Persona

Persona is the first truly values driven company that I've had the pleasure of working for. Many companies like to throw their values around, but few companies can truly stick to their guns when the rubber meets the road.

From leadership to every individual employee that I've interacted with, there's a deep understanding that taking care of each other and taking care of the business are two sides of the same coin. If we aren't doing right by people, we aren't doing it at all and that's something that I've only ever experienced at Persona. Folks here are compassionate, competent, and humble, a rare but inspiring set of dispositions that inform the culture and values.

Like most fast growing startups, Persona definitely has it's growing pains. One example from engineering is our current monolith deployment process becoming cumbersome as the amount of engineers increase. Likewise, oncall can be hectic as with our increasing scale and be particularly tough for new engineers who don't have historical context on what types of issues are safe to ignore. Overall, Persona would do well to invest more in engineering operations as the company grows.

Persona is also not the right fit for everyone. Being a small startup still, there is plenty of uncertainty and minimal structure. It can be overwhelming for first-time engineers to be thrown into such a fast-paced environment with so much responsibility.

Choosing to stick to person-centered values is the harder path to take and there's always temptation to take a few shortcuts with culture to get quick business wins. Keep fighting the good fight and thank you Rick, Charles, and the rest of the leadership team for making sure we're taking care of so we can in turn, make sure the business is taken care of.

Thank you!