Life at Accord

Intro

Accord is founded on the idea that collaboration and building better relationships leads to ideal outcomes and happier people! 🤗

Not surprisingly, these core beliefs are what our company culture is built on. Although culture is constantly evolving, we hope this gives you a peek into what it means to be an Accordion.

Some background:

• Accord is a customer collaboration platform that creates better relationships between buyers and sellers in the B2B world.
• Founded by early Stripe, LinkedIn, & Google Cloud leaders & recently funded by Stripe & YC with a recent $10M in Series A funding, led by Diana Berlin of Matrix Partners!
• Customers already include: Figma, Okta, Metadata.io, Productboard, VeryGoodSecurity, Stripe, MongoDB, Alteryx, and other modern sales orgs.
• We're have hybrid work model and are looking for fellow passionate problem solvers to join our growing crew!

Values

Our core values are a reflection of Accord's vision and mission. They drive our day-to-day interactions and how we work together. 🙌

🐼 Everybody is a Product Person

We have a shared drive and passion to create. This extends far past just building Accord's software platform and into every aspect of the company. We don't want Accordions to simply "stay in their lane" and prefer a feeling of joint ownership building together.

From talking to customers to hiring processes, it shouldn't matter if you happen to be in engineering, product or go to market... we should all be thoughtful in our approach of building a category defining company!

🦄 10/10

We strive for excellence in our craft. 9/10 is not enough when your aspirations are high. The last 10% delivers 90% of the value and truly differentiates a company.

We deliver 10/10 experiences to our customers and fellow Accordions. We balance moving fast by keeping this value in mind even when trying new things. Crawl, walk, then run.

🦁 Integrity Over Everything

We value Integrity above all else. What is success without feeling good about how you got there? We believe what really matters is what we do when no one is watching.

If we make a mistake like introducing a bug that potentially impacts our users, we are proactive in our communication and take responsibility. We don't "wait and see" if they noticed or pass the blame onto others.

If we could cut a corner to win a deal or grow faster but it negatively affects others, it's an easy decision to do the right thing.

🐝 Radical Collaboration

From Engineering to Customer Success, we work, win, and grow together.

Although collaboration can be tough when it comes to building a hybrid company, it also creates unique opportunities. For example, everything needs to be much more well documented to drive effective async collaboration. Also, charism matters less when meetings aren't in-person so it's harder for underlying strategy to be countered simply by energy.

We take a thoughtful approach to bringing in various Accordions and disciplines together whenever we're solving a problem.

Cordie

You might have noticed, each value at Accord has a corresponding emoji animal! We also give out a weekly award to celebrate the Accordion who has embodied a core value during the week.

Meet our value spirit animal - Cordie! (a cute combo of our 4 value animal emojis)

The Way We Work

In addition to our values, we have a few unique things here at Accord.

Social Contracts

We believe that being self-aware and communicative of your needs is crucial to building a supportive team culture. Great relationships go beyond what is in a standard employment contract and what might come up organically.

That's why each Accordion writes their own social contract when they join the team. A social contract is an agreement between each member and everyone on a team, outlining work preferences, how an employee interacts best with others, and what teammates should know about each other.

Here are Ross, Ryan, and Wayne's social contract.

Async by Default Mindset

As we enter a hybrid work mode, Accord continues to be a remote-first company (even before the pandemic). We strive to have as many hours of overlap to collaborate and learn from each other during the work day as possible. However, being a remote-first company we've adopted the mindset to be asynchronous by default.

Documentation and writing are our best tools for clear and concise communication. We approach all collaboration as if it will be asynchronous. This means writing and documenting things so that other Accordions can understand the situation or problem "offline".

This makes real time collaboration that much more powerful and enjoyable.

"How would you explain this to your friend in a bar?" -John Collison

InAccordance

Even though Accord is hybrid and we take a thoughtful approach to building relationships with each other, we're all human beings and nothing equals sharing joyful moments in-person. That's why we sponsor an Accordion-wide gathering at least twice per year. We call these IRL offsites, InAccordances.

They are in-person, multi-day events that provide an opportunity for team building, a chance to meet fellow Accordions face-to-face, and help build real human (non-zoom!) connections.

During COVID we've still taken time off work to do these virtually (activities such as magical shows, trips to New Zealand, ???) but excited to bring back later in 2021!

Diversity and Inclusion

Diversity is valuing being different. Inclusion is when everybody feels like they belong.

Everybody has a seat at the table. Different perspectives and unique ways of thinking are necessary for building a product people love. For all backgrounds and identities, we ask every Accordion to bring their authentic selves to work and be a part of our close-knit team.

Life at Accord

Being a hybrid company also means re-thinking traditional celebrations. Giving Accordions gold number anniversary balloons just didn't feel right when we're all on Zoom.

Instead, we celebrate every Accordion's anniversary with a video celebration from the team. Naturally, we call them Accordiversaries  and here's some highlights.

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We'll follow up this post with more in depth looks into what life is like at Accord (including how we socialize with monthly gaming sessions and happy hours!)