Culture

Our culture is built on freedom, ownership, and innovation. We trust our employees, so we provide them with the freedom to do what is best for Tatem. Since we trust our team, we provide them with the maximum amount of autonomy, responsibility, and ownership. This increases efficiency, attracts increasing levels of talent, and ensures that the business is innovating at every level of the organization. We’ve designed our culture on the belief that people can only innovate when they have the freedom to do so. We want ideas to come from anyone at the company, and for the people that have brilliant ideas to be able to pursue them.

We’re a high performance culture focused on attracting, retaining, developing, and promoting exceptional talent. Top performers want to be surrounded by other top performers, which leads to a cycle of increasing talent density. One weak link causes the entire organization to make a sacrifice. Mean, lazy, or kind-but-average employees are not good fits at Tatem. We immediately let employees go once we realize that they’re not a fit within the company. This ensures that the talent pool remains incredibly high. We also target employees who will contribute their opinion (and even counter opinions, kindly), which allows us to make the best possible decisions.

Speed is at the center of everything we do at Tatem. Moving fast and shipping fast is how we operate. This allows us to improve our product every single day. We aim to make at least one significant release each week. Moving fast and breaking things is not a novel cultural value, which means we have to move faster. The biggest advantage that startups have vs. large incumbents is the ability to move more quickly as there are less layers of bureaucracy to wade through. At Tatem, we have zero layers. Our entire business is designed to enable us to move as fast as possible. All of our cultural values work together towards the single goal of enabling us to move (and learn) incredibly fast.

As a startup, we only have the capital to do one thing. So, it has to be the most important thing. We don’t have the resources to become distracted. Our frugality permeates every decision we make: we avoid growing the team until we really need to, we don’t spend large amounts on flashy marketing campaigns, and we don’t purchase exorbitant (or unnecessary) equipment for our employees. Our frugality ensures that we remain scrappy, lean, and efficient. We want to maintain this focus as we grow, as this discipline yields powerful results.

Our customers should be the number one brand ambassadors for Tatem. There is nothing we won’t do to ensure our customers have a magical experience. Serving our customers is the foundation of our business, and we will go out of our way to accomplish that mission. A negative customer experience is the most costly error we could make. It means we failed.

At Tatem, we don’t have managers in the traditional sense of the word. Instead, we view our managers as mentors. Managers make a singular person responsible for each employee’s performance. We’re a team, and we want everyone to contribute to making our business, and our employees, successful. Further, we believe the individual most responsible for an employee’s performance is the employee themself. As a result of this monumental shift, this means that: your job is not to please your manager, it’s to make the greatest impact you can on our business. Impact is worth more than seniority at Tatem. Great ideas and execution come from everywhere, and everyone, at Tatem.

Given the large amount of ownership we provide our employees, clear direction and context are provided from our leadership team to ensure strong alignment throughout the organization. Without guidance and feedback, there wouldn’t be enough context to make good decisions, nor would there be a clear way to measure performance and output.

It goes without saying, but at Tatem we care deeply about employee productivity. We only pursue initiatives that lead to measurable productivity gains. We want employees to do the best work of their entire career at Tatem. Years down the road, we want our team to look back with pride at what we’ve accomplished. It’s not easy, but it is worth it. We don’t want employees working to “punch the clock,” we want them working to make Tatem 1% better every day.

No matter how disciplined we are, and to be clear we are disciplined, there will always be slight imperfections, bugs, errors, and flaws. They will be indiscernible to most, but they will be noticed by us. Our goal is to iterate so quickly, that those imperfections, those bugs, those errors, those flaws - they’re never there for long. Even though we’ll never achieve our pursuit of a perfect product, our attention to detail and focus should differentiate our products. Our passion for what we’re building should be palpable to our customers.