The global uncertainty of the last two years has meant that growth across all industries has been in a state of flux. Although the pandemic continues to interrupt business as usual, tech is looking onward and upward for the year ahead with big growth plans on the horizon.
Projections by the International Data Corporation expect the tech industry to exceed $5.3 trillion growth in 2022, with CompTIA’s 2022 IT Industry Outlook study reporting a return to the pre-pandemic growth pattern of five to six percent growth each year. The employment rate in tech is expected to grow at around twice the rate of overall employment in the United States, with many occupations like data science growing at four to five times the national average.
“With such a wide need in the industry,” monday.com VP of Sales, Jamison Powell, told Built In, “there are a lot of opportunities for aggressive growth spanning all market segments.”
From startups to Fortune 500 companies, expansion in 2022 is an exciting prospect with limitless potential. But how can the industry specifically support this movement?
“Bringing new people on and helping them achieve professional growth and goals while learning from each other — it’s amazing to see,” James Hobson, CEO of Attune Insurance, said. “A team of curious, empathetic and ambitious people allows us to meet and surpass our goals while growing relationships and still having fun.”
Tell us a bit about your growth plans for the year ahead.
With such a wide need in the industry, there are a lot of opportunities for aggressive growth spanning all market segments. Every team is growing, so new and additional teams are forming to drive and support that expansion.
The speed of this growth relies on a few different areas that we see as ‘revenue runways,’ each with different conditions, lengths, directions, customer journeys and experiences. We always ensure that we’re utilizing every aspect of the runways we have, optimizing the runways in use and building new runways for scale.
GROWTH INITIATIVES
- Small to medium sized businesses: This area used to be self-serve for us, but with our product being used more company-wide as a true WorkOS, we’ve seen the scale and ability to help these businesses, as well as the chance for large internal upward progression into other segments.
- Optimization: Efforts on both the new business and the account management front are underway, including workspaces for best practices guidance and customer segmentation for personalized journeys.
- Outbound: This is the newest runway effort to supplement our inbound and flywheel approaches.
What excites you most about this next period of growth?
Aside from the growth in our scale, I’m most excited about the opportunities unlocked by the product. Our low code and no code WorkOS allows any team or business to leverage the platform how they work, as opposed to the way the software works. Often they desire guidance and we’re there to help.
Templates were a great start, but the productization of specific solutions like CRM, marketing and projects is underway to enable true product types. These will be inclusive of all the areas one would expect in that solution, yet include the flexibility to be customized to the way each individual works. With that, there is growth in specialization efforts. This touches many areas in the business beyond just product, including outbound efforts in sales and marketing to target our ideal customers with specific products and solutions, AMs and CSMs expanding to other departments to add additional value, and SEs scaling to support the specialization of these new products.
With such a wide need in the industry, there are a lot of opportunities for aggressive growth spanning all market segments.”
What are three key characteristics you look for in a new team member? Why are these characteristics important for the work you do?
The main characteristics I look for in a new team member are intrinsic motivation, collaboration and love for the product. Intrinsic motivation is important because scaling in hyper-growth is not easy. So motivation, transparency and alignment to the big picture drives us forward. Teamwork is at the heart of everything we do, so the ability to collaborate is essential. This not only feeds that intrinsic motivation as it’s a larger collective effort, but the value derived for our teams and customers is much greater than that of an individual. Lastly, I look for love of the product. It’s a differentiator to be your own best-use case, with a desire to help any customer achieve the same.
Tell us a bit about your growth plans for the year ahead.
DISQO’s core marketing and advertising products have grown very quickly because our customers value their differentiation. However, our vision to build those products into a single-source consumer insights platform, fueled by our direct and consented consumer relationships, is pushing us into a hyper-growth period over the next couple of years.
We’re going to pour gas on that fire by doubling down on engineering and building for scale. This is our plan across the org, but especially in areas where we have a distinctive competitive advantage like our data engineering teams. Everyone who joins us this year will have a unique opportunity to make a lasting impact on DISQO’s products, our success and the industry as a whole.
What excites you most about this next period of growth?
The fun thing about working at a startup like DISQO is the way our growth accelerates the learning curve for team members. I’m most excited about the game-changing personal growth for the people who join DISQO on this ride. There’s nothing quite like making and then delivering on big bets, and you build life-long relationships with your coworkers in those crucible environments. It takes a special kind of person to recognize the growth opportunity and rise to the challenges posed by the start-up environment. Those are the people I love to work with and who love to work at DISQO.
It takes a special kind of person to recognize the growth opportunity and rise to the challenges posed by the startup environment.”
