Coffee Room – Image courtesy of GoCanvas
Bob Fox: Tell us a bit about GoCanvas.
James Quigley: Were a digital platform that resides in the cloud that allows organizations to automate from simple to more complex business processes that might have normally started out on paper – invoices, work orders, inspections, check lists. It allows you to automate in a mobile fashion without having to custom create any software. It automates how you collect information, how you share information, and empowers you learn something about your business because you’ve done that. We support some 70,000+ paid subscribers, predominately by small to medium businesses but a whole host of Fortune 500 companies as well, in 72 countries, though our two physical office locations are in Sydney, Australia and Reston, Virginia.
What kind of work is being done here in the office?
A good healthy percentage of what we do here, and especially in our remote locations, is sales and business development work. The average age of our sales force is 24 years old. Our young staff usually comes to us right out of college. There’s a healthy chunk of staff focused on the customer base including sales and customer success. The three other groups include product and software development, with most located in Virginia but with some in India, and our lead marketing group.
Can you describe the office culture? How do people work together?
We were talking about culture long before everyone started talking about it! When you walk in the front door, you see a Peter Drucker quote that reads: “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” We believe that culture is so important because of what I’ve learned from past failed startups and a couple of successful ones. I’ve learned as much from the bad ones as I have from the good ones. We’re extremely focused on our values, but we don’t have them written on our walls by our meeting rooms, we live and breathe them –they are baked into the design of the space and how we interact. We measure the effectiveness of this weekly using tools that take the cultural temperature of the organization. We’re also a big believer that the tropes for what is startup culture, is not really culture at all. Culture is more than ping-pong tables and free food. If you understand the biomechanics and the social structure of what culture is. We focus on stoking innovation and engaging the part of the brain that inspires fun, innovation and creativity. Our open office concept helps us achieve this.
The way we work together utilizes a mix of close and loose controls on collaboration. You can have too much collaboration and then work won’t happen, but there’s no success if you don’t collaborate enough. Innovation needs to come not just from me, but from the people solving the problems on the front line. We intentionally create an environment that inspires even our most junior people to act innovatively. Through this environment, and intentionally creating collisions with other companies, stakeholders and non-profits we continue to inspire and teach empathy; because as we see it, empathy is the currency of innovation.
