ClickUp is a San Diego company founded by Zeb Evans, and the startup recently had a billboard in New York City’s Times Square
At surface level, workplace productivity software company ClickUp’s startup story sounds like countless others—a college student drops out, learns to code, moves to the Bay Area, and finds success. But founder Zeb Evans’s path to productivity (and to San Diego) was filled with twists, turns, and life-altering experiences that came very close to cutting his life short.
Evans always had an entrepreneurial spirit, but it kicked into high gear while he was a student at Virginia Tech after a burglar held him at gunpoint. He says that traumatic event led him to reexamine his career path.
“Entrepreneurship is about doing things yourself, and I couldn’t help but feel that I was wasting a lot of time when I was in college,” he says.
He put his studies on hold and launched a social media marketing business. A couple years later, he and two employees headed out west to try to make it big. Another brush with death—this time an unprovoked seizure-like episode—caused him to reevaluate his life yet again.
“I realized that that business I created wasn’t really adding net positive value to the world,” Evans says. “I really wanted to do something that left the world a better place. And we basically were inflating people’s egos on social media.”
He and his business partners didn’t have to look far. As it turned out, the side project they’d developed to whittle down the number of apps their team used could also help other businesses improve their efficiency. That all-in-one platform became ClickUp, which aims to consolidate everything employees need to communicate and collaborate—chat, spreadsheets, documents, account and project management, and marketing tools—into one streamlined service. Their goal was to build flexible, customizable software that works for every type of business and allows users to keep all their work in one place. Their motto: “One app to replace them all.”
“The problem we were solving was actually a much bigger problem,” Evans says: “There was software overload, particularly in the productivity category.”
Moving on to bigger and better things also meant a move to San Diego, in 2019. “I always wanted to be in Silicon Valley,” Evans says. “It was great starting out there, for sure, but it wasn’t the California I was looking for.” The cloud computing company recently moved into an East Village high-rise adjacent to Petco Park, secured $400 million in series C funding, and reached a $4 billion valuation. Its staff has grown to around 800, and the ClickUp platform is used by teams at Google, IBM, McDonald’s, and the San Diego Padres organization.
Evans and the ClickUp team are celebrating the wins, but the goalposts are always moving. They’re planning to spend the next year expanding the company even further and scaling the software for use by larger teams while staying true to the company’s mission to save people time and make the world more productive.
“Time, I learned through those near-death experiences, is the most valuable thing in the world,” he says. “It’s the only thing that is completely priceless and that we don’t get more of. You have to be intentional about every minute.”