What are three key characteristics you look for in a new team member? Why are these characteristics important for the work you do?
The traits I universally admire and search out in people are embedded in our culture and values. I’ve found that an intellectual curiosity or ‘growth mindset’ — a desire to constantly learn and adapt — is the best indicator of how someone will perform over time. Next, I look for people who relentlessly build and challenge the status quo, reflecting our value in innovation. Lastly, but perhaps most importantly, I look for someone who I can trust and respect. Entrepreneur Naval Ravikant, former CEO of AngelList, put it best when he said, “If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day.” This creates professional and personal value above and beyond the product, the P&L and the company.
Tell us a bit about your growth plans for the year ahead.
Octane has created a massive business by modernizing financing in under-served verticals like powersports and outdoor power equipment. Our all-digital instant process replaces human underwriters and physical paperwork with proprietary algorithms and a simple online process. This year, we are allocating significant resources across the business to a few key focuses, with the largest headcount growth in product and technology. We’re launching in multiple new verticals, including trailers, RVs and boats. We are expanding and adding features to our popular consumer-facing prequalification and digital retailing products, automating every step of the purchase process and maintaining our clear speed advantage. As we continue to grow exponentially, we’re also further investing in scalability and security. To accomplish these parallel growth initiatives, we have organized our goals into clear objectives and key results. Every team member has agency to solve problems to achieve those objectives.
What new opportunities or capabilities will be unlocked for your team as more people join and what impact will that have on the business?
Making lending fast and transparent sounds simple, but there are many components involved in simplifying the process, offering consumers and merchants an intuitive, quick path to sale while making the smartest credit decisions. As we increase our number of teams, we further diversify the solutions we test in the market. But headcount growth isn’t just about how many products we can build. I look at each hire as a peer mentor who brings a new set of experiences and skills. Everyone can benefit from diversity of thought — it’s how we grow. The expanding team brings leadership opportunities for those on a management track and our rapid growth has allowed each delivery team to work consistently toward its objectives, making step-change improvements in the business. I am humbled by the creativity I have seen from our teams as they work to make our already-great experience even better for our customers.
Everyone can benefit from diversity of thought — it’s how we grow.”
What are three key characteristics you look for in a new team member?
There are many things we look for on the product team, but the three that I’ve found to be most important are the ability to simplify, empathy and positivity.
The ability to simplify is the most critical skill for a product professional. People think product management is about having amazing ideas — and of course that’s part of it — but there are always more good ideas than people to build them, so prioritizing and validating hypotheses quickly is what drives success. Secondly, I look for empathy in the sense of the ability to conceive of elegant solutions to user needs based on market research, customer feedback, analytics and vision. Our customers have high expectations and our ability to meet and exceed them is based on caring deeply about their needs. Lastly, the assumption of positive intent is the cultural value that’s most engrained at Octane. It is existential to us because we’re a company full of smart, passionate, driven people who aren’t afraid of disagreement. With positivity, we can feel good about voicing constructive dissent so the best ideas see the light of day.
Tell us a bit about your growth plans for the year ahead.
With significant growth worldwide and our position in the brand protection space, our North American commercial team keeps expanding. We’re projecting to grow our team a minimum of 50 percent throughout this year. New tech capabilities, product offerings and our client-centric approach are the main drives of this growth.
What excites you most about this next period of growth?
Helping everyone on my team exceed their targets while crafting their sales and consultative skills excites me. We’re problem solvers by nature. And that’s what I’m trying to communicate every day. I’m looking to solidify our position as the leading brand protection provider worldwide, as well as in the U.S.
We’re problem solvers by nature. And that’s what I’m trying to communicate every day.”
What are three key characteristics you look for in a new team member?
Since we’re experiencing significant growth, I’d say that commitment, adaptability and transparency are the key characteristics that I look for in new team members. These values are also the essence of our team and are essential in our industry.
Tell us a bit about your growth plans for the year ahead.
Coming off the back of a $100 million Series B fundraise last summer, this year is going to be a pivotal one in quip’s growth story. These funds are being invested in the continued growth and expansion of our personal oral care product business, as well as launching, testing and scaling numerous facets of our professional dental services, including a new digital oral healthcare platform.
While only the tip of the iceberg, 2021 was our first year of offering a digital oral care companion app to our members, which helps track, coach and reward members for better oral care habits. This platform is going to expand this year through new features and incredibly exciting healthcare partnerships.
