When Sarah King joined Molecula almost three years ago as a community advocate and relationship manager, CEO Higinio “H.O.” Maycotte told her that the job would be like “getting 100 MBAs at once.” He wasn’t lying.
That’s primarily because of Molecula’s lean staff. Today, the startup employs roughly 25 to 30 people, but back when King joined, it was even smaller. Her responsibilities overlapped with many areas of the company — product, marketing and customer success.
“Like learning about our go-to-market strategies, product market fit, finding and prioritizing product roadmaps, development practices, implementation best practices and how to best serve our customers,” King said. “All of the interpersonal things that you can ever imagine.”
This master course-type experience was so robust that nearly three years later, King now has an impressive new title at the company: director of product. And King’s not the only employee who has reaped the benefits of being able to learn on the job and cross-collaborate at Molecula, an enterprise feature store that simplifies, accelerates and controls big data access to power machine-scale analytics and AI.
At Molecula, King said employees are passionate and committed to their vision of unlocking human potential through the power of data. This culture brings out collaboration and growth as its core value.
“You work much more closely with everyone, not just a specific department,” Garrett Raska, an enterprise sales executive at Molecula, said. “That agility allows me as an individual to grow at a rapid pace.”
Agility has other benefits, too. When the novel coronavirus upended businesses around the world, Molecula employees said they were able to quickly pivot to an effective work-from-home structure, never missing a beat.
“It kind of had a democratization effect on the whole team,” Allen Joiner, a senior solution architect at Molecula, said. “During the COVID-19 pandemic, everyone’s been so willing to work together via remote teleconferencing. I think at a bigger company you would have a much harder time coping with that type of situation.”
From huge growth opportunities to making an impact across the business and in the world, working at this lean startup is a unique experience that this trio said they wouldn’t trade.
A Collaborative Approach
Raska was recently on a phone call with a client who had questions about a specific product feature that he wasn’t too familiar with. After the call, Raska reached out to a developer at Molecula for help.
“And he was like, ‘Of course. I’m the one who ported that feature into our product,’” Raska said. The developer spent an hour educating him on the back-end of the product, arming Raska with the confidence and insight to speak comfortably to that very feature the next time a client brought it up.
According to Raska, this type of cross-team collaboration and communication happens all the time at Molecula.
“Traditionally, sales and marketing go hand in hand. But I find myself working closely with everyone. I work with our services team on the back end, and product to better interact with our customers. There’s more of an all-hands-on-deck mentality here,” Raska said. “And it means I get to learn our product at a depth that would be much harder to achieve at a larger company.”
Raska would know. He came to Molecula from a much larger big data company in April 2020. Right away, he noticed two major differences: the opportunities to collaborate, and the agility of a leaner staff. Both factors play a role in preparing individuals for success in their current positions and their futures, he said. Being exposed to so much collaboration across departments and learning to work with people with different perspectives, professional backgrounds, and expertises is proving to be incredibly valuable to the Molecula team.
I get to learn our product at a depth that would be much harder to achieve at a larger company.’’
For example, if Raska realizes there are certain talking points that resonate more with clients, he can fast-track that feedback to Molecula’s CEO to better hone the company’s message — right before his next call.
“At a larger company, that process would take so much time. I’d have to go through feedback channels, then we would have to get a certain sample size to test it out, and then we could finally adjust,” Raska said.
Molecula has a level of openness both between departments and levels of seniority that employees really feel. Everyone feels comfortable sending a Slack message to the CEO and he is genuinely happy to receive those messages, Raska added.
At Molecula, Raska can even customize specific client needs. All he has to do is reach out to the product team, explain what the customer wants to team members like Sarah and Allen, and provide them with data.
“We can deviate on the fly and build something custom within weeks,” Raska said. “I love that.”
Learning On The Job
King arrived at Molecula in February 2018 as the first woman and first non-engineering hire. Her background was in sales, which is why her first role at the company was as a community advocate and relationship manager, where she spent a significant amount of time understanding how users interacted with the company’s open source product, Pilosa.
Incidentally, that position set her up for a career path she never thought she’d go down.
