In the midst of rapid expansion, seven New York companies are pausing to reflect on the exciting growth this year brought them — and will continue to bring — as they extend their customer bases, pioneer new projects and recruit talent like never before.
Though the featured companies span a range of different industries — including finance, retail, cybersecurity and information technology — they are united in their dogged pursuit of growth with successful results. Fintech startup LoanStreet, for example, tripled its team in the past year, while credit trading company Trumid expects its growing technology organization will account for more than half of its staff headcount.
Fueled by rising consumer demands and, in some cases, buoyed by lucrative Series funding or recent mergers, these companies are investing in ambitious initiatives. At e-commerce platform Bespoke Post, leaders are excited to optimize the company’s website for organic search and launch original editorial content. Cybersecurity company HUMAN is revamping its skills training and jumpstarting a lunch-and-learn series to ensure continued development for its expanding team.
Hiring across departments in engineering, data, design, operations, sales and more, leaders repeatedly stated their desire for candidates who are passionate, curious and — perhaps most of all — flexible.
“If there’s one constant in a startup, it’s change,” said Shannon Smith, vice president of engineering at Onna. “As we progress, there are times when we choose to shift priorities, times when the market shifts around us and times when the makeup of the team changes. It is important for team members to be able to adapt and accelerate in new conditions.”
Built In New York connected with leaders from Trumid, Dynamic Yield, Bespoke Post and four other companies to get the inside scoop on what lies ahead for their fast-growing workplaces, and who they are looking for to join them on their journeys.
Trumid, a fintech focused on credit trading, is expanding its technology organization, which accounts for more than half of its anticipated staff this year. Company leaders are excited about a number of initiatives including adding new trading protocols and maximizing their current business.
To help with these projects, recruitment leaders are searching for candidates who stay nimble, keep work timely and relevant, are passionate about finding solutions and possess domain expertise.
What teams will be growing most quickly? What projects or initiatives are driving this growth?
We knew 2022 was going to be an exciting growth year for Trumid, centered firmly around the scaling of our technology division, which accounts for more than 50 percent of our planned headcount for the year. We work hard to ensure an agile and flexible technology stack to enable us to react quickly to market opportunities and client needs. Adding key personnel across technology is key to driving this focus and further advancing our tech-enabled trading solutions, combining technology, intuitive product design and market expertise.
As we head into the second half of the year, maximizing the momentum of our existing business, expanding our footprint to include new trading protocols and ensuring there is capacity to continue to innovate and enhance our processes are driving our headcount growth. Our business performance remains strong with year-over-year growth trends reflecting an increase in the number of active traders on our platform, as well as growth in both volume and market share.
With the continued electronification of the fixed income market, our technology, engineering, data and intelligence and infrastructure teams are at the core of Trumid, working closely with the business to create, iterate and bring ideas to life.
What new opportunities or capabilities will be unlocked for your team as more people join, and what impact will that have on the business?
The first half of the year focused heavily on attracting and hiring key leaders who could bring their expertise and knowledge to stand up and advance key functions — such as talent, communications and marketing. With strong leadership across all core functions, we can remain laser focused on our firmwide goals, and we are excited to see the continued acceleration of our business.
As we grow and expand, so does the complexity of our organization, creating new structures which, in turn, create new opportunities for employees to advance internally. Whether through promotion or lateral moves, individuals can broaden their areas of expertise and stretch their skills and technical capabilities in alignment with their long-term career goals.
Trumid is an organization that recognizes and values feedback. We recently completed our mid-year review process, an opportunity to highlight individual and team accomplishments and to focus on career development and personal growth. We are excited to see the momentum of our business continue into quarter four and 2023, as our new leaders and new hires acclimate into their roles.
Teams who are passionate about their work always create an environment in which there is a collective and collaborative effort to find the best solutions.”
What are three key characteristics you look for in a new team member? Why are these characteristics important for the work you do?
Our approach to engaging candidates starts early during the hiring process. We ensure a fantastic candidate-centric experience, where they can meet and connect with multiple colleagues across teams, as well as have conversations around where the role and their experiences and knowledge intersect.
Success at Trumid is driven by a set of core characteristics that also define our culture. First, staying nimble is always a proven winner. We are a small and agile team, so needing to pivot is key to success. Second, keeping work timely and relevant is critical and, in return, we found our teams are more engaged and invested.
Third, finding solutions is fun. Teams who are passionate about their work always create an environment in which there is a collective and collaborative effort to find the best solutions and implement them. Finally, domain expertise to create immediate impact in our tech ecosystem. When combined, we find new hires thrive in our fast-paced environment where no day will be like the one before.
Dynamic Yield, which hosts a customer personalization platform for brands, is experiencing exciting growth potential in part due to its recent acquisition by Mastercard. As the marketing technology company expands, it is looking to hire “good people” who they believe will thrive at the company and attract additional talent.
