We welcomed 182 new Wunderkinders to our team in 2018 to scale our vision and serve customers around the world with new products and services. We entered 2019 as a team of 370 people hungry to do so much more.
With our aspirations in mind, I’m excited to announce the Wunderkind Core Values — the first formal set of values in our company’s history — to help our fast-growing team align around a shared vision for our culture and our company. The Core Values help everyone understand what’s expected of them and also serve as a statement of principles that bond us together as one team.
An Inclusive Process
We arrived at our Core Values by listening to our team. 89% of employees shared their ideas and feedback in survey format, and more than 200 employees participated in live workshops where they talked about:
- What traits the highest-performing Wunderkind employees have in common
- What they enjoy most about coming to work every day
- What needs to change as we continue to scale the company
Every department, every team, and every office had a voice.
Drumroll…. Presenting The 5 Wunderkind Core Values
COME HUNGRY. This is all about mindset. When any Wunderkind employee walks into the office in the morning, I want them to be ready to rock — excited to accomplish big things with the desire to rapidly learn and constantly self improve. This was the mindset of our founding team, and I believe there is no cap to the potential of employees who adopt this way of thinking.
CARRY EACH OTHER. In our workshops, we heard again and again that THE PEOPLE are what make Wunderkind exceptional. It’s a supportive, open community, and our most recent employee engagement survey results show that more than 90% of employees have a friend at Wunderkind. Internal competition is almost unheard of, and everyone has each other’s backs. It is so important to me that we hard-code this into our values and never lose this sense that there is a community of Wunderkinders that have your back.
DRIVE UNDENIABLE PERFORMANCE. One thing that makes Wunderkind somewhat unique in MarTech is how we measurably contribute revenue growth to our clients. For some of our clients, Wunderkind contributes even more revenue than Google or Facebook. This is the kind of undeniable performance we’ve built our brand on, and we want every Wunderkinder to think of their role as a performance role, whether they are in Engineering, Product, Sales, Customer Success, Finance, IT, People Ops, or any other team. This is a place where we hire and promote people who never settle for mediocrity and are incredibly focused on the outcomes they’re driving.
RESPECT PEOPLE, PRIVACY, IDEAS. It is an interesting historical moment to have conversations around values and principles. With #metoo scandals, a ferocious debate about a wall on the U.S. Southern border, and data privacy issues dominating the headlines, our employees said: “If we don’t make a strong and clear statement about respect, I’m not sure how much weight the other values will have. This is just too important.” I agree, and I’m proud that our team is a principled one. With regard to privacy, I believe this will be an industry-defining issue. As we build our next-gen product suite, we need to keep respect for consumer choice at the forefront of our minds.
BOUNCE BACK. Startups are hard. Building new products, companies, and categories is not for the faint of heart. It’s important that we meet each challenge with a sense of optimism and opportunity, and that we never stop moving forward. Our customers are counting on us, and the opportunity is too great to let any obstacle hold us back.
What We’ve Heard So Far
I shared the values with our Wunderkind team at an All Hands meeting last week, and I was blown away by what they had to say.
- “Well done! Corporate values are inherently eye-rolly but you guys did a good job making them as good as possible. Very true to the spirit of our company.”
- “I have been through some 4 very well-established companies (some very large and public) in my career with core values or the like. I can honestly say that the Wunderkind core values are by far the most connected, universally applicable, useful and motivating.”
- “I am shocked by how good these core values are. I feel like they are spot on and give me not only something to be proud of but give me something to work toward.”
More than 90% of employees said that the values make them proud to work at Wunderkind. Now we’re starting the hard work of embedding the values into how we recruit, hire, coach, recognize, and reward our teams. If these values resonate with you, check out our careers page for the latest info on open roles and consider joining our fast-growing team.