Culture as infrastructure: Why I joined Decagon

I’ve always believed that culture is the core infrastructure of any company.

It’s the unwritten operating protocol that informs everything you do, and as you reach meaningful scale, it is your cultural infrastructure that determines not only how you build and innovate but ultimately, whether or not you win. In my career, I’ve had the privilege to see that when you have a great culture rallied around a common purpose, you have magic. 

I’ve also learned that great cultures are cared for and driven with intention. Thinking of culture as infrastructure offers a concrete way to check in on the stack to ensure it’s powering the team forward.

Infrastructure for product and people‍

Here at Decagon, we are shaping a bright future for the business world. We have a bold vision and strong conviction that we can and will bring concierge customer experiences to everyone on the planet. We believe we’ll do so by empowering our customers with the best technology, built on an attitude that shirks bureaucracy and complex processes in favor of first principles, velocity, and getting things done.

Because of this combination of tenacity and technology, companies trust us to run their most important customer-facing operations on our platform. They’re betting on Decagon’s infrastructure to do their best work at an increasingly global scale.

In the same way our platform becomes the trusted foundation for our customers’ operations, our culture is the trusted foundation for our own. It’s the platform that empowers every teammate here to build with purpose and to do their best work. And just like our customers trust us with their most important business ambitions, our teammates trust us with that of their own careers. 

Finely tuned, together‍

That’s why I’m thrilled to be joining Decagon to lead Operations and People as we head into the exciting next chapter of scaling. 

Decagon’s culture is the secret sauce behind why our customers delight in our products every day. We have cultivated an early winning culture of working hard and living well – balancing intensity with flexibility, speed with precision, getting results together with getting together to celebrate. We see ourselves as the innovative team to bet on, without taking ourselves too seriously.

On my first day here, the energy was buzzing. While we had just grown to more than 200 – 10x from less than a year before – you could still feel the close knit mentality as cross-functional groups huddled together, working on some of the biggest customer names that other companies might spend years trying to win over. Every person shared the same energy and excitement: that we are building something special and bringing the power of AI to life for a better consumer economy.

I then spent a few weeks across our SF, NYC and London locations building a 360-view of our growing company while doing so. Over the course of many 1:1s, dinners, coffees and meetings, one thing stood out every time: at Decagon, we’re building something special, and every team member here shared the same ethos of innovation, collaboration, and rapid execution embodied in a down-to-earth attitude that made it impossible for me not to join the team.

Scaling the stack‍

There’s of course much work to do to take the magic of what makes Decagon great and scale it globally at the pace of our business in the years to come. I’m honored to join a team that understands that culture is not a perk, it’s core infrastructure. It’s how we build, how we innovate, and how we win. If you’re ready to help us build our stack from the inside out, get in touch. We’re hiring across every office and would love to have you.