What makes an employer stand out from the rest as a truly great place to work?
Tech in Motion has heard from tech employees at companies in the Bay Area to find out. We asked the community to tell us what makes their place of work "the best" for our Annual Timmy Awards, where we recognize the top startups, managers and employers in 2020. These companies highlighted a range of amazing perks and benefits that definitely stand out, but more importantly, they also go above and beyond to ensure that their work cultures are creative, inclusive, and rewarding for their tech teams.
Continue on to see which companies made the list and what makes them "award-worthy" - and one of the best places to work for tech professionals.
The Bay Area's Best Places to Work
Tray.io
At a Glance:
Tray.io was founded by three friends who wanted to solve for their most pressing work issues as engineers. Tray.io provides a powerful platform that anyone can use to automate complex processes and connect their entire cloud stack without having to write a single line of code. Companies such as IBM, GitHub, Forbes, Lyft and Digital Ocean currently use Tray.io to automate and connect data flow between commonly used tools.
Top Perks, Benefits or Stand Outs:
Amazing work culture, fast growing company, strong leadership.
What Employees are Saying:
“I have worked at other startups in SF before, and met a lot of founders and leadership. Never have I met a more humble, brilliant, people-minded management team. Their leadership comes from a place of empathy and openness, and everything they do is done with humor. This trickles down to every facet of the company, which makes the team as a whole a pleasure to be around.”
Coding Dojo
At a Glance:
Coding Dojo is a coding bootcamp that stands out from the rest. They strongly believe in "learning by doing" and provide ample opportunities to practice and hone in their students' skills. They pride themselves on building a strong team and a great team culture.
Top Perks, Benefits or Stand Outs:
Learning opportunities, supportive environment
What Employees are Saying:
"You learn a lot working here. I learned more here in six months than I did in two years at previous companies. Here, mistakes are okay. Failure is seen as a valuable learning experience. Asking questions is encouraged."
Retail Zipline
At a Glance:
Retail Zipline is the leading communication and execution platform for retailers. It was inspired by CEO Melissa Wong’s first-hand experience facing communication challenges while working at Gap Inc. over a decade ago. At the time, retail executives and store associates alike were facing a big challenge: no effective communication method existed beyond the usual mix of emails, faxes, and bulletin boards. In 2014, Melissa built a solution that would help HQ streamline their communications all the way to the sales floor: Retail Zipline. The platform empowers retail managers and associates distributed across different store regions to coordinate tasks and maintain effective communications.
Top Perks, Benefits or Stand Outs:
100% remote workforce, flexible hours, staff bonding opportunities including team retreats
What Employees are Saying:
“Like our customers, Zipline wants employees to be successful. The benefit of working remotely is the flexibility. If you're at the stage in your life where you want to travel and live in different cities...you can. If you're at the stage where you want to have time to attend you child's school events...you can. As long as you can get your job done, where you work and when you work has flexibility.”
Reflektive
At a Glance:
Reflektive provides a platform that is helping companies provide their employees with performance feedback so that they are empowered to do their best work. The platform provides real-time performance management and solutions for HR leaders at more than 500 companies worldwide.
Top Perks, Benefits or Stand Outs:
Transparent leadership, flexible hours, focus on diversity and mental health awareness
What Employees are Saying:
“Literally, ever since I flew out to SFO for my final round of interviews, saw the office and met everyone in person, Reflektive has blown away my expectations at every step of the process pre-employment and beyond. Seriously, a company to keep your eye on for your next step in your career.”
N3TWORK, Inc.
At a Glance:
N3TWORK, Inc. is a mobile game publisher with a diverse group of talented people creating groundbreaking interactive experiences and services with an aspiration to excite their players and partners. They place high value on delighting their customers, thinking of their customers not only as players, but also as co-workers and peers. Framing their decisions and actions through this lens has a positive knock-on effect in their day-to-day interactions and enables them to create even better products than if they were created in a developmental silo.
Top Perks, Benefits or Stand Outs:
Focus on team bonding and support
What Employees are Saying:
“We operate with a start-up mindset, pioneering and exploring new and emerging business models to stay at the forefront of innovation, and we're only able to do that because of the culture we've created, to bring curious, tenacious, and good people to N3TWORK.”
Modern Health
At a Glance:
Modern Health is the fastest growing mental wellness platform that combines clinically validated assessments, personalized stress management support, an international network of certified behavioral health coaches, and licensed therapists to deliver mental health support across a broad range of individual needs. Modern Health empowers employers to lead the charge in acknowledging that mental health is just as important as physical health, destigmatizing coaching and therapy while increasing accessibility of mental health services for all.
Top Perks, Benefits or Stand Outs:
Diverse team, making a positive impact
What Employees are Saying:
“I've never been part of such a hardworking, supportive, and dedicated team! Everyone is passionate about what we're doing and works really hard towards our mission. You have the opportunity to make an impact and learn a lot in the process. We also have great benefits, and a strong leadership team in place who is transparent and sets clear goals. So happy to be here!”
