(Netta Kivilis, Marketing @ Keywee)
Keywee is hiring in New York and Tel Aviv, and I recently recommended a good friend and ex-colleague for an engineering position. After being contacted by us, he emailed me saying he had just started working at Big Famous Tech Company Whose Name Rhymes With Doodle. Did I have reasons for him to consider Doogle (oops) a bad career move, on his way to his dream job at Keywee?
It was a great question, and it got me thinking. Clearly, Goodle is an amazing company, and quite a pleasant place to work at — the cafeterias, the segways, the office slides. You won’t find any of that at Keywee (at least not yet). But pretty quickly, a few things you will find at Keywee came to mind.
Keywee is really fast.
This is one of the things I like most about Keywee: The company as a whole, as well as teams and individuals, move really fast. There’s no bureaucracy, very little hierarchy, and few other obstacles standing in the way of getting things done. Part of it is the smaller size of the company, but not all — there are companies of similar size where the pace is much slower. For Keywee, being fast is in our DNA – it’s one of our company values. As someone with a lot of ideas who loves to get stuff done, I find this liberating, rewarding, and just fun.
You get to be more than just X.
I’ve worked for big companies where you’re slotted into working on a small feature or a small product. That can be frustrating. Even if you happen to work on something more substantial, you’re still typically boxed into your official job description – be it engineering, marketing, product and so on.
At Keywee, everyone is allowed — pretty much expected / encouraged — to go beyond their official titles. Not to mention that because it’s a small company, engineers talk directly to customers, work closely with sales and marketing, do data analysis for PR campaigns, and so on. Keywees appreciate the fact that they get to see how the entire company operates from up close and can get involved in areas they’re interested in.
Real impact.
Every single person at Keywee has direct impact on the trajectory of the company. They own a substantial chunk of what their team does, and what they do on a daily basis truly makes a difference.
Back when I first transitioned from BigCo to SmallStartup, it occurred to me that if I was out sick for a week, SmallStartup‘s numbers for the month would likely be materially different… It’s both exciting and scary to be such a central pillar in a company.
Really interesting AI / machine learning.
Many startups nowadays flaunt their forays into “machine learning” / “deep learning” / AI / insert other buzzword du jour here. At Keywee, we truly do all of that – heck, we’re building software that will at some point in the (near?) future automatically write articles for award-winning newspapers. The technical scale and challenges are immense (and for the right person, that’s a good thing).
Fast Growth.
Sheryl Sandberg has this famous quote about joining a rocket ship. We don’t know if Keywee is a Facebook-caliber rocket ship, but we do know that we’ve been doubling in size (revenue, employees, customers) every year since being founded in 2013.
This means a lot of good things, and in particular, it means incredible personal and professional growth opportunities for everyone on the team. Folks who joined Keywee at the beginning have experienced it first hand — going from junior engineers to team leads, learning a ton, and watching a startup grow from within. One of our values is “We are growing together: As Keywee grows, I grow — and vice versa.” In one’s career, these opportunities are rare and can be game-changers.
We’ll see what my friend says. In the meanwhile, did I mention Keywee is hiring?