We also launched our first professional service, quip aligners, ready for a strong push in DTC and through key partnerships in 2022, which will be another core growth initiative. Our teams are scaling across the board to support this initiative and more, but in particular our software, services, sales and marketing teams are going to see significant growth.
What excites you most about this next period of growth?
These key healthcare platform and service initiatives allow us to continue to balance building “startups within our startup” while we also grow and mature our core business. The beauty of this notion for team members is that there is the excitement, experimentation and speed of developing new products that a startup brings, balanced with the security, systems and processes of a more mature Series B company, with eight million existing customers and a strong track record of business growth and efficiency. This environment can lead to extremely exciting outcomes and a great setting to work, learn, develop and innovate in.
There is the excitement and experimentation that a startup brings, balanced with the security, systems and processes of a more mature Series B company.”
What are three key characteristics you look for in a new team member?
We’ve always fostered a culture of collaboration and autonomy at quip. We’re a design-focused company that thinks through every aspect of our customer’s experience.
Firstly, we look for curiosity. We have a strong preference for data and thinking over the obvious solution or answer. Having an understanding of more than one customer path ensures that we provide a consistent customer experience. Next, we look for agility. As a business, moving faster than entrenched incumbents is critical to our success. And we only do this through our ability to adapt and be flexible to our environment. Lastly, it is important our new team members have humility. A constant level of humility is required to challenge our own assumptions — when looking for new candidates we prioritize people who are looking to learn from their teammates, our customers and the dental professional community.
Tell us a bit about your growth plans for the year ahead.
Since 2017, we’ve worked tirelessly to bring new insurance solutions to brokers and small businesses. In that time, we’ve experienced tremendous growth — in our customer base, product, premium and employee count.
Last year, we joined Coalition, a cyber insurance and security provider, to build the future of insurance. This acquisition gives us additional support behind growth initiatives and product expansion, and together, we’re creating new technologies and using data to transform the insurance experience and risk management.
In 2022, we’re focusing on expanding all areas of the business and to succeed, we need to continue to grow, focusing on our engineering and revenue teams.
What excites you most about this next period of growth?
We’re most excited about the future of our platform and bringing Cyber insurance to our brokers. We now have an opportunity to really blow the ceiling off the industry and make a huge, lasting impact. That excitement is really resonating with our team and our customers.
We’re also really excited about the growth we’re seeing across the organization. Bringing new people on and helping them achieve professional growth and goals while learning from each other — it’s amazing to see.
A team of curious, empathetic and ambitious people allows us to meet and surpass our goals while growing relationships and having fun.”
What are three key characteristics you look for in a new team member?
We always look for curiosity, empathy and ambition in a new team member. Our team is excited and motivated about our mission to make small business insurance easier, for everyone. We’re doing something no one’s ever done before, so a team of curious, empathetic and ambitious people allows us to meet and surpass our goals while growing relationships and having fun. Attune has an incredible team of smart people who value continuous learning and find reward in challenges and tough work.
Tell us a bit about your growth plans for the year ahead.
As a company, we are pushing more into the enterprise and hiring in all roles that help support that growth. We work with amazing brands like Peloton, Etsy, Zoom and more, and are now massively increasing our investment in product. We have a particularly exciting vision around analytics, machine learning and improving our UX for customer support managers.
What excites you most about this next period of growth?
I’m most excited about seeing how our culture scales, strengthens and manifests itself into a unique group of people working together toward a common goal. We have three simple values — passion, evolution and structured thinking with socratic debate — that we constantly try to find ways to reinforce into our daily habits. I hope people can feel our culture through our energy and ambition, the clear open-minded discussions we have, the constant questions people ask to understand what’s going on deeper, and the structured approach to complex decisions.
Based on our hiring strategy this year, we will be enabling more leadership opportunities, more focused work for individuals, and higher autonomy and ownership of important outcomes within intentionally small pods.
I’m most excited about seeing how our culture scales, strengthens and manifests itself into a unique group of people working together.”
What are three key characteristics you look for in a new team member?
Can you feel their love for their craft? Are they willing to rethink their positions on a topic, even if it could make them look bad? How rigorous are their decision-making processes? We feel that if people embody these values, the probability of MaestroQA achieving its mission increases.
Tell us a bit about your growth plans for the year ahead.
Pinwheel is in the midst of an exciting growth period heading into 2022! Demand is accelerating faster than ever, so we’ll be investing in scaling our team across all functions to ensure we continue to delight customers and work toward our mission of creating a fairer financial system. We recently opened our New York City office and expect to more than double our headcount over the next few quarters, with a particular focus on our engineering, product, design and go-to-market teams, as we roll out new products to enable financial innovators to build the products of the future.
