At Tatem, we’re driven by core values that define how we build our business. Learn more about our 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 and responsibility. This increases efficiency, attracts increasingly talented employees, and ensures that great ideas and execution come from everywhere, and everyone, at Tatem.
We’re a high performance culture focused on attracting, 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.
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. But, 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. incumbents is the ability to move more quickly as there are less layers of bureaucracy to wade through. At Tatem, we have zero layers.
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.
Our customers should be the best 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 adhere to a conventional management structure. 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. This means that your job is not to please your manager, it’s to make the greatest impact you can on our business.
Given the large amount of ownership we provide our employees, clear direction and context are provided from leadership 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. 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, there will always be slight imperfections we don’t catch. They’ll be indiscernible to most customers, but we’ll notice them. Our goal is to progress every single day so those bugs, errors, and flaws are immediately addressed. Even though we’ll never achieve our pursuit of a perfect product, our focus, attention to detail, and commitment to continuous improvement should differentiate our products. Our passion should be palpable to our customers.