“In a word, describe the people you work with.”
Often utilized during icebreaker events, this quick exercise can offer a fascinating glimpse into a company’s culture by encouraging workers to state simply what matters most to them about their colleagues. In doing so, employees often hit upon a company’s core values and capture the essence of their work environment you’d never read on the official brochure.
For team members at five Seattle companies who were asked to discuss their colleagues, words like “driven,” “collaborative,” “approachable” and “ingenious” came up. These adjectives, though reflective of uniquely engaging work environments, point also to a broader appreciation for unity and passion as tenets of any healthy company culture.
At Violet, that’s certainly been the experience of Samuel Mosley, technical product manager. Though he chose “motivated” as the word that most sums up his colleagues at the fully-remote fintech company, which allows developers to add online shopping features to their platforms, Mosley couldn’t help but throw in three more: empathy, curiosity and transparency.
“Though some people at Violet lean toward certain traits more than others, you still find all of them consistently in every role and person you meet,” he said. “Every person cares about others, wants to learn more and do better, and strives to build clear, transparent relationships.”
Below, Mosley and team members at four other fast-growing, now-hiring companies — Routable, PitchBook, Knock and Wyze — discussed what distinguishes their colleagues and finding their own perfect fit in fast-growing industries.
What they do: Violet’s headless API for e-commerce integrations allows shoppers to buy products directly, in whatever experience developers and app companies decide to build.
Their workforce in a word: Motivated.
Everyone shares the desire to improve the world around them, for customers and within the company. Other traits I look for in colleagues include empathy, curiosity and transparency. Empathy is vital. The ability to understand another’s perspective and how they’re feeling is what will make us ultimately successful, especially when it comes to working with customers. I want to be working with people who know there is always more to learn. I want people around me who ask questions. Transparency, finally, is a big one for me. I like environments with autonomy and trust. Transparency enables both.
Why their industry is so exciting right now: E-commerce has increased significantly in the past few years and is starting to evolve more as we see “e-com” experiences popping up in new formats. I always have to keep in mind that the internet is relatively quite young in the course of history, and it’s also fast-evolving. That rapid pace of development is exciting.
In the past I’ve always looked to reduce user frustration when developing products. A negative experience will often hit 10 times harder and be more memorable than positive ones. When I heard one of Violet’s main objectives was to remove developer frustration from e-commerce integrations, I couldn’t join fast enough. The role of Violet in our industry is to make it as easy as possible to make a purchase from within any e-commerce experience. In that sense, we do the hard stuff so other innovators and entrepreneurs don’t have to. We make it possible for them to focus on their best work.
What they do: B2B payments can become complicated as a company grows, but Routable’s platform seeks to simplify the accounts payable and accounts receivable process, with automation tools that make it easier to invoice and pay bills.
Their workforce in a word: Hyper-collaborative.
I could spend all day complimenting my fellow “Routers.” They’re fun-to-work-with humans who happen to be incredibly good at their jobs. As a remote-native company, Routable has always put an emphasis on finding new ways to collaborate better remotely. Over time, Routers have developed a culture of intentional collaboration, where asking questions is encouraged and helping others is the default. Routers routinely experiment with ways to improve collaboration, from siloed or asynchronous working models to full “mob” sessions where full teams tackle problems together. Routers also know how to turn meaningful collaboration into documentation, so knowledge is shared asynchronously, and they keep it fun by starting meetings or demos with random questions and music.
Growth opportunities: I joined Routable as a senior software engineer, focused on the front end when the entire team was 20 people. A few months later, we split our engineering, product and design teams into pods, and I launched the business automation pod as a tech lead. There, I went deeper into our back end and gained experience shipping massively complex builds. Less than 18 months later, the company has grown 10 times in size. With that growth comes new management challenges and opportunities that I now get to work on as an engineering manager.
What they do: Covering the private and public financial markets, PitchBook is a fintech company that provides comprehensive data and analysis on the capital markets in order to help professionals find opportunities.
Their workforce in a word: Approachable.
As someone fairly new to the team, everyone has been so approachable, making it a comfortable environment in which to ask questions and bounce ideas off each other. You quickly feel like part of the team after joining PitchBook. As we continue to grow our software development team, we are looking for team members who embrace a growth mindset, are excited to learn from opportunities and are willing to solicit feedback. These qualities will not only improve the team but help to advance all of our careers as well.
Growth opportunities: PitchBook is an exciting place to be as we are looking to build new services to scale with our continuous growth and better serve our customers. One of our core values is to embrace and drive change, which offers opportunities for new members to help shape our path forward, from building new products and services to defining new team processes. The software development team focuses on authentication and authorization, making it a fun industry to be in, with standards like Oauth.20 and OpenID Connect to learn and implement. These standards encompass any specific industry. Because we deal with authentication, we are also exposed to the many different applications PitchBook offers to its clients.
What they do: With its software for apartment property managers, Knock partners with leasing teams to reduce spend and improve productivity.
Their workforce in a word: Driven.
Knock has created a culture where everyone really takes ownership over their work and no one hesitates to get into the weeds. Because everyone owns their part of Knock and then works collaboratively together, Knock has built a community where we can work cross-departmentally and depend on our co-workers to bring their best. The excellence of this team is one of the key reasons why I love working for Knock. In potential colleagues, I look for someone who can bring that same energy and is ready to dig in and work toward our shared goals.
Growth opportunities: One element that I’ve always appreciated about Knock is its focus on helping people grow their skill sets and careers. During my time here, I have had the privilege of taking on exciting new challenges and growing in a number of ways. Starting out as an individual contributor and learning the company, the product, the clients and the culture allowed me to start mentoring other Knock employees. This led to growing into a managerial role and helping to develop the next generation of “Knockstars.” I soon discovered that leading a team was a passion of mine, and I wanted to leverage that skill set to help create an environment where people want to come to work every day.
Most recently, I’ve transitioned to professional services from customer success, where I had an adjacent skill set. Knock’s leadership team has given me the opportunity and guidance to grow in a direction that I never expected! I’m learning a new side of the business and helping drive strategy for that. It’s challenging me in ways I didn’t expect and driving me to learn new things on a daily basis. I’m infinitely grateful for the opportunities that Knock has given me to develop as an employee and for the impact that it’s had on my career.
What they do: Wyze’s smart home products incorporate artificial intelligence with everyday users in mind. Consumers can purchase their cameras, fitness trackers, headphones, light strips and so on without breaking the bank.
Their workforce in a word: Ingenious.
My colleagues are so smart that they have empowered these Wyze camera gadgets with AI Brain. They are creative and resourceful, as evidenced by the way they have utilized all this state-of-the-art technology and crafted together something that makes Wyze AI stand out. In considering potential colleagues, I would expect them all to enjoy learning. Wyze is still a very young company; there is so much potential and, of course, many infrastructures still to be built.
Growth opportunities: Before I joined Wyze, I was a graduate student with almost zero real-world software development practice. It has been about one year and a half since I started working here and, during this time, I have successfully built and delivered applications from the ground up that have an impact on millions of users. Career-wise, I have matured from a new graduate to an experienced software engineer with highly sought-after skills, like AWS, ECS, Autoscaling, Lambda, Docker, Jenkins, Terraform, System Design, API Design, etc.
