As Covid-19 forced most companies to go remote, Boulder-based Bonusly stepped up to enable better communication, collaboration and team cohesion.
On Bonusly's platform, employees get a monthly allowance to give small bonuses to their colleagues to recognize their contributions. These points translate to a monetary amount, giving employees the ability to transfer them into real-world rewards.
The company, which was founded in 2013, is working with more than 1,700 companies to improve employee recognition and rewards. And, to fuel its growth, the company closed a $9 million Series A funding round in June to grow its team and built out its platform.
Founder and CEO Raphael Crawford-Marks spoke to Colorado Inno on the latest for the company, who won Inno on Fire's Software category.
This Q&A was edited for style, clarity and brevity.
Your business helps its customers create good culture through recognition and incentives. How important is culture at Bonusly itself, and how have you maintained it during the pandemic? Culture has been really important to us from the very beginning of the company. We defined a set of core values that were to guide us as we grew, right around the very inception of the company when we were just a handful of employees. We’ve tried to not just walk the walk around the power of culture, but also talk the talk, and use strong culture and very intentionally build a strong culture.
I think that’s really paid off for us in this pandemic, in a time when we had to close all our offices. Efforts we’ve put into — and norms and values we’ve created around — communication, radical candor, transparency, getting results, and a sense of ownership and responsibility that is shared throughout the organization have helped us not just persevere but succeed in this environment.
What is the biggest lesson learned during the pandemic? It’s really important for us as a venture-backed software business that we never did focus on just growth at all costs, but we always focused on sustainable growth.When this crisis hit and there was a period of really great uncertainty, we had the financial stability to take time to adjust to the new normal.
Luckily for us, this new normal has redounded to our benefit. We build software that helps teams communicate together, collaborate together and build cohesiveness. After that initial shock, in the more recent months we’ve seen a huge spike in demand as companies realize we’re going to be in this for a long time.
Tell us about a bright spot during the pandemic. Since March, Bonusly users have donated over $200,000 to the World Health Organization’s Covid-19 Response Fund and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. As much as our users love choosing rewards from brands like Amazon and Target, they are also very committed to paying it forward.
When you look at the new year, what are some of the headwinds and opportunities you see? I think a major headwind is the overall economic uncertainty and the possibility or probability of continued recession and at best a slow recovery. I’m of the mind that a recession doesn’t help anyone, and even though we’ve lucked out in being in the space that there is some increased demand for our services, ultimately a recession is a headwind for everyone.
That is the major consideration for us. We have to think of our customers and prospects trying to save money, trying to really conserve on budgets and combine tooling. How do we make sure that we’re a need to have and something that they are going to say yes to and choose to buy?
The big tailwind is this acceleration of the already existing trend to more flexible and remote work, and what the implications are for how companies manage and engage their workforces. We’re pretty excited about the fact that companies are making this dramatic shift towards new approaches to structuring work and the workplace.
Bonusly
Location: Boulder
Top exec: Raphael Crawford-Marks, co-founder and CEO
Category: Software
