San Francisco is well known for being the number one area for tech development, but groundbreaking innovation doesn’t just come from nowhere. The most important asset of any company is its people, and nine Bay Area industry leaders know that looking after their employees is the only way to foster growth and success.
According to the 2021 Diversity in Tech report from mthree, over 50 percent of 18 to 28 year olds in the United States have left or wanted to leave a tech job because the workplace culture made them uncomfortable. Furthemore, just 24 percent stated that they felt welcomed by their colleagues. So what should tech companies be doing to improve their workplace culture for employees?
Aditya Vaidyanathan, a product manager at NEXT Insurance, understands that getting people involved in decision-making helps foster inclusivity, transparency and empowerment from the top down — something management at his company has prioritized. “Leadership at NEXT takes employee feedback very seriously and ensures that changes are implemented where needed and celebrated where things are great,” he said. “People at all levels are encouraged to contribute to the culture which helps create a sense of ownership and belonging.”
In a fast-growing tech environment like San Francisco, prioritizing the happiness and wellbeing of employees is an essential move to set a company apart. Built In sat down with nine industry leaders across the Bay Area to discuss their unique company cultures and how they maintain them — and they’re all hiring!
What’s one thing that makes your company culture unique or special?
One of my favorite PitchBook values is “Make it Fun.” With that in mind, our company provides excellent opportunities for us to bond with coworkers and clients. While most of our client events were paused due to the Covid-19 pandemic, we were lucky enough to successfully host our annual PitchBook golf tournament at the Half Moon Bay Golf Links in September 2021. It was so refreshing to have the opportunity to connect with clients over a few rounds of golf and enjoy the sunny weather, especially after a year and a half of not being able to meet up! PitchBook also recently partnered with professional golfer and Angel investor Michelle Wie West, who attended the tournament. It was so fun to see her chat with our team and clients about investing.
To conclude the event, we hosted a dinner where we rewarded the tournament winners by having PitchBook match their donation to a charity of their choice. It was a great day to reconnect with our clients and teammates on a deeper level — it significantly improved my understanding of our clients’ businesses and we all had a great time on the course!
I love that I always have unique opportunities to learn.”
What’s one company resource, program or benefit that has really enhanced your experience as an employee?
PitchBook is a sponsor of Women in Sales Everywhere, an organization focused on developing female sales leaders. I was offered the opportunity to join the WISE community in 2021, allowing me to participate in networking events and mentoring opportunities. One of the coolest things was to see our own San Francisco-based female sales leaders — shout out to Jorja Palmer and Stephanie Dewald — host panels on interesting and complex topics like “Learning to Manage Up and Communicating with Leaders” or “How to Own Your Mistakes.” It was great to see them share learnings and insights with leaders from other tech sales organizations. As a new team lead, I love that I always have unique opportunities to learn and I can’t wait to see how we incorporate other leadership best practices in our own teams at PitchBook.
What’s one thing that makes your company culture unique or special?
One of the great things about working at NEXT Insurance is that you’re constantly setting very ambitious goals and doing your best to achieve them, but amidst all those goals is a central focus on people and ensuring that they enjoy working here. A clear example of this is that one of our company goals and part of our mission is to be the best place to work. We set OKRs against this and measure how we’re doing to ensure that we are consistently improving. Leadership takes employee feedback very seriously and ensures that changes are implemented where needed and celebrated where things are great. People at all levels are encouraged to contribute to the culture which helps create a sense of ownership and belonging. A diverse range of opinions is valued and sought out in order to make NEXT a great place to work.
Leadership takes employee feedback very seriously and ensures that changes are implemented.”
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently and what did you enjoy most about it?
Insurance is a very complex and nuanced area. One of the biggest challenges we face is translating this nuanced and often technical language of policy coverages, exclusions and other details into something that users can easily understand — what they’re buying, when and how it’ll help them, and when it won’t. I’ve recently been working on a number of initiatives to increase the transparency of our products and set a new industry standard in the confidence users feel when purchasing with us. We’re doing this at every stage of the purchasing process as well as after they’ve purchased and become our customers. Helping entrepreneurs thrive is at the core of everything we do at NEXT and we hope that these initiatives help small businesses find and buy the right coverages with confidence.
What’s one thing that makes your company culture unique or special?
Employees at Notion are very friendly — they embrace their own quirks and are unafraid to be themselves. One place where everyone feels at ease is during our product biweekly meetings, which may seem like it would be a very formal setting since important people like the CTO are there, but it’s actually a very open and inclusive environment where everyone is encouraged to participate. Everyone gets a chance to showcase what they’ve worked on and who they are, even sometimes showcasing something unrelated to work!
Everyone at Notion is very friendly with their own quirks — we are unafraid to be ourselves.”
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently and what did you enjoy most about it?
One of the most interesting things about my work at Notion is dealing with a graph dataset. This is a unique aspect of how things like documents are stored in Notion. Working with a graph dataset and using big data tooling like Spark or Snowflake comes with some interesting challenges because most of these tools aren’t built for this kind of data — we’re harnessing the power of these tools in new ways. Working on something like this guarantees that there’s always something new to learn and it means that there are a lot of unique challenges to explore and overcome.
What’s one thing that makes your company culture unique or special?
The thing that makes Crunchbase unique is our culture of transparency and trust. This is true all the way from the top, with our CEO candidly sharing company status, vision and strategy data in town halls, to the team level where we have open discussions about challenges and successes. When the entire team is open and all voices are heard, I personally feel more open as well. I feel I can trust my coworkers to have the company’s best interests in mind and trust them to listen to my ideas with an open mind.
