2022 Fire Awards: Kissimmee startup Yac says its recruiting success is due, in part to, doing 'dope stuff that's cool'

Yac Inc. was chosen as one of Orlando Business Journal's 2022 Fire Awards honorees, who were featured in OBJ's April 29-May 5, 2022, weekly edition.

The Kissimmee-based voice messaging tech platform is helping businesses everywhere replace recurring meetings with voice messages and screenshares. The platform allows asynchronous voice messaging between users, and is available on iOS, Android, Mac and Windows. Yac’s audio conversations, which can be spread across hours or even days, fill a gap in remote collaboration. In fact, even its workforce is fully remote worldwide.

Here's more from co-founder Jordan Walker:

What was your company’s biggest accomplishment of 2021? Outside of working with our enterprise customers and growing, we were incredibly happy to raise our Series A in January 2021. It set the tone for the entire year and we're incredibly grateful for it!

How did you get it done? Fundraising is about what you're building, growth and being a team of folks investors want to work with. Up to that point — and to this day — we worked incredibly hard to build something people wanted, and put ourselves in positions to meet the people we needed to meet. That was done by just showing up. No secret sauce. Showing up and being our genuine selves.

How does your company stay innovative and on the cutting edge? We stay on top of the game by purposefully putting ourselves in positions to keep up with what's current and talking to our customers. Twitter is the best place for keeping up. New trends and information always breaks there first, sometimes weeks ahead of legacy media outlets. We also talk to our customers as often as possible, and that feels like such a cheat code. Folks tell us what they want and expect of the product, which makes things easier for us to navigate and be in the know on.

What strategies have you implemented to recruit and/or retain talent in a competitive labor market? One thing we do well here at Yac for recruiting is not making empty promises like other companies do or offering the same cookie-cutter benefits. Everyone right now is offering super competitive rates, and so to compete with massive public companies we offer what they can't: fully remote, primarily async, have a lot of fun and work from home fund (we pay for expenses that go up by proxy of our people working from home, like electric, WiFi, water, etc). On top of that, since we are a startup, folks have the opportunity to do real meaningful work, not be employee No. 10,352 at some huge company. From time to time, we also just do dope stuff that's cool.

What is the biggest challenge facing your industry? Folks still think a live meeting for every conversation in this new world is the answer. It's just not. Traditionally people everywhere have built their lives around work. In this day and age, that's not the case. It's time people build work around their life. Meetings absolutely annihilate teams and folks need to understand people like us are here to provide not only the educational material needed to run a high-performing remote team, but we also have the tool to do it and get rid of all those pointless meetings.

What is your company’s top goal for 2022? Continue to grow and stay focused. Coming off our Series A in early 2021, we've been heads down focused on making the product be the best it can be and scaling up.

In the past year, what progress have you seen in the growth of Central Florida’s entrepreneurial and tech ecosystems? The growth in Central Florida — and Florida broadly — for entrepreneurship has been explosive. Since the major shift to remote work, VCs from traditional tech hubs have found there are people building incredible businesses everywhere, and deployed tons of capital into places like Central Florida, allowing founders to begin building and hiring. The feeling in the air right now is electric and we're now miles ahead of where we were just a couple of years ago.

What is the local technology and innovation sector’s biggest obstacle to more growth? While people from around the world are flocking to Florida in hoards and more capital is being deployed here in Central Florida, there still are a handful of folks who believe there isn't anything special happening here. In the long run, we'll see those people lose over time and wish they paid more attention to Central Florida, but currently, it's still proving to be a very real obstacle with some of the influence these legacy players have. I'm more optimistic than ever, though. There are incredible founders and builders here who are relentless and will keep pushing. That will set the tone for years to come.

Are you hiring now? Not at the moment, but yac.com/careers always has the latest

Yac Inc.

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