Security Starts with the Right People and Culture

We believe that what makes a fantastic workplace isn't a great office or free meals (although we have some nice perks). It's the people. Imagine working alongside stunning colleagues who are great at what they do, and even better at working together. Our co-founders' past sports excellence has made us model the team as a professional sports team, not a family. Families are about unconditional love. They can also be dysfunctional, and not perform at their maximum potential. Professional sports teams, on the other hand, focus on performance and picking the right person for every position, even when that means swapping out someone they love for a better player.

While every member of our Team has different skills, we look for common strengths that make us better together. These are the values we live by:

It's easy to talk about values and harder to live them. We work hard to keep each other accountable for upholding these standards, especially our leaders, because excellence and honesty go hand in hand.

Since a high performer in any role is many times more effective than the average employee, our team is driven by performance, not seniority, tenure, or unconditional loyalty. It's also why we focus on maintaining a high-performance culture. To recruit and retain stunning colleagues, we pay personal top of market for the role and location: a judgment about what that person could make in a similar role at another company, and what we would pay to keep or replace them.

We expect leaders to be strong developers of talent. And to ensure they have the right player at every position, we ask them to apply Netflix's "keeper test," asking "if X wanted to leave, would I fight to keep them?" Or "knowing everything I know today, would I hire X again?" If the answer is no, we believe it's fairer to everyone to part ways quickly.

In the abstract, the keeper test can sound scary. In reality, we encourage everyone to speak to their managers about what's going well and what's not on a regular basis. This helps avoid surprises. Managers also evaluate team members on their whole record, rather than focusing on the mistakes or bets that didn't pay off. On the team, you need people who challenge the status quo and try new things. So we stick with employees through short-term bumps.

No matter how brilliant someone may be, there's no place in our team for people who don't treat their colleagues with decency and respect. When you have talented people who work well together, trusting each other's intentions and respecting their differences, you have a powerful team, but without respect and trust you have nothing.

Keytos leadership is mostly comprised of people who were frustrated at their previous jobs, where decisions were made top-down, there was little transparency, and it felt hard to make a difference, or even get basic things done. At Keytos, we aim to inspire and empower more than just manage, because people can have a greater impact when they're free to make decisions about their own work.

As part of this, we strive to develop good decision-making muscles at every level of the company, priding ourselves on how few, not how many, decisions senior leaders make. We expect managers to practice context, not control: giving their teams the context and clarity needed to make good decisions instead of trying to control everything themselves. We also help employees learn by sharing a lot of information internally, including our weekly learning where any employee can teach anything interesting they have learned.

It takes an unusually responsible person to thrive on this level of freedom: someone who's self-motivated, self-aware, and self-disciplined, who doesn't wait to be told what to do and picks up the trash like they would at home. That said, context not control should not be confused with hands-off management. Managers need to be involved in the work being done around them and actively coach their teams. They may also have to step in when someone is about to make a decision that is unethical or could materially harm Keytos, during a crisis or if a new team member lacks the full context.

Since we try to hire highly motivated individuals that want to do the best for their team, we try to keep rules to a minimum. We want you to do your best work. For Time Off, Travel expenses, work hours, etc., we have a very simple policy: "Do what is best for Keytos." If you need to take some time off and go on a vacation, just let your manager know: there's no maximum number of vacation days, spending policy, or anything else.

You might think that this kind of freedom would lead to chaos. In reality, while we've had our fair share of failures (and a few people have taken advantage of our culture in bad ways), our emphasis on individual autonomy has created an extremely successful business, with many opportunities for employees to develop and grow.

Our pursuit of excellence is also why we constantly seek to improve our culture and processes, not preserve them. Every new employee helps shape how we work, finding new ways to accomplish more together. This creates a better experience for our members, employees, and customers.

The best way to illustrate this is with a direct quote from our developer handbook, written by our CEO:

"Stay curious, have fun, and always try to improve. You are at Keytos that means we believe you are one of the best developers in the world so act like one, you probably have heard me say it in many meetings but if you don't think the code you wrote 6 months ago is shit, it means that you are not learning and improving (this is not an invitation to write shit code today)."

At Keytos, it's our incredible team of talented individuals who turn the impossible into reality. Some of the tools we've developed were once thought impossible by industry experts, but our team made them happen (and we're just getting started 😉). How? By focusing on the journey rather than just the destination. Tackling massive challenges can be daunting, but by concentrating on the variables we can control and genuinely enjoying the process, we've found our path to success.

That's why we prioritize not only competitiveness and drive, but also making sure we have fun. After all, you'll spend countless hours at work, so you might as well do something you love. This playful energy isn't just internal; you'll see it reflected in our external marketing as well.

And, because no fancy culture statement is complete without a little Latin flair, we'll wrap it up with a nod to our high school motto: Terar Dum Prosim, "May I be consumed in service."