Tell us a bit about your growth plans for the months ahead.
Dynamic Yield just entered an exciting phase in our company’s history following our recent acquisition by Mastercard, through which we joined its data and services division to bring greater personalization to some of the world’s biggest brands. This represents an amazing opportunity to be a part of the groundbreaking, cross-departmental work that is taking place across both Dynamic Yield’s core team and Mastercard’s ecosystem to unlock new horizons of growth and drive innovation for companies within digital commerce, finance, quick-service restaurants, travel, and beyond.
New hires at Dynamic Yield will not only get to be a part of this transformative work, but will also have access to expansive growth and development opportunities as a Mastercard company.”
What excites you most about this next period of growth?
Dynamic Yield serves more than 400 global retailers, banks and companies across verticals, and many of Mastercard’s data and services solutions are already in use by approximately four out of five of the National Retail Federation’s top 20 retailers.
The combination of our strategic capabilities, technologies and teams creates limitless possibilities to influence the larger world of customer experience. For example, our customers now have access to additional Mastercard services across digital commerce, data analytics and insights, which can now also be supercharged by Dynamic Yield’s industry-leading personalization technology.
We’re really excited about the enormous potential to create a more open and agnostic marketing technology landscape amid the growing chaos of complex stacks that don’t cater enough to the nuances of different industries. New hires at Dynamic Yield will not only get to be a part of this transformative work, but will also have access to expansive growth and development opportunities as a Mastercard company.
What are three key characteristics you look for in a new team member? Why are these characteristics important for the work you do?
Dynamic Yield looks for good people. When the company was founded, our belief was that good people would flourish and, in turn, hire more good people. Mastercard has similar beliefs. Together, we can shape a better tomorrow, be a force for good and unlock the potential in each other.
Across teams, we look for people who care deeply about the quality and value of their work. Hundreds of good people later, we see the passion that our research and development and product teams have infused into the development of our technology. This has made us industry-leading in the eyes of Gartner, Forrester, G2 and TrustRadius.
Our sales team is hungry, successfully pitching our amazing products and services to leading brands across the globe. The customer success department cares deeply about the value our platform drives for the brands using it, not only during the initial onboarding period but throughout their lifetime as customers. Our growing marketing team breathes life into the brand and all of our activities. Our people leaders understand that all of this hard work — on behalf of all employees, including departments unmentioned — requires a special level of attention and recognition.
Bespoke Post, a lifestyle subscription service and e-commerce platform, is growing its design and engineering teams. Leaders are eager to tackle different initiatives, including improving the company’s homepage experience, optimizing its subscription service and expanding into editorial content.
When adding new hires, Bespoke Post leaders are looking for curious, flexible, empathetic people.
What teams are growing most quickly? What projects or initiatives are driving this growth?
Our main priority is to grow the design and engineering teams. We’re currently investing in growing our e-commerce shop, and we’re working closely with the merchandise team to determine how to build out an improved homepage experience that elevates the shop and drives directly to it.
Our subscription service is still the bread and butter of our company, so we’re continuing to optimize that business. We’re eager to continually improve our acquisition and retention. However, since it’s already established, our work there remains more focused on efficiency. The shop is somewhat new, so it requires further individualized focus. As the company grows, the team will grow, and the need for more designers and engineers will as well.
We’re at an exciting stage of growth, and our business stability creates a ton of space to experiment.”
What excites you most about this next period of growth?
We’re at an exciting stage of growth, and our business stability creates a ton of space to experiment. We’re currently working on optimizing our site for organic search so that both our e-commerce and subscription side appear in searches and drive organic traffic. This is vital during a period when paid traffic is getting more expensive, less efficient and less targeted. In that sense, there’s a ton of opportunity available because investing in our e-commerce side leads to better conversions and customers finding what they want more easily.
Taking advantage of this opportunity requires working cross-functionally. We’re utilizing the merchandising team to locate improvements, using simple, larger image modules to connect to product detail pages and expanded brand and collection pages. We’re also finally getting into content, and we’re utilizing our editorial side to describe our products and underscore our lifestyle brand.
We can further bring the vision of Bespoke Post to life using content, imagery and videos generated by the creative team. From a product perspective, we want to make all the moving parts fit together seamlessly and naturally.
What are three key characteristics you look for in a new team member? Why are these characteristics important for the work you do?
Curiosity is the number one thing I look for. You need to be curious about the business in order to work creatively. In my experience, it’s naturally followed by flexibility and communication. Also, having patience and empathy for many different types is crucial to working well together.
