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Teambuilding FirstRain style

Jun 2010/in /by

We have a history of taking on whacky athletic challenges at FirstRain – both to get and stay fit and also to play together as a team.

Yesterday was no exception, although we were a small team this time. Three of us competed in the Splash and Dash in the Stevens Creek Reservoir in Cupertino CA. It was supposed to be a 1.2 mile swim and 3 mile run.

Well, it turned out a little different than we had expected. First off the water was really cold – which meant we were gasping for the first leg as we got accustomed to the temperature. And then the swim was not 1.2 miles – it was closer to 1.6-1.7 miles. We only knew this because it took me so much longer than last time I did it and so we asked around some of the more experienced competitors who estimated the distance for us based on their swim times.

It’s no wonder that at the end we didn’t run. We’d had enough. But we enjoyed it, we didn’t come last, and we are signed up for two more races this year!

Here we are before the race (we didn’t look as good afterwards!)

Eugene, me and David

You can see some of our other events here: The 2008 Vineman Aquabike, The 2009 San Jose Rock n Roll Half Marathon and The 2009 Great Delhi Run.
team

Why Thomas joined FirstRain

Jan 2010/in /by

We hired a new, senior sales rep at FirstRain this week. Very seasoned guy, has worked for our VP sales before, and I asked him to tell me why he joined.

I am always curious what motivates people to join us — how good a job do we do of sharing what’s in our crazy minds about what we’re trying to build when we interview people — and I like to capture it before they get mired into the daily challenges of growing a new company (which are considerable, especially if you are in sales).

Thomas sent me his list:

* FirstRain provides sales people competitive advantage (better info faster)
* Excellent leadership team and longstanding relationships
* Game changing vision
* Fantastic people and culture
* Significant market opportunity

Clearly he is not a loquacious guy. A year from now I’ll buy him a beer and ask “So… was it what you expected?”

vacation

Changing to a new (really cool) vacation policy

Jan 2010/in /by

We’ve made a terrific change this year to our vacation policy – which is basically not to have one. As of January 1 our employees can take as much vacation as they need provided they are getting their work done. The idea of doing this for all employees was pioneered by Netflix and we’ve decided to follow their excellent lead for our US team.

This change is one more thing we’re doing to build a great culture. We have a very intense culture today. People work hard, they work long hours inside and outside “normal business hours”, from home, from airplanes, and we don’t clock or watch the hours they work. So if we don’t clock the hours they are here, why should we clock the hours they are not? Why should we be tracking paperwork and forms when an employee takes the day off but we don’t do the same for when they work over a weekend.

It is much more trusting and respectful to simply say:

Work the hours you need to to get the job done,

Take the time off you need to take care of yourself and your family and

Talk to your manager about the time you need and how to fit it in with your work.

After all – if we entrust an employee with critical algorithm design, or with talking to customers – why wouldn’t we trust them to manage their own time? And one of our five values is “Take ownership for the company’s success” so people managing their own time is really consistent with that – I trust them to do what’s right.

This is a very popular move as you can imagine and one I am really pleased to be able to do. I asked Ana to give me a Letterman list – the Top Ten reasons this is a great move for our team – here is her list:

1. Each employee gets to make their own decision about when it makes sense to take time off
2. Each employee gets to decide how much time off they need
3. It rewards folks for working smarter, not longer
4. It places trust in our employees – trust gains trust back
5. It differentiates us from our competition – especially when hiring
6. Vacation is good for physical and mental health – so this supports good health
7. It reduces administrative paperwork – always a good thing!
8. It’s one less policy we have to document and explain
9. No more accrued vacation liability on our balance sheet
10. It’s just very cool to say, “at FirstRain we take as much time as we need, as long as your work is done”

p.s. This last Christmas we shut down between Christmas and New Year to encourage people to take vacation and take a break. It was so popular – both restorative and productive – we’re doing it again at the end of 2010 even within this new policy to encourage the break.

p.p.s. The basic idea of not clocking vacation has been around for “executives” for years but for financial reasons – if you store up vacation then the company has to accrue the financial obligation of paying for that vacation on the balance sheet and so, since executives typically cost more, companies often did not accrue or track vacation for VPs and above so they could reduce the accrued liability.

holiday

New Year’s Message

Jan 2010/in /by

Ringing in the New Year I decided to send an email out to all my employees – the Rainmakers – to recognize the tremendous progress that we made in 2009, but also to get us all looking forward.

2009 was a hard year for almost every company – especially the first half – but 2010 is starting out with a bang. Some orders came in today (our fiscal year end is January 31 so the sales team is supremely focused), the stock market is up, pundits continue to forecast a recovery, especially in tech (although there are still some respectable analysts on the negative side…) and our customers are giving us good feedback on their use of the research engine.

So my objective is both to acknowledge last year, honor the hard work we did, and then put it behind us so we focus on today and tomorrow, not yesterday. And more importantly to thank everyone.

Here is the email I sent out (with just a few edits to remove unannounced customer wins):

Dear Rainmakers

As we enter 2010 I want to take this opportunity to thank you all for your hard work and the tremendous progress we made in 2009.

When I wrote to you at the end of last fiscal year I reflected that “2008 was all about our algorithms, automation and the quality of our datasets…” and that “2009 is going to be [about] self-service”.

