Culture as a Product

The second to last interview of my loop was with Lindsey Martin, then Check's Head of Engineering, now our COO. I was at my desk at home, late afternoon sun coming through the window, a little fried after a day of interviews. I asked her what made the engineering culture special. "Our weekly closeout meeting," she said. Every Friday, the whole team gets on and shares gratitude. I'm sure I said something affirming, but internally I was thinking, “a gratitude meeting? That's the answer?”

I'll be honest that it's hard to capture why this matters, and if you're reading this, I suspect you're where I was: a little skeptical, waiting for the corporate part to kick in. I get it. All I can ask is that you bear with me.

The meeting happens every Friday. Anyone in the New York office usually takes the call from a conference room officially named Net Pay, but everyone calls it the sauna because the radiator's too good. I went into my first one braced for the worst, some mandatory kumbaya circle, the kind of thing where you quietly check how long it's scheduled for. Then the hands started going up. The Google Meet hand raise queue sat above ten and stayed there, people getting back in line to give more praise after they'd already had a turn. “Huh,” I thought, “people are actually into this.”

The first real crack in the skepticism was my second week. I'd been annoyed at our flaky CI, so I'd made some small changes to our GitHub runners to make them more reliable. Nothing clever, not even perfect. But Henry, an engineer I hadn't worked with yet, gave me a shoutout for it that Friday. I felt those awkward, involuntary chills you get from a compliment you weren't braced for, which was exactly the problem, because I'd walked in braced for everything else.

And yet, if you asked me for the single moment it all clicked, I couldn't give you one. That's the point. There was never a clean "oh, I get it now." It wore me down in the best way through the consistency of the praise and the care people brought, week after week, the good and the bad.

What keeps getting me is the range. A week at a startup can be brutal or exhilarating, often both inside the same five days, so from Friday to Friday you never quite know what the team is going to need. You never know what you're going to get with closeout either. The thank yous are all over the map, small to big, code to not code at all. Last week, Teddy thanked the team for a quiet week for resource alerting, which is the sort of thing that normally goes unmentioned, precisely because nothing caught fire. Plenty of it isn't work in the usual sense. I remember Caden once thanked Alyssa for her discovery and usage of (:bufo-gives-vin-diesel-a-gentle-little-kiss-on-his-shiny-head) which made him laugh in the middle of a stressful stretch.

What makes this land is the contrast. At the bigger companies I've been at, hard work over long horizons had a way of flattening time. Effort becomes cumulative and a little shapeless. One Monday becomes the next. May turns into August and somehow back into May, and you'd be hard pressed to say what any individual week was actually for. It's easy to forget the small wins and the people behind them. Praise, when it came, felt transactional, often accompanied by a gif straight out of 2011.

I've also been at startups that tried to manufacture the opposite from the top down. Mandated fun, culture as an initiative, a calendar invite that insists everyone bond. And I've been at the other kind too, where one person is gamely trying to get something going and no one bites, because the buy-in just isn't there. You can feel the difference between a ritual people want and one they've been handed. The reason closeout lands is that no one is making it happen. It isn't the source of the culture so much as the place the culture becomes visible once a week. You could take closeout away tomorrow and this would still be a special place to work, because what's underneath it is just an ethos of earnestness and people who actually mean it.

What the ritual adds is shape. It makes time slow down once a week, turning five blurred days back into a week with people in it, with specific things that went right and specific people who made them go right. And it changes how you pay attention well before Friday. Nearly everyone I asked said they try to show up with at least one thank you in hand, a practice that outlasts the meeting itself. You catch yourself noticing who helped and what went right in real time.

So the best weeks turn into a kind of highlight reel. And the hard ones, where the pager won, or nothing felt like it landed, still get their Friday too. That's when it matters most, when it's proof that the week held people who saw you, even when the work didn't cooperate.

A gratitude meeting, it turns out, was never really the answer. The sincerity underneath it was.