Two years ago, when I pitched SpatzAI fair play for teams to an investor from Atlassian Ventures, he listened carefully, smiled, and said something that stuck:
“Managers might start getting pushback from their teams.”
In other words, managers are not going to like this. He wasn’t exactly wrong, and that’s why my pitch doesn’t fit the usual narrative and I am continuing to refine it.
Most investors, like most consultants, still focus on leaders as the heroes of workplace change. They’re the target market, they hold the budgets, and they sign the deals. So even when an idea is designed to empower teams to self-manage micro-conflicts (bypassing managers) and hold each other accountable, it can sound a little threatening to the traditional hierarchy and market positioning.
The irony is that SpatzAI could actually make a manager’s job easier, not harder. By giving teams a fair, structured way to address minor behavior issues (spats) before they escalate, managers could save up to 25% of their time, that’s time often spent mediating arguments, calming tensions, or writing HR reports.
Managers getting fair pushback from their team members could also be beneficial to the team and organization and ultimately to the managers, if they really want to me objective.
We believe that psychological safety shouldn’t be something leaders “grant” from above; it should be built collectively from within the team. That’s the future I see, one where organized fairness, not hierarchy, keeps teams aligned and behaving well.
Atlassian passed, but that feedback was gold. It confirmed to me that SpatzAI is ahead of its time, built not just to serve leaders, but to balance them. Because when everyone shares the responsibility for fairness, leaders can finally lead without getting bogged down with minor behavior issues between team members.
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