Solid company but has its quirks - Anonymous employee Gainsight Employee Review

Thank you so much for taking the time to share input on your experience. I want to take a few minutes to comment on the post to share my point of view. I want to continue to do a better job of being transparent with potential teammates about our philosophy at Gainsight. I don't believe in selling people on working at Gainsight. Instead, I aspire to be as clear as possible about what it's like to work here so teammates to whom our style appeals will join us. For some historical context: * Not everyone knows this but we were founded originally (before my time) in Hyderabad, India and St. Louis, MO * In particular, our co-founder and still VP Engineering is in Hyderabad * As such, we have always been a global company from day 1 * Due to this, when I came in (February 2013), I leaned into that and embraced the idea that we want people to be able to work from wherever they want to * As such, we have 6 offices today (Hyderabad, Bangalore, St. Louis, Phoenix, Redwood Shores and San Francisco) * We also have dozens of people who work from home (Florida, North Carolina, Boston, New York, Austin, Portland, New Jersey, ...) Some of this comes down to my personal beliefs: * I believe great people are scattered all around the world and we have an opportunity to build a world-class company by being flexible * Commuting is a major work-life balance impediment so we try to make it very acceptable to work from home (whether you have an office near or not) * In my informal conversations with teammates, this flexibility is a widely cited benefit of working at Gainsight In terms of our engineering strategy: * Per above, we've always had 100% of engineering in India * I worry about splitting teams up due to the loss of efficiency (e.g., I think many companies do "multi-country" development poorly) * We are definitely not in India because of cost; in fact, our R&D spend as a % of revenue is far above our peers at our stage; we believe in building a sophisticated product and are investing to make that happen (and I think the poster observed the results of that in terms of our product leadership) * In my almost 20-year career of managing thousands of people, I've never worked with a more customer-focused, innovative and responsive engineering team in my life than I see from our team at Gainsight In terms of culture: * We strongly believe in our 5 values across offices * However, beyond that, I am against imposing a certain style of culture on everyone * I fundamentally think life in different places is different * For example, I'm an NFL football fan (Pittsburgh Steelers!) That might work in Pittsburgh :) but not everyone in the world (or even in the US) is a football fan * We try to celebrate and recognize each others' cultures instead versus imposing a single culture * We believe phrases like "cultural fit" are often unintentional code for bias * We vehemently believe in diversity (as a part of our company value Shoshin - Beginners' Mind) In terms of work/life balance as a result: * This is an important point * I think this is one of the downsides to the model we have * However, I know we can do more to ameliorate this (in terms of better planning, async tools, etc.) * Your post has inspired us to focus more on this I'm a big believer that you have to build the company that's right for you and your team and not assume your company is right for everyone. As such, I don't push our model on others or assume it's the right one universally. However, I will say that more and more companies are trending toward a distributed workforce (for reasons above), so the skill-set of working in a distributed model is valuable on its own. You definitely learn that at Gainsight. Thank you so much for the excellent input and for the dialog it spurred!