9y
Thank you so much for taking the time to share input on your experience.
I want to take a few minutes to comment on the post to share my point of view. I want to continue to do a better job of being transparent with potential teammates about our philosophy at Gainsight. I don't believe in selling people on working at Gainsight. Instead, I aspire to be as clear as possible about what it's like to work here so teammates to whom our style appeals will join us.
For some historical context:
* Not everyone knows this but we were founded originally (before my time) in Hyderabad, India and St. Louis, MO
* In particular, our co-founder and still VP Engineering is in Hyderabad
* As such, we have always been a global company from day 1
* Due to this, when I came in (February 2013), I leaned into that and embraced the idea that we want people to be able to work from wherever they want to
* As such, we have 6 offices today (Hyderabad, Bangalore, St. Louis, Phoenix, Redwood Shores and San Francisco)
* We also have dozens of people who work from home (Florida, North Carolina, Boston, New York, Austin, Portland, New Jersey, ...)
Some of this comes down to my personal beliefs:
* I believe great people are scattered all around the world and we have an opportunity to build a world-class company by being flexible
* Commuting is a major work-life balance impediment so we try to make it very acceptable to work from home (whether you have an office near or not)
* In my informal conversations with teammates, this flexibility is a widely cited benefit of working at Gainsight
In terms of our engineering strategy:
* Per above, we've always had 100% of engineering in India
* I worry about splitting teams up due to the loss of efficiency (e.g., I think many companies do "multi-country" development poorly)
* We are definitely not in India because of cost; in fact, our R&D spend as a % of revenue is far above our peers at our stage; we believe in building a sophisticated product and are investing to make that happen (and I think the poster observed the results of that in terms of our product leadership)
* In my almost 20-year career of managing thousands of people, I've never worked with a more customer-focused, innovative and responsive engineering team in my life than I see from our team at Gainsight
In terms of culture:
* We strongly believe in our 5 values across offices
* However, beyond that, I am against imposing a certain style of culture on everyone
* I fundamentally think life in different places is different
* For example, I'm an NFL football fan (Pittsburgh Steelers!) That might work in Pittsburgh :) but not everyone in the world (or even in the US) is a football fan
* We try to celebrate and recognize each others' cultures instead versus imposing a single culture
* We believe phrases like "cultural fit" are often unintentional code for bias
* We vehemently believe in diversity (as a part of our company value Shoshin - Beginners' Mind)
In terms of work/life balance as a result:
* This is an important point
* I think this is one of the downsides to the model we have
* However, I know we can do more to ameliorate this (in terms of better planning, async tools, etc.)
* Your post has inspired us to focus more on this
I'm a big believer that you have to build the company that's right for you and your team and not assume your company is right for everyone. As such, I don't push our model on others or assume it's the right one universally. However, I will say that more and more companies are trending toward a distributed workforce (for reasons above), so the skill-set of working in a distributed model is valuable on its own. You definitely learn that at Gainsight.
Thank you so much for the excellent input and for the dialog it spurred!
