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Home > Swisspreneur Show > EP #272 - Raphael Schaad: The Next-Gen Calendar For Professionals And Teams
Podcast: Swisspreneur Show
Episode:

EP #272 - Raphael Schaad: The Next-Gen Calendar For Professionals And Teams
Category: Business
Duration: 01:06:03
Publish Date: 2022-11-02 10:26:28
Description:

Timestamps:

6:38 - Working for Flipboard in 2011

18:16 - Hacking a calendar extension

22:51 - Getting into Y Combinator

39:00 - The “Batman” life of solo founders

56:58 - Getting acquired by Notion


About Raphael Schaad:

Raphael Schaad is the founder and CEO at Cron, a next gen calendar software. Raphael holds a bachelors’ degree in Software Engineering from Gibb Berufsfachschule Bern, previously worked at Flipboard and was previously a researcher at the MIT Media Lab.

He started working for Flipboard back in 2011, which meant moving to Palo Alto. Raphael remembers that back then, Apple was still a much smaller player than Microsoft, Steve Jobs was still alive (and lived on the same block as Raphael), and the Facebook team still operated from within the Stanford campus. The tech scene, in general, was a whole lot smaller.

Early on in his professional life, Raphael noticed that all the high achievers around him were religious about their calendars, but never fully satisfied with the software calendar they used, and tried to compensate for this by adding extensions from third party apps. Apple, Microsoft, Google... They all fell short, and companies like Calendly seemed more like a calendar feature than a calendar itself. So Raphael got to hacking some calendars and building something which worked for him holistically, and nowadays Cron includes features like availability sharing, team overlays, time zones, multiple accounts, a menu bar calendar, multi-select flows, keyboard shortcuts, and light/dark modes.

They participated in Y Combinator in Winter 2020, and though the experience was cut short by COVID (canceling their demo day), Raphael still benefited from it by being forced to get down to business for (nearly) 10 weeks straight with like-minded individuals. Cron was then launched on stealth mode, both because they wanted to optimize for learning and because they had already gathered a very long waiting list from initial word of mouth success.

Cron raised $3.5M in a seed round in April 2020 and was acquired by Notion in 2022. It has yet to leave stealth mode. Head over to their website to sign up for early access.


Memorable Quotes:

"Knowing that Steve Jobs lived on the same block as me definitely infused me with an adventurous energy that was very special, back then."

"All the high-achievers were religious about their calendars, but they all complained about their calendar software."

"Participating in Y Combinator means, in all likelihood, sitting in the same room as 5 unicorns and the next Mark Zuckerberg."


Resources Mentioned:

Twitter thread


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