We started Crystal 3 years ago with a simple truth:
People are wired differently. Your life is much more productive, connected, and rewarding when you stop fighting the differences and learn to adapt to them.
We often refer to these differences as "personality types” or “behavioral styles.” They are as much a part of someone as their hair color or their height, only hard to detect and much harder to understand.
For thousands of years, we’ve tried to organize these behavioral tendencies into models, such as the Big Five, DISC, Enneagram, 16-personality, and others. There’s an entire psychometrics industry entirely devoted to helping people understand themselves and other people in this way.
That industry generates multiple billions of dollars every year because people don’t come with instruction manuals. We’re messy. Unpredictable. Emotional.
But what if everyone made and shared their own handbook? That may be a good start.
So that’s how Crystal was born. We started by analyzing public data to create personality profiles for anyone with a social media presence. Then, we built some tools to help people use that information in their everyday communication:
- A Chrome extension to help people write better emails in Gmail, and research customers on LinkedIn and Salesforce.
- A Calendar integration to help people run better meetings.
- Relationship reports to help colleagues have more productive working relationships.
With those tools, we’ve been able to build a business that helps thousands of people and companies communicate more effectively.
However, we still haven’t achieved the big vision… a handbook for everyone.
Imagine what your professional life would be like if you had better insight into anyone’s core values, their motivations, their behavior, their communication style - the information you need to really get to know someone.
How would your relationship with your boss change? Your employees? How many more people would respond to your emails and how much longer could you hold everyone’s attention in a meeting?
Today, we're announcing a big step in that direction with a $5 Million Series B round of financing (see the press release here). With the support of our partners at Salesforce, HubSpot, Birchmere Ventures, and Falmouth Ventures, we’re investing in our mission to make personality data more open, more useful, and available to anyone.
In addition to the changes we’ve made over the past few months, expect more announcements as we roll out new tools, content, and partnerships. Some of them may simply be novel, but one of them might help you win a client, resolve a conflict, or land a new job.
It’s exciting to see so many amazing people joining us to turn this vision into reality. Thank you for being one of them.
If you haven’t signed up yet, give Crystal a try and let us know what you think.
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