MemSQL
At a Glance:
MemSQL is The Database of Now, powering modern applications and analytical systems with a cloud-native, massively scalable architecture. MemSQL delivers maximum ingest, accelerated transaction processing and blisteringly fast query performance, including AI integration and machine learning models, all at the highest concurrency. Global enterprises use the MemSQL distributed database to easily ingest, process, analyze and act on data, to thrive in today’s insight-driven economy.
Top Perks, Benefits or Stand Outs:
Diverse and collaborative team
What Employees are Saying:
“There are few opportunities to work at startups like MemSQL. Here there is a maniacal focus on building a strong, well managed, and operationally efficient business that still maintains the innovation obsession you expect in a startup culture.”
Mammoth Biosciences
At a Glance:
Mammoth Biosciences is making diagnostics more accessible to help combat disease and improve health. Even before this current pandemic, Mammoth had been working on a programmable platform for the quick detection of diseases using CRISPR technology. Mammoth’s DETECTR platform acts as a search engine for biology, in that it can search and find nucleic acids in the genome that are indicative of disease. With this, the company aims to democratize disease detection with an easy and affordable point-of-care test that allows real-time and simultaneous detection of multiple conditions.
Top Perks, Benefits or Stand Outs:
Contributing to a positive cause
What Employees are Saying:
“A great opportunity for scientific growth with a strong sense of community.”
Kong
At a Glance:
Kong helps companies build reliable digital applications and services, giving technology teams at organizations - from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises - the architectural freedom to power connections for modern software architectures and applications across the cloud.
Top Perks, Benefits or Stand Outs:
Empowers employees to be decision makers, open feedback loops and reviews
What Employees are Saying:
“The nature of the work means every day is a learning experience, and this experience is fostered and encouraged by all. In my time with Kong I have grown more than at any other employer”
HoneyBook
At a Glance:
HoneyBook is a business management platform that automates workflows, digital payments and business opportunity generation for creative entrepreneurs. This allows business owners to save time and money, while focusing on growing their business.
Top Perks, Benefits or Stand Outs:
Positive team environment, amazing office space, quarterly team outings
What Employees are Saying:
“HoneyBook is a truly unique company. I have never been a part of a company that is so committed to living by their values while also growing and expanding. I think its easy to have a good culture but not make an impact, and its easy to make an impact with a bad culture, but to do both simultaneously, like HoneyBook is doing is quite unique.”
HomeLight
At a Glance:
HomeLight’s vision is a world where every real estate transaction is simple, certain and satisfying. HomeLight's proprietary algorithm crunches through home sales data to determine which agents are best equipped to fulfill the needs of each home buyer and seller. HomeLight's agent matching service matched over 671K buyers and sellers to top agents since its inception in 2012.
Top Perks, Benefits or Stand Outs:
Employee-led resource groups, close-knit team
What Employees are Saying:
“Management and leadership does a wonderful job in highlighting my strengths, while also coaching me and challenging me to continue to grow and improve in my role. Employees across the board from other teams and departments are incredibly friendly and helpful! It's great to feel like I'm contributing to the company's goals and employees really do take pride in their work everyday!”
Fivestars
At a Glance:
Fivestars Pay offers small businesses a payment processing service that integrates with any point of sale system across 300+ brands. With every credit card swipe, a business can onboard customers to their loyalty program and start messaging members to stay top of mind once they have left the store. Through payments, Fivestars has both tripled the number of signups on the platform as well as increased the speed of operations of its merchants.
Top Perks, Benefits or Stand Outs:
Bi-Annual Hackathon, quarterly volunteer initiatives
What Employees are Saying:
"The company is very progressive and provides its employees with many benefits & perks. The culture is friendly and positive. Overall great place to work!”
Fast
At a Glance:
Fast’s top priority is to make online checkout fast, easy and safe for everyone of all ages and all backgrounds. While other online payment options are focused on building products within their ecosystems to support their main business models, Fast’s core competency is payments AND optimizing e-commerce on all devices connected to the internet, instead of one narrow section of the market. Fast is platform agnostic, focused on delivering a seamless experience across every browser, platform and device, and can be used with essentially any credit card or bank.
Top Perks, Benefits or Stand Outs:
Flexible hours and choice to work from home or in-office, worldwide team
What Employees are Saying:
“The company is open to new ideas, great people work there, and creativity is often rewarded..”
Educli
At a Glance:
Educli is a popular free social networking website for international education. Users can connect with colleges, universities and other students already studying abroad. Educli promotes and facilitates interaction between people planning to study abroad and colleges and agents.
