Sustaining Qwilt’s Culture Through Rapid Growth
Scaling the team for business growth is a critical stage for any startup organization, setting a precedent for company culture, the pace of innovation, and business success. It’s a journey I’ve been proud to guide Qwilt on over the past two years. We’ve grown from a team of 85, largely based out of Israel, to more than doubling in size, with more than 200 staff working in offices in Israel, the US, Europe, and Australia. I’m proud to see diversity remain at the heart of this growth, with our recruitment in early 2022 showing close to 50% gender equality. And with this progress, we’ve been recognized as a Rise Awards finalist for our commitment to investing in women – more on that later!
Qwilt’s People Team, led by Hadar Vaturi, SVP People
With such rapid scale comes a whole host of challenges that Qwilt has embraced as an organization – from expanding our office facilities and balancing our hybrid work policy to ensuring we remain a close-knit team. One of the reasons our rapid scale has been so smooth is the passion our people have for the company and product. We are a technology-driven company with innovation at the heart of everything we do and a team of fantastic thinkers and inventors that love their work. This drive has enabled us to grow as rapidly as we have while preserving the culture of a company half our size: no easy task given the level of competition in today’s tech market. As we look forward to continued expansion and evolution, we’re dedicated to preserving our unique culture and mission.
Overcoming challenges of scale
While Qwilt’s unique Open Caching technology enables our service provider partners to stream live at scale, we’re deeply focused on our internal scaling and the challenges and opportunities this brings. As Qwilt scales in size and our employee base grows, we’re continually finding ways to accommodate in-person meetings and ensuring ongoing collaboration. We offer all our employees a hybrid and flexible working policy, giving everyone the autonomy to work wherever and however they like. We’ve also expanded our Israeli office facilities, offering more space and a better working environment for those choosing to enter the building.
Taking on more office space while maintaining the same quality of connection through hybrid working is a big adjustment for any organization. The reason I believe Qwilt has done this so effectively is our cross-team synchronization, and the passion and belief we all have in the product. For those working in the new spaces, we’ve accommodated a whole raft of leadership workshops, social activities, external expert talks, and presentations from across the industry. For those working remotely, we have company-wide programs to ensure everyone is connected and remains driven. This includes our annual Hackathon event, which unites every department at every level of the company to put their heads together and collaborate to overcome real-world technology challenges. This year’s Hackathon was our most successful yet, with over a dozen teams signing up to present different projects – spanning technology from AI/ML to video encoding and even non-traditional hackathon topics such as Sales and Marketing innovation.
Empowering Qwilt staff for a future of tech innovation
Scaling at the pace and level by which Qwilt has means we’ve had to undergo restructuring and recalibrations, taking some of our biggest teams and encouraging individuals to become team leaders and role models for their colleagues. We took managers from across the company, in all roles and backgrounds, to ensure we retained a core and diverse culture as we grow. By ensuring that all our teams have a clear career path and growth potential at Qwilt, we maintain a driven and forward-thinking company mindset that propels our technology forward and delivers the best customer service.
As I mentioned earlier, I am immensely proud that, during IBC 2022, Qwilt was nominated for a Rise Award for ‘company investment in women’ – a true testament to the community and culture we’re fostering that makes us an attractive workplace for women. What makes this accomplishment most admirable is that we don’t set quotas for diverse hiring. Instead we put tremendous effort into properly feeding our pipeline. By ensuring we have a skilled and diverse pool of talent from the very first step of the recruitment process, diversity in the interviewing and hiring processes comes naturally.
By investing in the best talent and maintaining a fun working culture, we’re readying ourselves for a strong future of continued expansion and more technology innovation. Believing in the product and industry we operate in creates a great environment to work in and makes embracing the changes that come with scale all the easier.
