Why We're Building Teamsake

Remote work is broken.

Though its prevalence is down from pandemic highs, it’s here to stay. Forced into it by the pandemic, everyone had to make the best of the situation. But few companies became truly good at it, which is one reason we’ve seen such a backlash from senior people, especially at large companies, demanding that people return to the office. Good luck with that.

Companies need to understand that most knowledge workers want the benefits it offers, and that embracing it and learning to do it properly, will actually yield better business results. But the tools and business practices most of us have today don’t make that easy.

Teamsake is building a suite of tools and resources designed to help founders and management teams build and retain happy, high-performance remote teams and create an atmosphere in which they can thrive.

How we got here

Founders at every stage of the company lifecycle have lots to worry about. Concerns relating to your team are easily at or near the top of the list. Did we hire the right people? Are they productive? Are they happy? Are they going to ride out the lows with us? What are they working on? Is everyone getting along and collaborating well?

My co-founders Max Lynch, Ben Sperry and I have a lot of experience in this arena. Collectively, we’ve built and exited two great, high-growth companies with well over $100m in revenue at exit. The first went public and then sold for $1.4B. The second was sold after 10 years of building a high performance, highly engaged, remote team. That’s what we’re most proud of: having built a team that was high in talent density and happy and engaged (not a coincidence). Our business had its ups and downs, but we were able to keep our best people motivated and engaged throughout. We consistently had employee NPS scores in the 80s (scale of -100 to 100…most companies are in the 20s) and very low unforced attrition, even during the Great Resignation.

How’d we do it? We were very deliberate about engineering our culture. We spent a lot of effort hiring the right people. We made sure they were actually the right people in the critical months after they started. When they weren’t working out, we dealt with the situation quickly in almost every instance. We were explicit about the behaviors we wanted to see in the workplace (and tried to model them!) and about those we didn’t. We made sure people felt recognized for their accomplishments, large and small – not only by us, but also by their peers.

We know those are all things that every founder can learn to do with the right guidance. And many of the behaviors that make for a happy, high-performance organization can be facilitated using the tools we’re building.

When recruiting, we’d often joke with candidates that ours was the only company we’d ever worked for that actually improved people’s mental health. But we weren’t really joking. Our teams were able to spend 99% of their energy doing their best work. That wasn’t just good for mental health, it was great for business results. But sadly, it’s also uncommon.

We’re on a mission to change that at Teamsake. Our first product is a Slack app that helps create a strong sense of workplace community (and just plain good vibes) by encouraging peer-to-peer employee recognition. We hope you’ll try it.

Thanks!