“Now, I’m leading product strategy,” King said. “And I have zero technical background by training or education. All of my education has been here.”
King credits this switch to the culture at Molecula. In her first role at the company, she learned the product inside and out, along with how customers interacted with it and some of the gaps that needed to be filled as the company launched its commercial product. So when the director of product position opened, someone on the management team told King that she would be a perfect fit for the role.
This is common practice at Molecula, King explained.
“The culture fit is really obvious in every single one of us in terms of being high achievers and very ambitious,” King said. “Because of that, it’s a lot easier to trust people to step into roles that are bigger than the shoes they’re wearing, knowing that they’re going to grow into those shoes really gracefully.”
For King, growing into her current role has been a bit surreal. Before this, she had never been on a technical leadership team, but now, she’s often the main technical person on a call.
“I know the ins and outs of engineering management more than I ever could have imagined I would,” King said. “And I reflect on that, and I’m shocked. I pinch myself at times. I just think that’s such a cool career transition that I am so grateful for every day.”
Speaking of Cool ...
In King’s first year at Molecula, the company won one of four spots at the Oracle for Startups competition. At the time, one of King’s roles was technical partnerships, which meant she and Molecula’s CEO got to travel to speaking engagements to talk about their products to Oracle clients. “We spoke at Open World Singapore,” King said. “From a growth perspective, going up to talk about a really technical product in front of a large group of people really stretched me and propelled me forward.” Those speeches went so well that Oracle invited the pair to Open World San Francisco. They even attended a Q&A-style evening with Larry Ellison at his home. This is just one example of the kinds of opportunities Molecula offers its employees, King said.
A Bird’s-Eye View
Allen Joiner had his flight booked to Austin, Texas, from his home in Atlanta back in March 2020. He had just joined Molecula as a senior solution architect, and even though his job would be remote, he wanted to meet his co-workers in person and ease into the new role. Then the COVID-19 pandemic hit.
Joiner cancelled his fight and was concerned about what his onboarding process would look like.
“I’m this one employee out here in Atlanta,” Joiner said. “Pretty much the whole team was in Austin. How was I going to plug in? How was I going to have influence? How was I going to make people understand how things work?”
But those concerns quickly faded. Joiner found that everyone was easily accessible via Zoom, from the CEO to King and the product team, where they’d continuously collaborate and learn from each other. This seamless onboarding process likely wouldn’t have been possible at a larger organization, Joiner explained. And that’s not the only benefit of being a part of a lean staff, Joiner realized.
“One thing I’ve enjoyed as an employee of a small company is being able to see the entire workings from a bird’s-eye view,” Joiner said. “I see everything. I see what our go-to-market strategy is, and I understand it. It’s not just an email from a marketing VP. I know why we’re pricing it, I know what we’re developing at the lowest level. So I get to see everything, and I can actually absorb it and take it in. That’s the coolest thing to me.”
I see everything. I see what our go-to-market strategy is, and I understand it. It’s not just an email from a marketing VP.’’
It’s also a testament to the level of transparency that Molecula leadership has committed to that every employee, no matter where they are based in the world, gets a 360-degree view on the company, strategy, product and each other, Joiner added. Despite being a lean team, Molecula has engineers in Poland, Kenya and Spain, in addition to teammates in Georgia, Minnesota and California.
To that point, Joiner even posts a weekly “state of the customer” summary in Slack, which includes updates on big customers and their experiences, and more. Recently, he asked his co-workers if these updates were useful, and the responses were overwhelmingly positive.
“A lot of development team members were like, ‘I love it, because I get to see what customers are doing. I’d never get to see this at a big company. I’m not close enough to the customers to get that type of feedback and know what functionality is being used that we’re developing,’” Joiner said. “Having that level of involvement across the whole company is awesome.”
Regardless of department, Molecula is built on collaboration, transparency and empowering each individual’s ambitions for growth and success, Joiner said. United in their vision to “make data as accessible as a beer tap for all,” Molecula employees are working together and pushing each other forward.
“That’s what working at a lean startup is all about,” Joiner said.
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