What excites you most about this next period of growth?
There are two things that excite me most about this phase of growth. The first is exploring new use cases with customers and co-building novel financial products. For example, we’re enabling our customers to build earned wage access products — a way for consumers to get paid daily instead of waiting for their biweekly or monthly paychecks. With on-demand wage access, people can avoid overdraft fees and predatory products like payday loans to make ends meet. These products not only move the industry forward — they manifest our mission of building a fairer financial system.
The second thing I’m excited about is further developing and codifying Pinwheel’s culture. There are three items that allow our team to do their best work — purpose, people and impact. Firstly, purpose is important because you need to wake up every day knowing that your work truly matters and has tangible effects on society. Secondly, you should constantly be impressed and inspired by the people you work with. Third, the work you do must have a clear, direct and meaningful impact on the outcome of the company. You are not just a cog in the machine. We’re excited to develop the systems to build a culture where our team feels strongly about having all three of these!
When we strive to improve ourselves every day, our output reflects that and our customers and consumers ultimately reap the rewards.”
What are three key characteristics you look for in a new team member?
We have a saying, “Don’t limbo, hurdle.” This means that we continue to raise the bar, no matter what we do. When we strive to improve ourselves every day, our output reflects that and our customers and consumers ultimately reap the rewards.
To ensure we have a team of hurdlers, we first look for grit. Is this person unstoppable in accomplishing their goals? Will they move mountains to succeed? Startups are challenging as you’re working to unseat better resourced, distributed and branded incumbents. Our greatest advantage is faster execution.
The second trait we look for is curiosity. Does this person have an insatiable thirst for knowledge? Do they continue to ask the right questions until they deeply understand the situation? Curiosity is a universal trait among high performers and we aim to foster that at Pinwheel.
Finally, we look for craftsmanship. Does this person do their best work each and every day, sweating the minutia and holding themselves and others to the highest standards? We want people who are raising the bar to achieve their best work!
Tell us a bit about your growth plans for the year ahead.
Axial is the largest digital marketplace for buying and selling small and mid-size businesses. Our 2022 goal is to magnify Axial’s market leadership by investing in technology, talent and innovative growth strategies to double our market share and increase revenue by 50 to 100 percent via four core strategies.
CORE STRATEGIES
- Investing in top-notch product and engineering talent, increasing our members’ access to proprietary datasets, enhancing the accuracy of our matches and continuing to automate manual, offline processes.
- Hiring additional growth marketing personnel to integrate our media platform into our product experience.
- Building out our business operations and HR teams.
- Continuing to hire into our member success team to build on the valuable human layer that complements our product experience.
What new opportunities or capabilities will be unlocked for your team as more people join and what impact will that have on the business?
Axial’s mission is to unleash the potential of private capital markets for entrepreneurs around the world, with the goal of achieving enough impact as a business to fundamentally change the global economy. Our ability to achieve this mission is a direct result of the number of high quality members that are engaging in meaningful interactions on Axial’s platform.
Growing our team this year is all about driving a faster speed of high-quality execution. New members will be joining more frequently, our team will be releasing high quality product features with greater velocity and, as a company, we will be experimenting with a greater number of innovative growth tactics. We will have more data at our fingertips to know which strategies are working and where we need to double down.
The increased pace of member growth will not only allow us to widen our economic impact, but will be an exciting opportunity and challenge for every one of our employees to grow personally and professionally.
We will have more data at our fingertips to know which strategies are working and where we need to double down.”
What are three key characteristics you look for in a new team member?
Firstly, we look for curiosity. As a high-growth technology company pioneering a unique business model, intellectual curiosity is central to the discovery of new and better ways to serve our members. New hires need to be constantly thinking outside the box for fresh, new ways to meet members’ ever-changing needs. Beyond intellectual curiosity, we seek employees who are hyper-curious about their own performance, have a hunger for feedback and explore avenues for accelerating their personal growth.
Next, we look for quick, agile learners. Given Axial’s rapid rate of change and steep learning curve, we seek hires who are innately comfortable with absorbing and synthesizing complex information and respond with smart, insightful recommendations. We prize critical thinking — the ability to join disparate dots, recover from errors and continuously iterate solutions.
Lastly, we look for entrepreneurial self-starters. Axial requires new hires to think and act like owners. Employees are expected to take initiative, proactively fill gaps as they emerge and always go the extra mile in supporting both their peers and customer needs. We want all of our employees to invest deliberately in learning to constantly raise their game.
