This company has grown over 50X (yes fifty times, not percent) since I joined. It was a fantastic startup to work for: an experienced and skilled team, great company unity and character, design-centric product development, good work-life balance, fun but not silly. We disrupted an industry and created a novel product category in equal parts, as we grew from unknown to market leader. Great vision, great market timing, great execution - the true recipe for success. As we grew through 100, 200, 400 people, I worried frequently about what it would grow to become. I didn't want to work for a mega-corp, and have seen and heard enough of the horrors of the pathologies of the corporate giants. IBM, Intel, MS, Amazon - even Google was deteriorating as it grew to tens of thousands of employees during those years. I still don't know if that fate is inevitable. Tableau, though, still has a chance of finding out - even at 3000 and beyond.
People talk about "startup culture", and how to feel small while getting bigger. A lot of change that I once feared has come - I don't know what everyone is working on, I don't know everyone's name, departments don't know each other, company meetings feel like a sea of strangers. But the strange thing is, none of those changes (among many other changes) actually seemed to matter in a way that impacted the core of the company or the experience of being here. There's one thing that I've discovered underneath "startup culture" that can be kept, intentionally, as a company grows is: Trust. Or, "faith in each other" might be a better way to put it. When you're small, you trust everyone because you know everyone. But when that breaks down, you can still extend trust, still "assume the best", and see that unearned trust become earned, time and time again. It's a culture of cooperation and coordination in a tribe that's bigger than any tribe our hind-brains recognize.
This is theoretically stable (in the rational iterated-prisoner's-dilemma sense), but of course the bigger we grow, the more chances any person or team has to let tribalism come in, to let fear or defensiveness taint trust and teamwork. I've seen it happen at least a dozen times, but we are darn good at catching it, overwhelming it positively, and turning it around. Perhaps due to the constant change that comes with adapting to constant growth, people here are very good at re-evaluating, admitting mistakes, accepting new evidence, and serving the greater good. It's a culture that takes constant tending and cultivation. Sure, we have a lot of (half-jokingly called) "refugees" from the usual few giant Seattle companies - managers, as well as engineers - and it can take a while to "detox" from bad or even typical experiences and mesh into the web of trust that makes Tableau (at least the development team) such an amazing and refreshing place. People want to do-and-be good, and we get to do that as the bedrock foundation of our culture.
All the other goodies are top-notch and still growing: you know, health care benefits, 401K matching, stock purchase plan, parental and sick leave, all the standard stuff. And the other super-important thing that I just take for granted after so many years is what the product does for people in their work lives. You're really making a difference! In the world! Directly through what you make! ...by working at Tableau, and it's easy to see that it's for good, and not (solely or even majority) about money either. That foundation really makes it easy to get up in the morning and keep plugging away - the litany of customer stories, heard at conference after conference, that validate what we've been doing for them.
