Behind the scenes: Company culture at PicCollage
Tags: Startup, Company Culture, Innovation, Work At Piccollage, Work

This is a place where you can truly be yourself

An employee told me this about PicCollage before I started. Of everything I heard, this stuck with me. After spending 8 months here, I can wholeheartedly agree.

What’s PicCollage?

PicCollage is a software start-up in Taiwan that makes photo and video apps like Widget Go, VDO, Salut, and more. The company’s main product, PicCollage, is a top photo app for iOS, Android, and Windows with over 200 million downloads.

Part of what drives this success, I believe, is a unique company culture based on the following slogans:

Creative, Fun, and International Create Boldly Live Well, Work Well Always Be Learning

Creative, Fun, and International

We are a mostly English working environment that embraces international talent. Even though our main office is in Taipei, we have team members from around the world (ex. India, South Africa, USA, Thailand, Canada, etc).

We regularly celebrate holidays from different countries to understand other cultures. Aside from local celebrations like 尾牙 and 春酒, we also host awesome Christmas and Thanksgiving parties.

We love food, lots of it

People are encouraged to showcase their own cultures. A previous intern once presented how her family celebrates Jewish holidays like Hannukkah and Passover. We even got to try matzo, a type of Jewish bread enjoyed during Passover!

Our multicultural workforce reflects PicCollage’s international reach. Our main product has around 15 million users worldwide, especially in places like the US, Canada, UK, Japan, and Mexico.

Create Boldly

We’re always encouraged to try new ideas and products. Creativity is the core of what we do.

The organization of our company allows room for bold experimentation. We have two efforts: PicCollage and Explore. PicCollage is where we work on our main product. Explore is where we develop new products, such as Groupful, Cattitude, and VDO.

Examples of apps we’ve developed to spread fun and creativity

Another perk is that we have Flex Weeks. These are entire weeks without meetings where we can work on anything we want or take PTO. People often take this time to recharge, travel, or work on passion projects.

Finally, my favorite tradition is Innofest, which happens around twice a year. These are two-day hackathons where we stop regular work to come up with new product ideas. Past examples include a luxury Quarantine retreat, an online KTV app, Omnion, a cross-platform unit converter, and more.

Food, games, innovation — it doesn’t get better than this!

Live Well, Work Well

We believe people do their best creative work when they’re healthy and happy. This means:

Unlimited PTO (that you’re actually encouraged to take)

Flexible work hours and WFH option

Free lunch and dinner daily (+ endless snacks)

Free weekly in-office exercise classes (ex. Yoga, Boxing, HIIT)

Regular company outings and bonding

The list goes on…

People really care about you here. I can’t stress that enough.

When Covid-19 sent us into lockdown, our company gave every employee (interns included) a generous bonus to help us adjust. We were encouraged to prioritize our personal wellness over productivity.

At PicCollage, you’ll find that happy people = happy workplace = incredible work. We do what we do with plenty of laughter and drive.

From Sports Day 2020 when we competed against 7 other start-ups and won!

Always Be Learning

We have a strong learning culture and a passion for continuous improvement.

We learn from our users

Every week, we host user feedback sessions with 2 users to understand how we can best improve our products. We also have a Community team dedicated to maintaining close relationships with our users.

2. We learn from our peers

Every Friday, we have Sharing Sessions where people can share any topics of interest. We also host internal study groups. For instance, right now I’m reading Traction: A Startup Guide to Getting Customers with the Product team.

Virtual study groups on Gather

3. We learn from others

At PicCollage, you are given the resources and room to grow as a professional. In just eight months, I’ve attended two conferences for free. One of them was the UX Insights Festival, a renowned international conference. We also have subscriptions to learning resources like O’Reilly Media and Medium.

Before Covid-19, PicCollage even flew employees abroad to places like Toronto and San Francisco to attend conferences and/or learn about local cultures.