Culture at Keytos

The Keytos Way of Working

At Keytos we offer highly available, secure, and scalable cloud security tools. We are committed to providing the best possible service to our customers, and we believe that the best way to do this is to create a company culture that is focused on excellence, teamwork and that empowers our employees to do their best work. This document outlines the core principles of our company culture, which are based on three key values:

1. Selflessness and teamwork:

While we hire extremely ambitious individuals, we value selflessness and believe that the success of the team is more important than individual success. We encourage our employees to help each other, share knowledge, and work together to achieve common goals.

2. Pursuit of Excellence:

We believe in continuous improvement and always strive to be better. We encourage our employees to take risks, try new things, and learn from their mistakes.

3. Making the impossible possible:

We believe that nothing is impossible, we just haven't had time to implement it. We encourage our employees to think big, be bold, and challenge the status quo. We want to create an environment where people feel empowered to take on new challenges and push the boundaries of what is possible.

As our business grows and evolves, our culture will, too. What won't change is our focus on excellence, and our determination to ensure that Keytos remains a place where great people can do the best work of their lives. If this sounds exciting, you'll probably love it here. But Keytos is not for everyone, so please read on.

Before we dive into the details, let's start with a quick story about our co-founders.

Both Marcos and Igal went to high school abroad. When Igal was growing up, he would hear stories about Marcos being: lower school tutor, cadets commander, math tutor, while also being the Football and Rugby captain. When Igal got to high school, he discovered that you only had to do one activity to meet the school requirements, so he called Marcos and asked, "Why did you do all those things?" Marcos replied, "When I go somewhere, I want to leave a mark, I want to be remembered." This is the spirit that we want to instill in our employees—the spirit of excellence, teamwork, and the pursuit of greatness.

The Importance of the Team

We believe that what makes a fantastic workplace isn't a great office or free meals and massages — 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 value:

• Selflessness — you are humble when searching for the best ideas; you seek what's best for Keytos, not yourself or your team; you take time to help others succeed. Ideas do not have rank; it doesn't matter if our most experienced engineer came up with it or our summer intern, the best idea for the team is the one that will be implemented.
• Judgment — you look beyond short-term fixes in favor of long-term solutions; you make wise decisions despite ambiguity; you use data to inform your intuition.
• Candor — you willingly receive and give feedback; you are open about what's working and what needs to improve; you admit mistakes openly and share learnings widely.
• Curiosity — you learn rapidly and eagerly; you are as interested in other people's ideas as your own; you're humble about what you don't yet know.
• Resilience — you quickly adapt to changing circumstances; you make tough decisions without agonizing or long delay; you embrace a hard challenge.

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.

Pursuit of Excellence

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—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.

Making the Impossible Possible, While Having Fun

At Keytos, it's our incredible team of talented individuals that turn the impossible into reality. Some of the tools we've developed were once considered impossible by industry experts, but our team made them happen. How? By focusing on the journey rather than the destination. Tackling massive challenges head-on can be daunting, but by honing in on the variables we can control and genuinely enjoying the process, we've found success.

That's why we prioritize not only competitiveness and drive but also making sure we have fun while we work. You'll even see this playful energy reflected in our external marketing.

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.”