It’s admirable when a company has a clear mission statement — especially when it involves making the world a better place. But for some companies, that’s all it is: a statement. The following NYC tech companies have been dedicated to making their mission statements drive their entire business and culture.
Since 2011, Codecademy has been on a mission to provide interactive coding courses for over 45 million people. Curriculum Developer Laura Breiman explained how the company’s mission drives the business.
What are your company’s values?
Our values include teamwork, transparency, feedback and evolution. Evolution speaks to me the most. We describe it as helping each other get better by doing the same things our learners do: teach and learn.
How has your company embodied these values?
As curriculum developers, we aren't always experts on the material we teach, so we rely on each other a lot as teachers. When I'm first starting to research a course, the first people I go to are the people on my team who know the content the best. My first big course was on Matplotlib, a graphing package in Python. Our Head of Data Science Hillary uses Matplotlib often in her work, and taught me everything about how it is used and when it is most powerful. As I learn more and more about Matplotlib and data science, I often go back to that first course I wrote and massage the concepts and add more pertinent examples. Because our courses are living and breathing online, we can always be iterating on them and improving them.
Security company White Ops is on a mission to prevent online fraud. Director of Business Development Maria Martinez Diaz, who has been with the company for two years, explains what the company’s values are and how they follow through on them.
What are your company’s values?
We have a big mission: to defend the internet from the dark forces of malicious bots. To achieve it, our five core values have one common thread: service. Whether it be to our colleagues, our clients or the larger ecosystem, service comes first. To deliver great service, you need to be a hacker, empower others, practice humility, deliver on promises and be good.
How has your company embodied these values?
Every day I see my colleagues embody our values but never as fully as the day we took down the MethBot. MethBot was a “bot farm” generating about $4 million in fraudulent revenue per day by targeting premium video advertising. After weeks of research, White Ops had found a kill switch — a list of IPs that needed to be blocked. This left us with two choices: Keep the information to ourselves and protect only our customers, or share our intel and take the botnet down with a coordinated action across the industry. We chose the latter.
Marketing Coordinator Stephanie Ahwireng has been with healthtech company Zipari for 7 months. During that time, she’s learned how the company practices what it preaches.
What are your company’s values?
Zipari strongly values our team and culture, and provides many opportunities for the team to socialize and grow stronger. Our annual Zipari Day, held on our company’s anniversary, is a time to celebrate achievements and acknowledge how far the team has come. Team members are able to nominate each other for awards and share memorable moments from the year. The celebration is rounded out with a party complete with food, drinks and a souvenir for all.
How has your company embodied these values?
The social events extend beyond company-organized events to informal outings organized by the team. It's not uncommon for everyone to go out rock climbing at the beginning and end of each week, or to sing karaoke after our weekly townhall meeting. The best part about our team outings is that different team members organize the outings and they're open to all who want to join. This has been a great way for employees to meet others throughout the organization that they don't work with directly.
Brett Podolsky co-founded The Farmer's Dog with Jonathan Regev in 2015 after his dog's stomach problems illustrated the power fresh food has on health. Ever since, he’s been dedicated to providing pets with authentic, fresh food. He explained to us how the company has embodied these values.
What are your company’s values?
The Farmer's Dog places authenticity above all else. Unlike many other pet food companies, we actually do what we say we do. Our food is human quality, fresh and devoid of any marketing fluff. We never have to rely on false marketing, because our food is fresh and actually looks and smells like real food in your dog's bowl.
How has your company embodied these values?
We embody authenticity in every interaction we have with our customers, and in our food itself. You can identify every single ingredient in our meals (turkey, parsnips, broccoli, carrots, etc.), because we only use real, whole foods. And when it comes to dog food, we're an open book. Our customer experience team is always available to talk through every aspect of our food and service, and we keep pet owners educated about their dogs' health.
Director of Communications Katie Ullmann has been with Dandelion Energy since it was launched in 2017. The heating and cooling company has established a number of values that drive its brand. She explained how the mission is present in everything the team does.
What are your company’s values?
Two of Dandelion’s core values are to be data-driven and strive for simplicity.
How has your company embodied these values?
Dandelion embodied these values when developing and launching our newest product, Dandelion Air. Dandelion Air is a renewable home heating and air conditioning system. When making product decisions, our team asked, ‘Does the data show that this feature will make a difference in a homeowner’s ability to save money switching to Dandelion? Does data show this feature will reduce time or pain for people to install and maintain the system?’ Using these questions as guidelines, we put all the essential features together into one simple, lightweight unit that is still over four times more efficient than any furnace on the market and two times more efficient than conventional air conditioning systems. The product represents our team values and makes it easy for our team to sell.
Jon Staff co-founded Getaway in 2015 as a way to provide escapes for people looking for serenity. He talked to us about how the company incorporates its values into everything it does.
What are your company’s values?
We value building balance and striving for excellence. We embrace simplicity, obsess over details, "slay our worsts" and avoid being “weasels” — which essentially means not taking any shortcuts and doing things from an honest place. We're committed to working differently — drawing clear lines of distinction between work and leisure, which is also core to our product and experience of Getaway.
How has your company embodied these values?
As a startup, there's always an endless amount of work to do, but we're strict about enforcing our mandatory vacation policy: 20 days off, plus 10 holidays. When you're off, you’re expected to be truly off unless it’s an emergency. Each employee is also required to go on Getaways themselves to learn from — but also to enjoy — the benefits of nature and disconnecting.
We strive to protect deep work time from distractions as much as we try to ensure that off-time, or life outside of work, is equally protected from work spilling into it. To do this well requires a lot of transparent communication — notes are sent out to the company after each meeting, and we are rigorous about keeping lists on how we could do better, analyze trends and confront our weaknesses head-on. Every week, we have a team meeting where we review guest feedback and nominate our "worsts." We then put them up on a highly visible board until we've solved the issue. Striving for balance while striving for excellence is a tricky act that requires focus and reflection.
