestled back control, and hybrid work did not stick around in the way we hoped. But we still built a profitable business that I am proud of, and it continues to grow today.

While working in finance and investing in hotels, I noticed that most hotels sit empty during the day. So we built an algorithm that predicted when that was going to happen, and sold those rooms by the hour to other guests.

Now, I know what you are thinking, but no, we did not sell them to hookers. They were mostly business people arriving on early morning flights, and families who wanted one last afternoon by the pool.

It was a good idea. We got funded by Y Combinator and moved the whole team out to San Francisco. The timing was terrible. Covid hit, all our hotels shut for two years, and that was that.