The pandemic has shown that perks and pay can only motivate employees so much. Tech workers want to know that the hours they’re putting in from home are going toward something more than a paycheck and a shoutout in the company Slack channel. That’s just one reason people gravitate toward mission-driven businesses, whose purpose involves solving major technical challenges in addition to turning a profit.
Fortunately, there are quite a few Bay Area companies hiring that offer the opportunity to do work that matters. We’re taking a closer look at two of them here: emerging e-commerce force Grove Collaborative and AI-innovators Moveworks. Continue reading to learn more about the missions that have attracted some of the Bay Area’s top talent to these companies.
The Company: Grove Collaborative is an e-commerce company specializing in sustainable and natural cleaning, health and wellness, and beauty products. Consumers can either place one-off orders or schedule monthly shipments. And in addition to carrying brands like Mrs. Meyer’s, Burt’s Bees and Seventh Generation, the company also sells products from its Grove Co. brand.
The surge in online shopping created by the pandemic and an increased demand by consumers for sustainable products has helped push Grove to new heights. The company attained unicorn status this past December after closing a $125 million funding round. Grove was launched as a Certified B Corporation and recently announced that it was converting to a public benefit corporation, following in the footsteps of companies like Patagonia, Ben and Jerry’s and Kickstarter.
Their Mission: Grove Collaborative is on a mission to help people lead healthier lives and reduce their waste. The first part of this mission is accomplished through Grove’s sourcing of natural and non-toxic ingredients, both in its partner products and its own. When it comes to reducing waste, the emphasis is on completely cutting plastic out of its products.
Grove’s goal is to gradually replace the plastic in its products with glass and aluminum and to be entirely plastic-free by 2025. In the meantime, the company has gone plastic-neutral. For every ounce of plastic it sells, it removes an ounce of plastic from an ocean-bound waterway and recycles it.
A lot of the talented people we’ve been able to attract only work at Grove because they believe in the mission.”
Hear It From the CEO: Grove CEO and founder Stuart Landesberg sat down for an interview with Forbes last summer and dove deep into his company’s mission and vision.
“The company’s mission statement is to help all families create a home that reflects the best of themselves,” Landesberg told Forbes. “We do that by making it easy to find home and personal care products that are good for you and the planet. We never sell out our values in terms of curation.”
Part of the $125 million Grove recently raised is earmarked for hiring. The company currently has 31 open roles on Built In San Francisco, and Landesberg told Forbes he’s counting on Grove’s mission to give it an edge in recruiting top talent.
“A lot of the talented people we’ve been able to attract only work at Grove because they believe in the mission,” Landesberg told Forbes. “If people are the number one determinant of success in business, a strong mission is the number one determinant of getting the best people.”
The Company: Enterprise IT teams have much better things to do than access software licenses, reset passwords and unlock accounts. That’s why Moveworks has developed an AI-powered chatbot that helps employees resolve these and other simple IT issues without having to get an actual human involved.
This automation is made possible by the combination of a conversational interface and natural language understanding that enables employees to chat with Moveworks’ AI just like they would with a human colleague. According to the company, its AI has been trained on 100 million service tickets, making it able to not only resolve IT issues but also questions directed at HR, finance and facilities management teams.
Their Mission: Moveworks’ mission is to revolutionize how companies support their employees. To accomplish that goal, the team has been developing advanced chatbots that seamlessly integrate into existing employee communication tools, like Slack. Ivy Wang, head of product design and research, spoke with Built In this past September about “Channel Resolver,” a Slackbot that automatically resolves tickets posted into an IT support channel.
Along with resolving IT tickets, the platform also recently rolled out support for employee communications. Instead of flooding employees with emails, an AI-powered chatbot can reach people where they are — on Slack, Microsoft Teams or another chat app — with questions and reminders related to benefits enrollment, setting up two-factor authentication, software license use, and more.
Moveworks’ purpose to reimagine the employee experience using NLU-based system is both clear and ambitious.”
From the Head of Data Science and Engineering: Prior to joining Moveworks in January 2020, Jitender Aswani, head of data science and engineering, held leadership roles at Netflix, Facebook and SAP. While Aswani could have taken his talents anywhere in the Bay Area (and beyond), he wrote in a Medium post that Moveworks’ mission is a big part of what drew him to the company.
“I was seeking a startup that had clarity in its purpose, believed in developing a product that truly delighted its users and had assembled a group of people who are simply inspirational,” Aswani wrote. “I found these three key forces — purpose, product and people — operating in perfect harmony at Moveworks. Moveworks’s purpose to reimagine the employee experience using NLU-based system is both clear and ambitious.”
Moveworks currently has 21 open roles on Built In San Francisco, and according to Aswani, mission-driven technologists looking for their next opportunity need look no further.
“I truly believe that Moveworks is a once-in-a-generation opportunity for its investors and employees alike,” Aswani wrote.
