The Values of Success in
the Cloud 100

Research has shown that diverse teams perform better, but many companies, particularly those in technology, struggle to recruit and retain employees from varied gender, ethnic and other backgrounds.

A number of companies on the Cloud 100 have prioritized diversity, equity, and inclusion and made progress toward their goals. 

At Front, 80% of the executive team is female, and more than 50% of its leaders are female.

Retaining employees from diverse backgrounds requires additional focus and effort. “Once we have done some work on representation, the next step is inclusion,” says Collin, who has created and empowered multiple Employee Resource Groups, or ERGs, at Front. These groups are led by people who deeply care about a topic. Front publicly recognizes and highlights the work they do and gives them financial support to organize events, all of which creates higher engagement and a stronger sense of community. 

When Collin raised Front’s Series D funding in June, valuing the company at $1.7 billion, she learned that only 10 of 1360 SaaS unicorns — companies valued at more than $1 billion — were created and run by women.

At Guild, more than half of its employees participate in one or more of its six ERGs for community building, resource sharing, and advocacy, including groups for employees who identify as Black, Asian American/Pacific Islander, Latinx/Hispanic, LGBTQIA+, women, and people with disabilities. Elected leaders of ERGs are granted additional quarterly-vested stock options, and each ERG has a significant annual budget. The company has gone to great lengths to ensure an equitable workplace, including constructing an equitable compensation structure with predefined levels and salary bands — all of which are shared internally and on job descriptions. And the company offers equity to all its employees, regardless of level or seniority. “We are focused on nurturing a dynamic, healthy and mission-aligned culture where all employees feel a sense of belonging and empowerment,” says CEO Rachel Romer Carlson. 

At Gong, leaders are expected to “cultivate belonging and diversity.” Leaders and employees learn how to be allies through allyship training, a speaker series, and other programs designed to deepen their understanding of underrepresented people. Recruiters take specialized training courses to identify bias, source candidates from a more diverse talent pool, and mitigate bias using competency-based interview questions. The company reviews data on team diversity each quarter and has hired an external organization to conduct an annual review of its pay equity.

When Manny Medina and his co-founders built Outreach, they stated an explicit goal of building a team that looks like its customers and community. There is emphasis placed on training internally, supporting the team to recruit from a broader population. It requires extra effort and creativity, but Medina believes Outreach’s diversity is a competitive advantage because of these challenges.

One way Outreach makes this happen is by requiring everyone to “sell” their position to others, rather than assuming anyone’s perspective or opinion is inherently more valuable than anyone else’s. “When you sell the idea, you treat the other as a peer and equal. Irrespective of title. Irrespective of age. Irrespective of gender, irrespective of your origin,” says Medina. “You have to work to sell it you develop all these mechanisms and ethos and artifacts that embrace the power of diversity.”

All the CEOs we interviewed pointedly let us know that they see their company’s values and culture as ever-evolving.

In the beginning, their stated values reflect the principles and values of the founding team, and then as new team members join the company and society shifts, the values and culture mature along with the business.

Howie Liu, Co-Founder and CEO of Airtable, said he and his co-founders wrote the company’s values with the intention that they would drive the company’s success. Among them: Humility; Growth Mindset; Bias for Action; Customer First. These principles show up in daily life. With Growth Mindset, for example, an attitude of lifelong learning permeates the culture. Team members are encouraged to think of feedback as a gift to help them “unlock” what’s next in their careers. Employees receive a “learning and development wallet” — a budget they can use to expense books or training to support their chosen development path. In interviews, rather than dropping “gotchas” on candidates, interviewers aim to understand: Has the candidate illustrated past experiences where they learned something important due to feedback?

The company itself is also eager to receive feedback. In its annual “Employee Voice” survey, employees are asked their thoughts on the culture and business practices at Airtable and what can be improved. The data team slices the information in different ways to ensure that different employees aren’t experiencing different versions of the company — for example, if they are new to the team or located in specific functions or geographies. 

As companies grow and change, their core values can act as a constant for the team. Databricks went through multiple pivots in its lifetime and sells very different products today than it did five years ago. The team has also grown significantly and is no longer the same intimate group directly led by the founders. CEO Ali Ghodsi credits the company’s core principles with providing employees with a sense of continuity. After a period of great change, “the only thing that is the essence of your company that remains is the culture principles and the people who live them,” he says. 

At Snyk, leadership is encouraged to spend more time asking questions and learning from everyone on the team before making a decision, instead of thinking they know all the answers. Snyk spends a great deal of effort making sure new hires will continue to enhance and improve the company’s culture. “Do they fit a global view versus a US-centric view? I think we've been able to surround ourselves with very diverse thinkers, people who think and look at problems very, very differently. It's about different thoughts, different genders, different cultures that make this a more compelling culture,” says McKay.