Introduction
A company is just a group of people. Briefcase is a group of people that are naive enough to think we will change the world. We are incredibly ambitious, massively driven and relentlessly pushing forward. Everyone in the team is exceptionally hard-working, supportive of each other and laser-focused on being the best version of themselves.
Our Setup
We work onsite. We are solving new challenges every day, the output of each day matters massively for the overall success of the company. To actually work fast, to unblock ourselves in real time we need to remove every accidental complexity from getting stuff done. Online meetings such as syncs and planning sessions are exactly that. We do none of them, instead we do a prioritisation group session once a month which can easily last 3-4 hours. We discuss what we've accomplished last month and what big things we want to get done in the next month. This is sufficient to create a high-level alignment.
Our Ways of Working
To create a low-level alignment, to build a comprehensive understanding of the product, technology, domain and our vision, we delve deep individually. Everyone is an individual contributor with end-to-end project ownership, be it in engineering or GTM. Everyone solves hard problems, everyone goes through the problem maze, struggles through it enough to earn the scar tissue and forge a deep comprehension of the underlying problem. They then distill what they learnt and share it in a meaningful way with others. This creates a depth of understanding individually that is then shared within the peer group organically.
We ship 30+ times to production daily, yet we do no pull request reviews, have no staging environment, we deploy straight to production. This forced us to build superb internal tooling, production monitoring, actionable alerts and a direct path to fixing stuff. In January we migrated our DB to PlanetScale with no intermediary deployment to a non-production environment. Migration took about 5 hours and everything worked afterwards. While our DB is still in 100s of GB and not yet in TBs (although that is happening very soon), it was still sizeable enough that most companies would only attempt a migration like this with multiple staging migrations.
We are breaking lots of traditional ways of working and yet things work. This is only possible because our team is top performing.
Our Team
Top performance is easier to measure in specialised domains like sports, chess, maths, competitive programming etc. The real world is messier, more complex, far more ambiguous than that. It makes it harder to evaluate what great performance looks like for an individual who operates in this messy world.
We evaluate four key criteria for each individual: Growth mindset, Ownership taking, Product thinking and Technical / GTM excellence. Biologically, a human is largely remade every seven years because in that timespan almost every cell in the human body is recreated. Growth mindset and ownership taking are soft skills that predict a person's ability to significantly push forward and recreate their mental models, hopefully earlier than in seven years. Product thinking and Technical / GTM excellence are lagging indicators that they've been able to recreate their mental models before. Both leading and lagging indicators matter a lot and Briefcase is full of outliers for each. This makes for an environment that is stimulating, motivating and very fertile for personal growth.
Our Celebrations
When working very hard, celebrations are important to mark how far we've come. We celebrate wins in multiple ways, but our favourite one is with the gong!
Join Us
We are hiring across engineering, GTM and design. Join us to do the best work of your life 🚢
Introduction
A company is just a group of people. Briefcase is a group of people that are naive enough to think we will change the world. We are incredibly ambitious, massively driven and relentlessly pushing forward. Everyone in the team is exceptionally hard-working, supportive of each other and laser-focused on being the best version of themselves.
Our Setup
We work onsite. We are solving new challenges every day, the output of each day matters massively for the overall success of the company. To actually work fast, to unblock ourselves in real time we need to remove every accidental complexity from getting stuff done. Online meetings such as syncs and planning sessions are exactly that. We do none of them, instead we do a prioritisation group session once a month which can easily last 3-4 hours. We discuss what we've accomplished last month and what big things we want to get done in the next month. This is sufficient to create a high-level alignment.
Our Ways of Working
To create a low-level alignment, to build a comprehensive understanding of the product, technology, domain and our vision, we delve deep individually. Everyone is an individual contributor with end-to-end project ownership, be it in engineering or GTM. Everyone solves hard problems, everyone goes through the problem maze, struggles through it enough to earn the scar tissue and forge a deep comprehension of the underlying problem. They then distill what they learnt and share it in a meaningful way with others. This creates a depth of understanding individually that is then shared within the peer group organically.
We ship 30+ times to production daily, yet we do no pull request reviews, have no staging environment, we deploy straight to production. This forced us to build superb internal tooling, production monitoring, actionable alerts and a direct path to fixing stuff. In January we migrated our DB to PlanetScale with no intermediary deployment to a non-production environment. Migration took about 5 hours and everything worked afterwards. While our DB is still in 100s of GB and not yet in TBs (although that is happening very soon), it was still sizeable enough that most companies would only attempt a migration like this with multiple staging migrations.
We are breaking lots of traditional ways of working and yet things work. This is only possible because our team is top performing.
Our Team
Top performance is easier to measure in specialised domains like sports, chess, maths, competitive programming etc. The real world is messier, more complex, far more ambiguous than that. It makes it harder to evaluate what great performance looks like for an individual who operates in this messy world.
We evaluate four key criteria for each individual: Growth mindset, Ownership taking, Product thinking and Technical / GTM excellence. Biologically, a human is largely remade every seven years because in that timespan almost every cell in the human body is recreated. Growth mindset and ownership taking are soft skills that predict a person's ability to significantly push forward and recreate their mental models, hopefully earlier than in seven years. Product thinking and Technical / GTM excellence are lagging indicators that they've been able to recreate their mental models before. Both leading and lagging indicators matter a lot and Briefcase is full of outliers for each. This makes for an environment that is stimulating, motivating and very fertile for personal growth.
Our Celebrations
When working very hard, celebrations are important to mark how far we've come. We celebrate wins in multiple ways, but our favourite one is with the gong!
Join Us
We are hiring across engineering, GTM and design. Join us to do the best work of your life 🚢