Founders Everywhere: Vanessa Liu and Judith Michelle Williams
Vanessa Liu and Judith Michelle Williams are the co-founders of Sugarwork, enabling enterprises to own their tacit knowledge in order to surface the information people need to work better and faster.
Welcome to Founders Everywhere, where we highlight the incredible people behind the companies we’ve backed at Everywhere Ventures, a global pre-seed fund supported by a community of 500 founders and operators.
Just as a house relies on a strong foundation to support its structure and longevity, organizations depend on institutional knowledge as the bedrock of their operations and success. With baby boomers retiring in droves, the growing prevalence of remote work, and job hopping becoming increasingly common, organizations face the critical challenge of retaining valuable knowledge. Decades of expertise and institutional memory are at risk of being lost, making the preservation and transfer of this knowledge essential for maintaining continuity, fostering innovation, and sustaining organizational growth. Sugarwork is changing the way companies hold onto institutional knowledge by creating a structured process to aggregate tacit knowledge in order to surface the information people need to work better, and faster, whether they are coming, going, changing roles, or changing the business. The platform connects individuals within organizations and leverages generative AI to make the information they share usable and valuable for them and their team.
Co-founders Vanessa Liu and Judith Michelle Williams met at SAP in 2018, where Vanessa was the VP of SAP.iO, their early stage venture capital division, and Judith was SVP of HR and Head of People Sustainability. Through their roles, they collaborated on bringing in diverse founders and vetting HR tech startups, which led to discussions about unmet needs in longevity and knowledge transfer. They teamed up to create Sugarwork, a platform designed to address these gaps to facilitate the seamless transfer and retention of critical organizational knowledge. Their focus is on capturing tacit knowledge—insights that aren't documented anywhere but are gained through years of experience, encompassing best practices, company culture, and the reasoning behind established processes. Their combined expertise in technology and human resources has been instrumental in developing a solution that ensures valuable insights and experiences are preserved, fostering a more efficient and innovative workplace.
Why Sugarwork and why now?
We've been thinking about longevity and aging for a long time, noticing a lack of focus on the workforce's wisdom as baby boomers retire. At SAP, the average employee age is higher than at most tech companies, because it's been around for a while. We saw the challenge of retaining decades of valuable knowledge when people left and that this problem goes well beyond retirees to anyone moving roles. We realized we needed a way to digitally capture and disseminate this expertise, ensuring it benefits not just successors, but the entire organization.
What’s Sugarwork’s North Star?
Our North Star is to enable companies to capture, own, and distribute institutional knowledge in a scalable way. We're focused on ensuring organizations can retain and use expert data. In today's era of generative AI, this expert knowledge is crucial for training LLMs. We serve as the knowledge infrastructure for companies, ensuring they preserve the critical information held by long-term employees, subject matter experts, and key stakeholders, which is fundamental for their success.
What sets Sugarwork apart?
We understand human nature and the importance of tacit knowledge. Our backgrounds in large organizations give us first-hand experience with this problem. We emphasize the human aspect in knowledge transfer, creating environments where employees are motivated to share their expertise. Many technologies create deeper silos of information, but our platform extracts insights from various conversations and generates distinctive and meaningful outputs, like transition guides, process documentation, and customer insights, which are beneficial across the organization.
How does Sugarwork inspire “customer love”?
We have a very customer-first approach, everything is geared toward making sure that customers get what they need, because we think that what we are doing is so fundamental to the success of their companies. We're targeting mid-cap and enterprise companies, focusing on those facing large retirements, restructurings, or lacking documented processes. Customers appreciate our ability to save time and mitigate risks during transitions. We recently helped a company called Appen save four to six weeks of onboarding time during a major restructuring, demonstrating a clear ROI.
Any favorite book recommendations?
Vanessa: I'm reading a book called Red Helicopter, by one of our advisors and investors James Rhee. He is Korean American and shares his experiences as the former CEO of Ashley Stewart. The book highlights the power of kindness in business, intertwined with practical insights from the world of mathematics. It's a very uplifting parable and fantastic read.
Judith: I’ve been enjoying The Jazz of Physics: The Secret Link Between Music and the Structure of the Universe by Stephon Alexander. I’m interested in physics and it's fascinating because the author is a jazz musician and a theoretical physicist and he uses jazz as a metaphor to help you understand physics more deeply.
Fun facts:
Vanessa: I learned how to do ab rollouts from Jackie Chan.
Judith: I play the mandolin, and I travel with one everywhere I go.
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