As I reflect on 2009 it is exciting to see that we have more than exceeded the goals we set out a year ago:

- We made our product significantly more powerful when the research engine interface came up in beta in June and went into production in September. It is the first of its kind for business search, it reveals the depth of business structure, topics and content that we have spent the last 4 years developing and it expands the available market we can sell to by appealing to a broad, general business market.

- Although we have been selling to marketing teams all along we were able to start selling aggressively to sales and marketing teams across all types of business-to-business companies. The early positive feedback from sales customers is very encouraging and in 2010 we’ll continue to invest in the workflow for sales teams. Our first Dreamforce show and the demonstration of how we integrate with salesforce.com CRM was an important milestone for us in this market.

- We introduced several very powerful innovations which make our product valuable to our customers – like signals, the company brief, the faceted search engine and the workflow to use the search engine to develop personal email and RSS feeds – and while we will always want to make the research engine easier, we did make significant progress so that now customers can be independent – they can start by themselves and make their own changes. This is a huge step forward from where we were a year ago.

- The recession was very difficult for almost every company and it is to the credit of every one of you, and our sales and support teams, that we came through it stronger than before. We made some difficult staffing decisions during the recession and our finance and HR team worked hard both in the US and in India to bring our costs down and make sure we ran as lean a company as we could.

- We developed and grew our traditional customers like Axxx, Gxxx and Bxxx; we developed important new relationships at Mxxx and Dun and Bradstreet. Our corporate customers continued to use our product, Dxxx substantially grew their use of our reports and the new work with Fidelity.com pushed us to make our event detection truly exiting.

As we enter the New Year I believe we are building momentum both in our product and in our channels. In 2010 we will use the investment and innovation of the last few years to continue to grow our bookings and revenue. Our goal is $xxxx and it is going to take hard work, creativity and team work to achieve the goal – and we can and will do it!

I hope you have all had some time with your families and friends over the New Year and are recharged for the exciting opportunity we have in front of us.

Thank you again – it is my privilege to work with you all.
Penny

Second Harvest Team

Giving back at Second Harvest

Dec 2009/in /by

There are many ways to build community at a company but one of the best is definitely giving back to the community together. This is the second year we have volunteered at Second Harvest and, as last year, it was great fun. Bagging apples, boxing food and generally enjoying each others company doing something useful.

India Team Diwali

FirstRain Diwali celebrations

Oct 2009/in /by

A note from our Gurgaon office:

Diwali, the festival of lights was celebrated in the Gurgaon office in a colorful way. The dress code was ethnic Indian dresses as the “fun group” organized a bay decoration competition and also got a few stalls put up by the employees. The ambiance was fun-filled with good food around as enthusiastic team members came up with amazingly creative decoration ideas.

Our industry modeling team won by a slight margin over the source management team, with both depicting the various facets of celebrating the Diwali festival. The games put up and the stalls were equally exciting.

Overall, it was great to see the technology and research savvy team show off their creative and artistic abilities.



Half__start

Team building at the Rock and Roll Half Marathon

Oct 2009/in /by

Regular readers of this blog may remember that the FirstRain team likes to take on physical challenges together – like last year’s AquaBike. Well this year (yesterday) ten of us completed the San Jose Rock And Roll Half Marathon and I am very proud of them all for taking it on and every one of them for completing the course.

It was a perfect day for it. The FirstRain team and 15,000 people lined up at 8am in downtown San Jose to try to conquer the distance each in our own way. Hats of to our controller Eugene who ran the race in 1 hour and 42 mins – we were still walking in the first half when we saw him running the last stretch and cheered him on from across the road. Also hats off to Ana, David and Dennis who did their best distances and times – very impressive.

A few of us walked it, some in more pain than others, and YY comically awarded me the “Stubborness” award for doggedly finishing with the slowest time of the team. After the race we retreated to BJs for much needed food, water and alcohol (purely for medicial purposes of course).

Next FirstRain race is a 7km in Delhi on November 1 – the Great Delhi Run. David is planning to be in Delhi that week anyway so he’s challenged a team from our Gurgaon office to run it with him. We’ll see how many sign up for it!

Now we have to decide what race we’ll chose for 2010 in California. Frankly I found the half ironman aquabike last year was easier to finish than the half marathon this year so I’ll be lobbying for something in the water next time.

The crowd at the start of the race 

Me leaning against the post for relief at the 9th mile marker

Rehydrating and refueling at BJs after the race
Team1_SaraPalin

Humor for Halloween

Oct 2008/in /by

The California team at FirstRain held a pumpkin carving contest again this year – following up from last year’s very successful competition. The challenge was to create a scary pumpkin. We had a bat and a blood sucking loan agent, but the winner was Sarah Palin – the scariest thing the winning team could think of this year (well this is California…).

This years carvers

The winning pumpkin: Sarah Palin

notes

Brainstorming FirstRain style

Sep 2008/in /by

We’re developing an important new capability within FirstRain this month and there are many opinions and ideas knocking around the brainstorming meetings. As you can see here the ideas come in vibrant colors, and one of our lead researchers has come over from Gurgaon for a couple of weeks to play a key role in the design process.

Getting everyone’s ideas on the wall, organizing them into themes, and prioritizing the groups helps us build a richer product implementation. We believe you just get better products if you have a robust brainstorming methodology as a team.

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