I love forums where we all sit together to evaluate ideas and suggestions. In an open environment, we can truly discuss technical and business trade-offs, knowing that all ideas are valuable and any concerns that are raised are contributing to a better overall solution. We often come out of these discussions with a much better idea of how to tackle a problem than we had when we walked into the meeting.
When everyone is growing and learning new things around you, you also grow a lot more.”
What’s one company resource, program or benefit that has really enhanced your experience as an employee?
One of the benefits I find great at Crunchbase is the yearly employee learning and development budget. This is a $3000 annual stipend that employees can expense towards any activity that supports them in developing their craft. This not only allows us to invest in our skills and growth, but also encourages shared learning between team members when someone learns something new. When everyone is growing and learning new things around you, you also grow a lot more.
What’s one thing that makes your company culture unique or special?
Every day is a new and exciting one at Upland. The company prides itself on celebrating every impact that has been created by collaborative teams across all departments. Though speed to market is a key value of the culture, it’s not without the encouragement of employees who humbly champion each other. Teamwork is an essential part of the Upland culture. Recently we’ve been creating strategic campaigns for our NFLPA partnership and it has truly been a team effort to layer knowledge on football and the players, marketing tactics, product design, creative design and paid campaigns to generate success. We couldn’t have achieved this success without everyone coming to the table to share knowledge and champion each other’s efforts.
We couldn’t have achieved this success without everyone coming to the table to share knowledge and champion each other’s efforts.”
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently and what did you enjoy most about it?
City releases are really fun projects to encourage Uplanders to mint properties. Bringing the diversity, culture and city to our community to help users realize the real life value of each digital property has been personally and professionally rewarding. As we continue to open cities worldwide, this level of in-depth knowledge about different regions makes Upland employees and players well informed about diversity, cultures, localized information and geographical awareness. This is the first truly global company with whom I’ve had the privilege to work.
What’s one thing that makes your company culture unique or special?
It’s hard to pin down just one thing that makes Moov’s culture special, but being 100 percent remote with a flexible work schedule sits near the top of the list. Because we started in a post-pandemic world, we’ve embraced remote work from the beginning, but this doesn’t automatically create a culture — in fact, it can quickly kill it. But with Moov, our leadership deliberately flipped the paradigm and organically integrated the remote-first culture into every fiber of our being.
Because of our values like radical transparency and reciprocated trust, Moovers thrive regardless of where they live. Every part of the business happens in the open. We share gratitude, solve problems, assuage disagreements and make major company decisions in real-time in our company-wide Slack channels. At first, it felt a little overwhelming to be included in everything, but I quickly realized how great it feels to be involved in all facets of the business. Instead of keeping discussions private, anyone can hop into another team’s channel and ask questions, share ideas or learn about their priorities. It shows how much Moov values our expertise and feedback on anything, not just the topics pertaining to our specific roles or team.
Moov values our expertise and feedback on anything, not just the topics pertaining to our specific roles or team.”
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently and what did you enjoy most about it?
I think everyone at Moov views work as one long amazing project. Everything we do ties back to our purpose of building the best payment user experience from the ground up. We’re actually changing the payments industry and having spent my entire career in this field, I know what a feat that is.
The things I love most about this company-wide endeavor are the people I get to work with and what it means when we succeed. I’m surrounded by a team that believes in our vision and understands the significance of our work. It means we get to experiment together and never take shortcuts. Sure, it’s hard work, but by making money movement dead simple, we can let our customers focus on transforming their respective industries. Every day at Moov, I feel reinvigorated by my teammates’ ability to constantly challenge the status quo in the industry and push back on legacy thinking. It makes each workday feel incredibly rewarding.
What’s one thing that makes your company culture unique or special?
The culture at Doorvest is phenomenal, and the company really does put the people first. Some companies use the term people-first as a tagline, but Doorvest shows its commitment to this by constantly supporting professional growth internally and keeping an open door policy that isn’t only about operations. It feels like a team working towards a championship, rather than just a group of people who just work together.
The company really does put the people first.”
What’s one company resource, program or benefit that has really enhanced your experience as an employee?
The benefit that has most enhanced my experience as an employee is the time arranged to enjoy and get to know each other. Doorvest creates a community in Slack where we have different interests and everyone can share their thoughts, opinions and findings. Just imagine being in a product meeting, trying to figure out how to launch our next feature, and then immediately continuing a conversation about anime with that same group of people. The family and community culture makes the stress of work feel minimal.
What’s one thing that makes your company culture unique or special?
Publica is full of egoless, kind and passionate humans who consistently think outside of the tech box to innovate for our partners. This means cross departmental collaboration is critical and it’s a dance that the company does incredibly well. The engineering and product teams work in tandem with technical account managers and business development leads to continue to support the streaming ecosystem for content owners. This has been one of my favorite things to be a part of and build on.
I love watching major content owners try our tech and fall in love with how well we support their nuanced business.”
What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on recently and what did you enjoy most about it?
I am admittedly biased but I think the Publica technology solution is one of the coolest projects I have ever worked on. I find sheer joy in educating the adtech market and community about our solution, which is the only independent, or demand agnostic, tech that can build the right ad break for content owners, from stitching the ads into the stream to leveraging audience data to drive revenue and manage across direct, PGs and PMPs. I love watching major content owners try our tech and fall in love with how well we support their nuanced business. Just when they think we can’t top it, we go and provide the most white gloved customer service experience that will dig into issues beyond the Publica workflow to support our partners.
It’s extremely thrilling and we are just getting started!
