This week we tested our teamwork skills as our CEO took a proper vacation. 

Some folks believe that startup CEOs/founders shouldn’t take a vacation. The prevailing wisdom seems to be that a leader should model a kind of hustle culture – giving their time and energy to building the company, without respite. If you’re truly invested, they’ll say, then you wouldn’t even want to take time off. Also, if you can take a vacation, they question, are you really that valuable? 

That’s not really how we think around these parts. 

We believe that to do our best work, humans need breaks. It’s this belief that leads to things like mandatory outdoor time when the team’s feeling stressed. We also believe that life isn’t just about work, and things like family, hobbies and friends deserve your attention too. 

Lastly, we believe that the team is greater than any one person, and we want to be able to flex and fill-in for anyone who needs or wants to take a break. This way of working proved valuable a few months ago when two of our team members struggled with power outages in Texas, and as various team members have dealt with travel challenges related to the global pandemic.  

So this week, we tested our ability to continue moving forward as a team while Jordan, our co-founder and CEO, took a proper vacation. 

We’re excited that we leaned on each other in new ways, picked up and moved forward with tasks we hadn’t tackled, and mostly, that it was just a normal week in many ways. A true testament to the culture we’re building! 

This week, we see our top-of-funnel traffic numbers re-stabilizing after we fixed an error on May 14 that was over-counting traffic. The chart looks sad, but as we dig into the data, we feel confident that what we’re seeing is just the result of fixing that error, and traffic is in a healthy place. 

We also saw increases across both sign-ups and meetings run, even crossing a threshold of 1.5K retro meetings with more than 3 attendees this week! 

…explored designs for offering polls and options for scheduling meeting reminders. As we continue our research for larger features on the horizon, we’re also committed to shipping nuggets of user value consistently, and these are two examples. As always, interested parties can follow along on our public repository. 

…celebrated a prospect who made her own pitch deck advocating for our app! It’s humbling and exciting to see how our users describe the tool we’re making.

…rejoiced as several more coworkers got their first or second vaccine. Most of our team has had at least one shot, and it’s been bonding to share our experiences navigating access to vaccines and post-vaccine side effects. 

…published a post on the 9 Most Misunderstood Pairs of Scrum Terms following some highly scientific data collection on Reddit.

…kicked off Sprint #80! 

…welcome two new team members! And begin batting practices with three more potential coworkers. 

…continue Sprint #80. 

Have feedback? See something that you like or something you think could be better? Leave a public response here, or write to us.