Loom is officially 100 Loommates strong (and counting)! 💯🎉 I can’t think of a better way to celebrate this milestone than to walk you through how we got here, where we’re headed, and how you can be a part of our next chapter. ❤️️
How we reached 100 employees
We grew slowly, then all at once! 🌱
To give you some perspective on just how quickly we grew this year alone, let’s take a short walk down memory lane:
2016
Loom (formerly known as Opentest) began with three employees: Co-founders Joe, Shahed, and Vinay. The “work from anywhere” ethos was firmly embedded in our culture from the start — they worked from their tiny apartment in San Mateo, CA; in coffee shops; and even while waiting for haircuts, 💇♂️until landing at Loom’s first official office space in San Francisco.
2017-18
Rebranded from Opentest to Loom. ✨
Moved to our second office space in San Francisco. 🏢
Had our first team retreat in Los Cabos, Mexico. 🌴
Grew from 7 to 11 Loommates. 📈
2019
Had our second team retreat in Costa Rica. 😎
Moved to our current office in San Francisco. 🏢
Grew to 45 Loommates. 📈
2020
Had our third team retreat in Barbados. 🌞
Went fully remote due to COVID-19. 💻
Launched an all-new Loom. 🆕
Reached 100 Loommates (and counting!) 💯
What our team looks like today and how we grow from here
Right now, Loommates live and work in 11 countries (with 47% working remotely across the US, — 39% in SF — and 14% internationally), and our company is 100% remote (pre-pandemic that breakdown was 50% remote and 50% working in the San Francisco office).
Here’s a look at how over 100 Loommates are distributed across our seven different teams:
Customer Support: 14% of company
Design & Brand: 11% of company
Engineering: 41% of company
Product: 6% of company
Sales & Customer Success: 8% of company
Marketing: 7% of company
People & Operations: 13% of company
Of course, numbers don’t quite capture the full makeup of our team, and we’re holding ourselves accountable to diversifying on all fronts. Over the past year, we’ve developed partnerships with organizations like Techqueria, Women Who Code and have attended events by Nextplay to refine our recruitment process. Partnerships like these will help us ensure we’re building an organization whose population better reflects the world we live in and fulfills our mission of building a world-class organization with the best talent across the globe.
In addition to scaling our team, we’ve made a commitment to effectively and thoughtfully scale the processes that support our company and its people’s continued growth and success. This year, we welcomed our VP of People, Meghana Reddy, and have partnered with companies like Paradigm to provide training and resources for all of our employees, which we’ll continue to develop in 2021 and beyond.
Employee happiness and growth
Since our early days, we’ve been intentional about how we grow as a company — including having a laser focus on employee happiness and retention. We’ve created a benefits package that puts us in the 95th percentile relative to other Bay Area startups of our size and funding stage to make sure our Loommates are supported and taken care of. Among our offerings are:
Medical, dental, and vision insurance with 99% premiums paid by the company (including dependents!).
401k employer match, short-term and long-term disability, group term life insurance, and AD&D.
Monthly fitness and mental health reimbursement.
WFH setup stipend and Internet reimbursement.
Annual professional development stipend.
As we grow as a company, we want to make sure Loommates have clear career growth opportunities with us. This past year, we’ve had 24 transfers and promotions company-wide to recognize individual employees’ goals and incredible efforts. While we’ve always been a remote-first company, now that we are all remote for the foreseeable future, we’re also adapting our policies to respond to and address work environment shifts due to COVID-19 circumstances — from implementing 360 performance reviews and investing in more manager trainings, to offering home office setup and monthly internet reimbursement to all employees, regardless of location.
Ensuring security for our users
As the team scales, so does our investment in user trust and security. Here are some ways we’re investing in and demonstrating our commitment to intentionally scaling our processes as we do our people:
We’re growing our Infrastructure team and are focused on security and trust needs.
We’ve completed our SOC 2 Type 1 audit for security. (Look out for a finalized report from us sometime this month!)
We’ve undergone third-party penetration tests, which test our systems for security vulnerabilities.
We have a private bug bounty program that allows external researchers to identify bugs within our platform.
Be a part of Loom’s next chapter
If you ask any Loommate what their favorite part about working at Loom is, chances are they’ll answer, “the people.” That’s no coincidence; as Co-founder and CEO Joe Thomas says, the most important aspects of a business, in order, are “people, product, profit.”
Scaling thoughtfully is always a challenge for Talent teams, but it’s one our own product has made such an inspiring one to undertake. As a distributed (and now fully remote) team across multiple time zones, each and every Loommate is a super user of our own product, helping us explore and champion new ways to accelerate information flow across the global workforce.
We can’t wait to see what this next chapter of Loom’s growth has in store for us, and we’re looking forward to bringing more Loommates on board to empower everyone at work to communicate more effectively and efficiently wherever they are. If that sounds exciting to you, take a look at our open roles! 🎉
