The difference between a job you love and a job you hate is usually one thing: the company's culture. These days, lots of tech startups have adopted cultural perks like free food, pool table/games, and beers on tap. But others have come ...
The difference between a job you love and a job you hate is usually one thing: the company's culture. These days, lots of tech startups have adopted cultural perks like free food, pool table/games, and beers on tap. But others have come up with new ways to make their companies great places to work. They've "hacked" their culture, according to this discussion thread on Quora.Maptia's founders moved the whole company to Morocco Jonny Miller, cofounder at Maptia and an avid surfer, has the best hack we've ever heard of. He and his two co-founders moved their company to Morocco, a low-cost way to have an office on the beach. Maptia's graduated from the TechStars Seattle program at the end of 2012 and then the founders' visas expired. Instead of going home to London, they wanted a cheaper place where their $100,000 in seed money would last until they launched their beta. They are building a travel discovery site. So they "spun the globe and found a cheap apartment only ten meters from the Atlantic ocean in the Moroccan surf town of Taghazout." (It's the second floor of the white building, pictured.) All five Maptia team members live there. They stop work when the surf it up and the cost of living is so low, they can feed themselves on $10 per person week, Miller says. Commerce Sciences has the last person to join create a welcome kit for the next person to join Commerce Sciences has a cool tradition for an employee's first day at work, says Oren Ellenbogen, an engineer at the Palo Alto, Calif., startup. "The last person to join the company is responsible to create a 'starter kit' for the next one to join. Each kit is totally different and personalized (depending on how creative the last person is :)), ranging from funny jokes, interesting books to Nerf Guns and coffee capsules," he says. At Expertcity, hearing the bell ring means free breakfast A lot of companies have bells in their offices that people ring when they sign a new customer contract or have announcements. But at Expertcity, there was a unique rule about the bell: If you rang it without a good reason, you had to buy breakfast for the whole company the next day, says John Greathouse, who was CFO at the time. Expertcity was the startup that created GoToMeeting and GoToMyPC and was sold to Citrix in 2003. Greathouse was originally opposed to the bell because he felt employees would think it was "a cheesy, faux motivational tool" but people loved it. See the rest of the story at Business Insider Please follow SAI on Twitter and Facebook.
