Growing a Sustainable Culture at a Remote Tech Startup
Published: 2024-02-02 14:34:47

---
title: Growing a Sustainable Culture at a Remote Tech Startup
published: true
date: 2024-01-23 20:08:50 UTC
tags: 
canonical_url: https://authzed.com/blog/growing-a-sustainable-culture-at-a-remote-tech-startup
---

Years ago, I remember reading [Sam Kim’s blog post](https://authzed.com/blog/starting-at-authzed) about joining a remote company during pandemic times - and I thought “Wow, I could work for a company like this.” Before even bringing on a person to focus on the people aspect of the company (hi, that’s me!), AuthZed was focused — from the beginning, and quite by default — on protecting the time of each team member with regular meetings (and not meetings for meetings’ sake), strong written communication between every team member, and longer design and technical questions via video call.

This is my favorite bit of that blog post:

> “I’d summarize my onboarding experience as being welcomed into healthy tensions. The autonomy of figuring out how to work towards a weekly theme but the accountability of shared daily goals. Working remotely but having deeply connected moments. Welcoming different opinions but sharing the commitment to get to better solutions for our users. One thing in harmony, though, is as we continue to improve how we work together, the better we get at building the best product for our users.”

Since 2021, when Sam’s blog post was written, our company has grown sevenfold. How do we continue, as we grow, to embrace those new healthy tensions? How do we have deeply connected moments virtually, when there are more people and projects to manage daily? How do we have a strong remote work culture? How can we continue to improve ourselves — individually and as a team — to get better at building the best authorization products and tools?

And ultimately - what is **our** culture?

## What is our culture?

As companies grow and the makeup of each team within a company changes, company culture changes too. Especially remote work culture! This is less of a “how to build team culture remotely” post (although that is a great idea for another post!) and more of a snapshot in time. I want to give you a feeling for how we answer the question of “What is the culture AuthZed?” at this time in our history.

Our culture can be summarized into one sentence: _ **“Trust each other.”** _ From this stems the agency for each AuthZedder personally to do their job well. The tenets of our company culture include:

- **Agency**

- **Collaboration**

- **Open-mindness**

## Evolving our culture

I’m excited to see how our AuthZed team grows and changes as we add more remote employees; how the tenets of our company culture evolve as our digital world changes and the work we do in the authorization space becomes more and more necessary. We are on the edge of something BIG with Zanzibar and SpiceDB, we have seen huge adoption with our open source and our products — and I can’t wait to see where our journey takes us.

Are you a remote worker and enjoy having the work life balance a remote work environment brings? We are building a strong remote workforce - join us!

P.S. - here are some of my favorite photos from our last offsite (and some team building activities!), 3 days after I started at AuthZed.

![12 AuthZed employees smiling outside on a driveway surrounded by grass](https://authzed.com/images/upload/20230912_094901~3.jpg)

![An AuthZedder at a kitchen counter surrounded by chopped vegetables](https://authzed.com/images/upload/pxl_20230911_173807827.mp.jpg "Startup culture can mean making a meal for our colleagues!")