Top Perks, Benefits or Stand Outs:
High staff retention, focus on LGBTQA+ inclusivity
Contentstack
At a Glance:
Contentstack’s mission is to make the company indispensable for organizations to tell their stories and to connect with people they care about through inspiring, modern experiences. CEO Neha Sampat’s goal is to provide employees with the opportunity to do the best work of their careers. This approach is considered when establishing company values, hiring practices, and is evident in everyday work life, either when physically in the office or virtually.
Top Perks, Benefits or Stand Outs:
95% staff retention rate, opportunities for professional and personal outside learning
What Employees are Saying:
“From the top down, everyone genuinely cares about each other, always gives them the benefit of the doubt, and always tries to have the other's back.”
BlueOcean
At a Glance:
BlueOcean is an AI brand management platform that is the first to provide million-dollar brand audits in seven days for $17K. Its innovative approach produces AI-informed brand strategies that generate unbiased perspectives. Because of how fast its technology delivers actionable insights, BlueOcean is transforming how marketing is executed within the industry. Further, BlueOcean is priced so affordably that it's intended to be used frequently so brands can keep pace with the requirements of change.
Top Perks, Benefits or Stand Outs:
Exciting product, rapid company, growth
What Employees are Saying:
“Innovative doesn't even scratch the surface of what they are doing at BlueOcean. Fantastic leadership and fundamentals that truly values their employees. Love what I do and the people I do it with.”
The Bay Area's Best Tech Managers
A company can only be as great as it's leadership. Managers and leadership can make or break a company, and they are at the forefront of creating the best places for technologists to work. A stand-out manager leads their team through unexpected territory, inspires performance, and ensures an inclusive and productive team culture. We couldn't share the best places to work in the Bay Area without highlighting the award-nominated tech talent leading the way for their teams and companies.
Jossie Haines, Senior Product Engineering Director at Tile
How do they impact the company?
Jossie Haines is an exceptional engineering leader at Tile. She not only leads the integration of the Tile technology into all of Tile's partner ecosystems, including partners such as Google, Amazon, Comcast, HP, and Intel, she also leads diversity and inclusion efforts as well as manager training at Tile. She started the Tile mentoring program, which has had over 65% company and over 90% executive team participation in all 4 sessions it has run. The mentoring program has enabled multiple people at Tile to switch roles between teams, empowered new managers with the soft skills they need to thrive, and allowed employees to learn about aspects of the business they didn't know before.
What are their employees saying?
“Despite the challenges of the world today, our team feels happy and motivated and driven to deliver on a vision that she has been outlining for us. Our team has been working on a multi-year project, and to ensure motivation during that time, she ensures that she provides a very clear vision of the end goal and why this is so important to Tile. She takes the time to check in on each and every team member, and understand what's going on in their lives today -- this is so important for leaders in our remote world.”
Jessica Sweeney, VP of Product at Limelight Health
How do they impact the company?
As a leader, Jessica has left a notable impact not only by navigating Limelight Health through product transformation but on the industry as a whole by extending her expertise to the larger product community. Jessica’s impact is felt through her commitment to driving a culture of growth, empowerment, and innovation. Since joining Limelight Health, Jessica initiated and led a holistic company transformation to position the company at the forefront of the industry. Jessica guided the executive team through the challenge of narrowing Limelight Health’s focus to a core market to better target their solutions to a shared set of universal problems, then delivering complete and configurable enterprise solutions to complex, large-scale insurance carriers.
What are their employees saying?
“Under her guidance in creating highly effective remote team culture, Jessica’s team was ready to adapt with compassion and flexibility to the added challenges of working in quarantine with family.."
Alan Leard, CTO & Co-Founder at Limelight Health
How do they impact the company?
As a leader, Alan works to foster a culture of innovation. His belief is that it’s not about picking the “best programmer”, but the one who is the most passionate and willing to learn. Alan also believes in the importance of instilling trust in his teams and the power of communication. Alan frequently adds AAA (Ask Alan Anything) sections to team meetings, whether a smaller team or a department meeting. He is also not afraid to admit he doesn't know something and will give credit to team members for raising an issue he hadn't thought of himself. This behavior powerfully demonstrates how he relies on and values the thinking of his team members, which also directly contributes to the whole team’s growth.
What are their employees saying?
“Alan is very good at respecting the line of autonomy. He won’t jump into anyone else’s responsibilities and take over, but rather, he will set clear directions and expectations and always make himself available to discuss, problem-solve, and encourage.”
While all these companies are among the best in the Bay Area to have a career as technology professional at, an expert panel of judges will be choosing the best across tech hubs in North America as a part of the national Timmy Awards ceremony. Tech in Motion invites the Bay area and all of the tech community to join us digitally! RSVP below.
Interested in learning more about these companies or even signing on for next year's awards? Visit our Timmy Awards website for more information. Don't forget to join us for the ceremony on October 29th to unveil which companies will take home an award to recognize their incredible work place!