When you’re building a company, it can be difficult to know what to prioritize. The product? The customer? Investors?
We recently spoke to four Seattle tech leaders making names for themselves as their businesses scale. And while their end goal is to deliver a product worthy of the initial vision — whether that be a business texting platform or distributed game technology — they’ve all devoted energy into helping their team work as a cohesive unit to solve customer pain points.
Zipwhip VP of Product Management Pradeep GanapathyRaj attributes the company’s most recent growth to the team’s reliance on one another and ability to learn from previous development and client experience. In 2020, GanapathyRaj has his sights set on gaining more enterprise clients and expanding text messaging capability and integration for businesses.
Tell us how Zipwhip got to the precipice of rapid growth, what the biggest factors contributing to its growth and success moving forward will be.
For rapid growth, we need a strong foundation. At Zipwhip, we have a sharp focus on customer needs, a strategic view of the business-texting industry and heavy investment in Zipwhippers. This couples well with a robust culture of innovative collaboration where people feel empowered to try new ideas and are not afraid to fail. The way we rely on each other, pull through and continuously learn from our experience is key to converting opportunities in this space to tangible growth.
Our goal is to make Zipwhip the de-facto texting provider for every business in the world.’’
What does growth look like for Zipwhip over the next year?
Our goal is to make Zipwhip the de-facto texting provider for every business in the world. We will move closer to this goal in 2020. We will acquire more enterprise customers, introduce a self-service channel and deepen the Zipwhip extensibility platform to enable independent software vendors to incorporate business texting into their workflows. We want to make the Zipwhip texting experience part of every business-to-consumer communication workflow.
As we acquire more users, I’m excited to learn about the nuances of how they use Zipwhip and quantify their joys and frustrations. I plan to use these insights to provide a better user experience.
Since its founding in spring of 2018, blockchain company Mythical Games has raised $35 million in funding to develop game technology. COO Jeff Poffenbarger told us that the team’s $16 million Series A round enabled them to start developing the products they set out to provide, bringing distributed ledger technology to consumers.
Tell us how Mythical Games got to the precipice of rapid growth, what the biggest factors contributing to its growth and success moving forward will be.
Mythical Games started as a shared belief in blockchain technology. It enables in-game economies for player ownership in video games at scale. With a kernel of an idea, rapid iteration and prototyping, we secured our initial seed and Series A funding that allowed us to hire the right resources to begin turning prototypes into reality and create game designs.
After securing our completed Series A, the team is now poised to finish developing our proprietary blockchain platform and our first flagship game, “Blankos Block Party”. Growth for us will be building a strong, healthy organization, securing partnerships for licensing and distribution and fostering our player base. Success will be determined by more than creating engaging experiences for our audience. It will also be determined by our ability to nurture a healthy, respectful organization that puts our employees and their families first.
Success will be determined by more than creating engaging experiences for our audience.’’
What does growth look like for Mythical Games over the next year?
From my perspective, growth next year will be measured by our ability to successfully overcome the challenges we’ll surely face as we develop our platform and game. It will also be measured by our partnerships, player base and community.
In her previous roles at Riot Games, Facebook and Cruise, Meagan Murray, global head of talent at Karat, said the teams constantly had to hire at triple-digit growth year over year. Karat helps such companies develop more efficient hiring processes with interview engineers. Murray is focusing beyond the product itself this year, as she looks to expand departments across the board.
Tell us how Karat got to the precipice of rapid growth, what the biggest factors contributing to its growth and success moving forward will be.
Any company hiring engineers at scale has faced the challenges of hiring at a fast pace, keeping the quality bar high, balancing interview fatigue and making sure their engineers can still make deadlines. I’ve certainly experienced this balancing act in my career.
The technical screen is arguably the most important part of the interview funnel. Yet it’s often inconsistent and overlooked as a key indicator of the candidate’s performance onsite. Karat’s interview engineers conduct live technical interviews on our clients’ behalf. Karat will continue to expand upon our assessments and services as we move into the global market this year.
The demand for interview engineering is growing as more businesses turn to digital transformation.’’
What does growth look like for Karat over the next year?
The demand for interview engineering is growing as more businesses turn to digital transformation and build software engineering teams. Over the next year, Karat plans to grow all aspects of our business, from our own engineering team to our global network of interview engineers and our sales, marketing, talent and operations functions. And we’re moving into a new, bigger office space to accommodate for that expansion.
As we grow, we’ll be able to help more companies (including many of my former colleagues) improve their technical hiring and interview processes to ensure that every interview is fair, predictive and enjoyable. As a talent lead, that vision is exciting.
Hostwinds CEO Peter Holden is focused on building out the company’s client base as they scale. He told us that, for him, success comes down to client experience. And that experience hinges on fast and reliable hosting options.
Tell us how Hostwinds got to the precipice of rapid growth, what the biggest factors contributing to its growth and success moving forward will be.
We have to give credit where credit is due and attribute our company's growth and success to our loyal clients. That's how we got here. All of us at Hostwinds have made it a priority to build genuine, long-lasting relationships with each of our clients. As far as growth moving forward, our team strives to innovate and build better, more convenient services so that clients experience the fastest, most secure and most reliable hosting out there.
We are looking forward to building our client-base organically.’’
What does growth look like for Hostwinds over the next year?
We are looking forward to building our client-base organically by improving the services we offer and the features that they come with. That includes offering more robust hosting packages.
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