When you’re able to engage with a variety of stakeholders, you can pull thoughts and ideas out of them and cohesively share that. I want to work with someone who discusses ongoing projects within the business beyond their scope of work, because it often ends up holistically mattering to Bespoke Post. Thinking outside of the box and locating efficiencies and pain points that go beyond answering a specific need demonstrates creative thinking and can impact the company on a larger scale.
It’s up to the product team to stay curious and create connections. One way we’re currently addressing that is by giving engineers visibility over what people are requesting and why they’re asking for it. By encouraging dialogue, continued discussion and curiosity over the basis of reasoning, we increase the understanding of how things can be built, general timelines, reasonable expectations and shared empathy.
In the past year, LoanStreet, a fintech startup that helps community lenders share loans, tripled its workforce. Bolstered by a growing customer base and successful Series B funding, LoanStreet is showing no signs of slowing down as it continues to hire engineers, designers, product and project managers and salespeople.
The company’s most important product release this year is its commercial loan servicing solution, which leaders say will benefit local communities and their small- and medium-sized businesses by connecting lenders, co-lenders and borrowers on a single platform.
What teams will be growing most quickly? What projects or initiatives are driving this growth?
This is such an exciting time for LoanStreet. Our workforce is three times larger than a year ago, and we are continuing to add talented engineers, designers, product and project managers and salespeople to help create and deploy technology solutions that are driving innovation for the loan industry.
Fueled both by our success in growing our customer base to more than 1,300 financial institutions, as well as our Series B funding in February 2022, LoanStreet is growing more aggressively than ever.
In addition to enhancing our one-of-a-kind loan trading and reporting platform and expanding the number of credit unions and community banks using it, we are developing even more powerful loan analytics tools and executing on our plans for our commercial loan servicing platform.
Over the next several months, we are launching material additions to our analytics capabilities that will enable customers to understand their loan portfolios in meaningful ways that were historically unavailable to them. As for our commercial loan servicing platform, we are adding new features nearly every two weeks and will provide lenders with a solution that is even more intuitive and powerful.
Our team is excited that this offering will allow lenders to better support their local communities and small- and medium-sized businesses.”
What excites you most about this next period of growth?
At LoanStreet, we pride ourselves with building highly innovative technology solutions that help bring people together. One of the most important product releases in 2022 is our commercial loan servicing solution that will seamlessly connect lenders, co-lenders and borrowers on a single platform. This truly unique suite of loan servicing tools, which will introduce unprecedented efficiency for lending institutions, will enable customers immediate access to critical information and allow borrowers to self-service their loan workflows.
Our team is excited that this offering will allow lenders to better support their local communities and small- and medium-sized businesses. Enabling more loans with more automation and less administrative overhead could never be more important during this period of economic uncertainty.
What are three key characteristics you look for in a new team member? Why are these characteristics important for the work you do?
At LoanStreet, our culture centers around team members being humble, smart, engaged and, importantly, taking ownership. Developing innovative, enterprise financial technology is a complex and nuanced undertaking that requires a broad range of skills and talents to deliver meaningful products to clients.
Our culture encourages each of us to bring our best to the table, leveraging our diversity and varied experiences to meet high standards of delivering generational products to financial institutions.
Rho, which provides businesses with an automated spend and cash management platform, is doubling investments in its growth, product and sales departments. On a mission to “make finance frictionless” for its customers, Rho is looking to add high-performing team members who prioritize making an impact and bring diverse perspectives.
What teams will be growing most quickly?
The Rho platform has everything finance leaders need to run their businesses, which is a direct result of the investments we’ve made over the last year to build a world-class product. Moving forward, we’re doubling our investment in the growth, product and sales functions to create new capabilities and help more customers make finance frictionless with Rho.
What new opportunities or capabilities will be unlocked for your team as more people join, and what impact will that have on the business?
Finance teams are under significant pressure in today’s macroeconomic environment, and they need our support more than ever. Companies are looking for intelligent ways to cut back on spending, automate to save time and resources, and steer their businesses through the current economic environment. What excites us most is the opportunity to help our customers tackle these challenges.
Our latest launch of expense-management capabilities within the Rho platform is a great example. Early customer feedback has been positive, so we’re focused on extending this momentum.
We look for high performers who move fast, know how to prioritize for impact and bring diverse skill sets and perspectives.”
What are three key characteristics you look for in a new team member? Why are these characteristics important for the work you do?
Rho’s company values are speed, precision, diversity, empathy and creativity, and we hire for these attributes.
We look for high performers who move fast, know how to prioritize for impact and bring diverse skill sets and perspectives to help make our customers’ lives easier. They lead with empathy and push themselves to imagine exciting new possibilities and outcomes that defy the status quo.
Onna, a knowledge integration platform, is expanding its platform and solutions teams. Leaders are excited by a current companywide initiative to extend APIs to more data sources, thereby turning fragmented data into powerful knowledge for customers.
