Our Company Handbook

A Collaborative Handbook for our Team & Community

This handbook has gone through a number of changes over the years and this version is no exception! This version should be the most "usable" as there's only a few pages to review (and update...)!

This repository serves these purposes:

1. Gives a high-level overview of who we are, what we do, and why we do what we do...
2. Our compensation, benefits, and employment policies for our staff and team...
3. A cultural glossary of practices, quirks, principles, and operating virtues...
4. An assortment of other organization-centric things to know about...

It's a work-in-progress, something designed to be touched by anyone in our community. If you have thoughts, I'd love to hear them!

Finally, I'm grateful that you're here and that you've decided to commit a season of your life helping to build a meaningful and impactful software product for our amazing community — their success (and ours) wouldn't be possible without you.

To infinity & community,

John // Chief Cartridge Blower

Table of Contents

1. Operating Virtues
2. Our Team
3. Our Story
4. Employment (Compensation and Benefits)
5. Open Roles
6. Cultural Quirks
7. Tools We Use
8. Policy Changes, Legal Stuff

Operating Virtues

Ben Horowitz via his book What You Do is Who You Are helped us frame our own:

Bushido looks like a set of principles, but it’s a set of practices. The samurai defined culture as a code of action, a system not of values but of virtues. A value is merely a belief, but a virtue is a belief that you actively pursue or embody.

The reason so many efforts to establish “corporate values” are basically worthless is that they emphasize beliefs instead of actions. Culturally, what you believe means nearly nothing. What you do is who you are.

Consequently, here are our current operating virtues (taken from our blog):

1. Table All The Things — #tatt

Or, in other words, we “put everything out on the table” — the good, the bad, and most definitely the ugly. Information is the lifeblood of our business which is especially true in a distributed-first organization. This means that we share things in real-time: We don’t wait for the timing to be “perfect” and we’re comfortable with sharing incomplete, imperfect, and unpolished ideas in prose.

Candor is our weapon of choice — both a strategy and tactic.

We treat all updates from team members with respect knowing of the courage required to share something that could make the person "look" foolish or silly. Instead, we engage graciously, responding to the update with the care and attention that we’d hope to receive if it was our own, knowing that they’ve successfully modeled this virtue with excellence.

Finally, #tatt means that we may share things that of personal nature and are only meant for those presently at our table. Everything shared in our communication tools should be held in the highest regard and with strict confidence.

Our table is strong when trust is the foundation.

2. Speed of Decision Making — #sodm

No bullshit: We are in a fight for our survival and every single day we make business-altering decisions. And sometimes theese decisions are made without all of the data. Regardless, we agree with General Patton when he said “A good plan, violently executed now, is better than a perfect plan next week.”

That “plan” is our first operating virtue, #tatt, because our team has mastered the art of communicating with candor: We are open, honest, and we keep things simple to maximize meaning and understanding.

When making decisions, we clearly state if consensus or feedback is required, the expected time to deliver, and then, with enough collective confidence that we can create, we commit to the decision even (and especially) when we may personally disagree.

We move the fastest and are the most effective when we are aligned.

3. Kaizen — #kaizen

When our team executes the first two operating virtues with excellence it allows us to build a culture of continuous improvement, both corporately and independently. We seek to do this in everything that we do. Consequently, everything in our business is dynamic, not static; a real-life work-in-progress.

We look for opportunities to not only grow but also to share our learnings with the other folks on our team — this is part of #tatt! Much has been written about the history and application of kaizen and it's worth developing your own personal philosophy and practice.

As a team we intentionally find opportunities to invest in ourselves and one another through continual education — reading, attending (virtual) conferences, and even taking educational courses to level-up as humans. Feel free use your monthly budget to invest in yourself!

Our Team

John Saddington - Community - @yenFTW

John was most recently co-founder of Pinpoint, an engineering analytics company in Silicon Valley backed by some of the top names in VC (Bessemer, Storm Ventures, BoldStart, BloombergBeta, Slack Fund, Social Capital, and more). Previously, he was a co-founder of The Iron Yard, the largest coding bootcamp before it was acquired by Apollo Global (Fortune 500). Through his love of open source he founded 8BIT, which was both an open source product (acquired by WooThemes) and a content company (acquired by WPEngine). He's a writer, dad, and amateur filmmaker.

Agata Bergstrom - Engineering - LinkedIn

Agata wrote her first lines of code when she was 9 years old. Won the Math Olympiad in Poland at the age of 14. Graduated with an MS degree in Computer Science from one of the top technical universities in Poland. Moved to Ireland and eventually settled in the beautiful Pacific Northwest region of the US. 10+ years of professional experience as an engineer, from an employee #50,000 to an employee #5. Worked at Microsoft, Facebook and at various stage startups. On top of engineering experience and a track record of shipping well-founded products, she also has experience interviewing engineers (600+ interviews) and making hiring decisions for a top 5% talent company. In her past life Agata was a licensed skydiver (200+ skydives), amateur photographer and enjoyed flying tiny airplanes with her husband. Currently her favorite pastime is chasing her two little daughters and trying to keep them alive, which she finds more challenging than jumping out of airplanes.

