Our Purpose
Parabol exists to enable meaningful interactions at work
Parabol’s Purpose
We are creating software that makes every meeting worth the time invested. We believe organizations exist to serve people and manifest change. People are able to do their best work when work feels meaningful to every teammate. We believe establishing trust between people is the foundation of meaningful work.
Parabol’s Values
Open Book
Default to open. Be explicit and write it down. Ask for feedback.
Transparency is one of our core values, and we practice what we preach by keeping conversations open within the company and public whenever possible.
🐙🐱 Open-source code: See our code and how we work together before you apply.
🚢 Friday Ship: We’ve been building in public since 2015 and publish a weekly blog with our metrics and updates of what we’re working on.
💼 Default to transparency: We default to working in public Slack channels and minimize 1:1 direct messages, so everyone can see what others are working on and lend a hand if they’d like.
🍟 Share beyond our team: When some things work particularly well, we share our process for others to learn from, including how we hire.
Open Eyes
Assume good intent. Seek to understand, not to be understood. Use data.
We’re building a company that supports individuals navigating a fast-changing world and fulfilling personal ambitions. We seek to understand and support everyone’s human side.
🌍 Work from anywhere with people around the globe: Our current team stretches from Los Angeles, California to Chengdu, China. We support employees that choose to travel or work in one place. We don’t place restrictions on where folks work.
💰 Fair & location-agnostic pay: US-based salaries, no matter where you’re based. We also provide industry-leading healthcare for US employees.
🌞 People-first working hours: We limit recurring meetings to 1-2 hours per week per team, with no synchronous daily standups, so you have time for deep work.
🥟 Building trust through fun: We hold quarterly in-person or virtual retreats and optional monthly social calls to get to know each other. We also start every meeting with an icebreaker.
🏖 No hustle: We offer unlimited PTO for everyone and company-wide and country-specific holidays. We also don’t treat anything as an emergency, because it rarely is.
👂 Kind and direct feedback: We lend each other a hand and provide honest feedback on each others’ work, always in the interest of making it better.
Safe-to-try
Propose rapid, survivable change. Don’t be precious, be playful. Learn by experimentation.
Disagreements are healthy and normal. We believe there is no better way to resolve a disagreement than by agreeing on a small step or an experiment to help chart a path forward.
📜 Open governance: Everyone at Parabol is responsible for shaping how we run the company. From company-wide strategy to our holiday calendar, all team members propose, question and consent to changes to how we work. For smaller changes, it all happens async.
🤝 Trust: We trust each other to make changes, lead projects and take initiative. Our hiring process ends with a paid trial project, and for most team members, that work ships to production, often before their first day. We trust each other to make changes, lead projects and not break anything catastrophic.
🌀 Growing faster through experimentation and autonomy: From peer code reviews to monthly sales experiments, we structure our work to maximize learning. Everyone owns their work and can develop their skills quickly.
🎭 No big reveals: We work in short iterative cycles and avoid long project timelines and ‘big launch energy.’ We ask for feedback along the way and give async, written responses, letting teammates process and respond in their own time. Through these smaller iterations we can take bigger risks along the way.
A working style that allows professionals to work outside of a traditional office environment. It is based on the concept that work does not need to be done in a specific place to be executed successfully.