To help with this initiative and others, managers are hiring people who are innovative, creative, resilient and have a bias for action.
What teams will be growing most quickly? What projects or initiatives are driving this growth?
Throughout Onna’s history, we have helped companies manage and make sense of their fragmented data. We have seen a lot of success in delivering connectivity across a few dozen cloud systems to bring together content, collaboration and communication data, and brought value to some of the world’s premier companies through our eDiscovery solution.
In our next stages, we are expanding in both connectivity and solutions. Our platform team is growing to extend our reach into more ecospheres housing unstructured data, while also broadening our breadth of connectivity through our open API. Additionally, our solutions team is growing to provide even more value for our end users through new use cases.
What excites you most about this next period of growth?
If I were to choose one thing I am most excited about, it would be extending our APIs to reach an almost limitless set of data sources used within our customers’ businesses. Onna’s pre-built connectors gave us the ability to integrate data from some of the world’s most widely used cloud tools. Our APIs will extend that reach, while also allowing us to to work more closely with our customers to generate additional value from the data they store in more niche tooling and in-house, proprietary systems. This will show the real power Onna has to turn fragmented data into knowledge.
I look for resilience. If there’s one constant in a startup, it’s change.”
What are three key characteristics you look for in a new team member? Why are these characteristics important for the work you do?
One characteristic is having a bias for action. In a growing organization, it is incredibly important to move quickly. We are building a culture of ownership, where engineers are encouraged to determine and implement solutions, so I look for engineers who have a history of seeing and solving problems.
Other characteristics are innovation and creativity. Onna has built a great foundation for both our business and our platform, but we know the world around us is always changing and forcing us to adapt. We solve new problems as we scale, address new use cases and continuously extend our connectivity. We look for humble experts who can bring their wealth of knowledge and experience to help solve some of these challenges. I look at how they have brought innovation to previous roles and encourage them to do similar things at Onna.
Finally, I look for resilience. If there’s one constant in a startup, it’s change. Onna is solving a huge business challenge made up of a plethora of interesting engineering problems. As we progress, there are times when we choose to shift priorities, times when the market shifts around us and times when the makeup of the team changes. It is important for team members to be able to adapt and accelerate in new conditions.
HUMAN, a cybersecurity company that helps businesses stop bot attacks, is growing rapidly in part as a result of its recent merger with PerimeterX, a provider of identity fraud prevention solutions.
Leaders say that with a mission to “protect the integrity of the internet,” it’s essential for the company to recruit employees — whom they refer to as “Humans” — with diverse perspectives from around the world. As the team expands, HUMAN is looking for candidates who are passionate, agile team players.
Tell us a bit about your growth plans for the months ahead.
Our company is rapidly growing as HUMAN and PerimeterX join forces to become a leader in protecting media and enterprise customers from bot attacks, identity abuse and fraud across advertising, e-commerce and cybersecurity. We’re taking this opportunity to invest in our products and the development of our most valuable asset, our Humans.
My team is revamping our growth and development review process, providing key soft skills training and launching a lunch-and-learn series to ensure every Human has the right tools and skills to develop as we enter the next growth stage of our business.
What excites you most about this next period of growth?
Every new Human who is a part of our company has an opportunity to impact our business through their work, ideas and feedback. As we expand globally and add new friendly faces to our teams, we embrace diversity of thought to increase knowledge sharing and innovation. We understand it takes diverse perspectives to protect the integrity of the internet and ensure all Humans can openly share thoughts and feedback through regular all-hands meetings, leadership ask me anything sessions, anonymous employee engagement surveys and employee focus groups.
Our recent merger gives us an exciting opportunity to learn from even more new Humans across our business so we can leverage each other’s ideas and identify best practices to share throughout the organization. There is no “us versus them,” but rather “how do we win as a team?” As we enter this next stage of growth, our teams are thrilled to get together both virtually and in person around the world.
In the new world of work, an individual must have the agility needed to adapt with the business. You must ‘be a hacker’ and ‘own it.’”
What are three key characteristics you look for in a new team member? Why are these characteristics important for the work you do?
I look for three qualities in new team members: passion, agility and being a team player.
In order to make an impact on our mission, you have to be passionate about what you do and with whom you impact. One thing that inspires me most is seeing our mission-driven teams “put Humans first” by supporting each other and our customers.
In the new world of work, an individual must have the agility needed to adapt with the business. You must “be a hacker”and “own it.” We never stop growing and are always looking for new ways to improve. We take accountability and learn from our mistakes. That’s part of what makes us HUMAN.
Lastly, we support each other throughout the journey. When one of us wins, we win as a team. Whether someone accomplishes something at work or in their personal life, we celebrate our wins together and lift each other up. It’s the little things that count when you are on a mission to protect the integrity of the internet.