Andrew J. Mason - Storytelling - @AndrewJMason

Andrew is one of the best audio / video producers you’ve never heard of. John bought Andrew his first podcasting mic in 2009 and challenged him to give “this new thing called podcasting” a try. Since then, Andrew’s voice and production work has been featured on podcasts for major news outlets like Time, Wired, and Inc.com. He currently hosts & produces one of iTune's Top 100 Business podcasts: The “Getting Things Done” (GTD) show for David Allen Company. He also hosts & produces for WisdomDestinations.com. Andrew enjoys spending time with his wife, two boys, and 13 year old Dachsund named Harmony.

The Yenicorn - Mascot - LinkedIn

According to myth and legend, our friend, The Yenicorn, was raised by a herd of Japanese unicorns in a mysterious other worldly… … world. She knows (as prophecy has foretold) that she has a very important part to play in the cryptocurrency community but is understandably a bit nervous and often lacks a bit of self-confidence (thus the helmet) – but she wants to help people and do her very best!

Venture Capital Firms

We're fortunate to have the financial support from the following (repeat!) venture firms:

1. Cherubic VC
2. Hustle Fund
3. LINE Corp
4. Sterling Road VC
5. Service Provider Capital

We also have a top-flight group of Angel Investors who act as both advisors and personal friends.

Our Story

Born out of the ashes of two pivots over 2+ years, we restarted YEN's story in early-2020 as we caught a vision for an exciting and inevitable future — a vision of a future where there's a "community on every website" and how we do that is through our mission to "democratize community building" for everyone, everywhere.

For starters, it looks like a simple b2b saas platform that helps businesses launch, manage, and grow a community right on their own website. Unlike other solutions that can take a lot of time to properly setup and install, we bring the community right to the business, maximizing their efforts and marketing ROI.

Built for speed, we help creators connect with their customers, monetize their projects and know-how, and build a community they can be super-proud of.

We are currently test-driving the mvp in our own business-building community.

Cultural Quirks

Here are a few things that aren't immediately obvious about us and our team.

How We Refer To Ourselves:

• Legally, we are ROFLCOPTER, INC. But other than legal docs, you’ll rarely see this.
• Most commonly, we refer to team, project, company as our core product, YEN.
• YEN (all caps) is not an acronym.
• You’ll also see accounts under yen.io or yenio or yenFTW or yen_io (sometimes we couldn’t get just YEN)
• If "YEN" is combined with another word, it's not capitalized (e.g. YenIQ)
• You can find our brand guidelines here. It is outdated, copy-wise, but the colors and other identifying marks are correct.

Some Terms You'll See Tossed Around:

• Yenizen - Members of our amazing community
• Yeniverse - What we're building AND how we describe our community
• Yeni or Yenni (what community members named the company mascot, the Yenicorn)
• yenSTRONG - When one of our community members does something amazing and supportive of another yenizen.
• yenSQUAD - An alternative way / loving way of talking about our community
• yenIVERSITY — Any of our educational courses or workshops.

"My Meeting, My Notes"

• When you call or 'own' the meeting, you are responsible for taking notes and dispersing them along with action items after the meeting so those who weren't able to attend are made aware. We usually just drop those in Slack post-meeting.

"Team Food Day"

• Until someone on our team comes up with a better name for this... it's just called "Team Food Day"! On Wednesdays the company trades one meal of your choice (Breakfast, Lunch, or Dinner... or Second Dinner...) for a picture of it! Feel free to pay for the family too!

Policy Changes and Legal Stuff

The only constant is change...

We want all of our policies to be living documents which can improve and change as we learn and grow as a company. This is how we'll propose and make changes to our policies.

Right now, we use the following tools to discuss the Handbook:

1. GitHub - The canonical resource. Feel free to open a pull request with context!

2. In Person Meetings - Our hope is that as we grow and scale, we'll have more opportunities to gather in-person and virtually to discuss the #handbook openly.

Handbook Use, Policy

This Employee Handbook describes the employment policies applicable to all employees of the Company. Where there are differences in the terms applicable to employees in different jurisdictions, the differences are noted in the Handbook. This Handbook is not a contract, express or implied, guaranteeing employment for any specific duration.

This Handbook is designed to familiarize employees with the employment policies of YEN. Employees should read, understand, and comply with all provisions of the Handbook. It describes many of the responsibilities of an employee and outlines the programs developed by YEN to benefit its employees.

No Employee Handbook can anticipate every circumstance or question about policy. As YEN continues to grow and as business needs, employment legislation and economic conditions change, YEN reserves the right to revise, supplement, or rescind any policies or portion of the Handbook from time to time as it deems appropriate, in its sole and absolute discretion. No statement or promise by any other member of the Company can be interpreted as a change in policy nor will it constitute an agreement with an employee. Employees will be notified of such changes to the Employee Handbook as they occur.

Should there be any discrepancy between the Handbook and other documents of the Company, the policies incorporated in the Handbook shall govern. This Employee Handbook supersedes any and all other previous YEN Employee Handbooks or other YEN policies, whether written or oral.

Policies set forth in this Handbook are not intended to create a contract, nor are they to be construed to constitute contractual obligations of any kind or a contract of employment between YEN and any of its employees. No person can enter into an employment contract with YEN for a specified period of time or make any agreement contrary to this policy without written approval from CEO.

The provisions of the handbook have been developed at the discretion of management and may be audited, amended or cancelled at any time, at YEN’s sole discretion. Whenever the word “Company” is used, it refers to the employer, “YEN”.