Culture & Values: Building for Builders

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Our Philosophy

We believe the future belongs to builders—the developers, creators, and innovators who turn ideas into reality. Everything we do serves this community, because when builders succeed, the world advances.

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Core Values

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Bias to Action

Ship fast, learn faster

What this means:

• Perfect is the enemy of good—we prioritize progress over perfection
• We make decisions quickly and iterate based on feedback
• When in doubt, we build and test rather than debate endlessly
• Every Friday is “Ship Friday”—everyone ships something, no matter how small

How we live this:

• 2-week sprint cycles with continuous deployment
• “Try it Tuesday” experiments with new features
• Open source contributions to the community
• Rapid prototyping over lengthy planning

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Build for Builders

Developers are our heroes

What this means:

• Developer experience (DX) drives every product decision
• We eat our own dog food—CNAP builds on CNAP
• Documentation is as important as code
• Simplicity is sophisticated—complex problems deserve elegant solutions

How we live this:

• Regular “Developer Days” where we use our own platform
• All features start with developer stories, not business requirements
• Open source first—proprietary only when absolutely necessary
• Community feedback shapes our roadmap

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Open by Default

Transparency builds trust

What this means:

• Open standards, open ecosystem, open communication
• Public roadmap, public metrics, public learnings
• Default to transparency unless privacy/security requires otherwise
• Share knowledge freely—rising tides lift all boats

How we live this:

• Build on open standards like Kubernetes and Helm
• Public changelog and roadmap updates
• Regular community calls and feedback sessions
• Blog about failures and learnings, not just successes

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Customer Obsession

Success is measured by customer success

What this means:

• Customer problems are our problems
• Revenue follows customer value, not the reverse
• We optimize for customer lifetime happiness, not quarterly metrics
• Support is everyone’s job, not just support’s job

How we live this:

• Everyone does customer support rotation
• Customer success metrics on every dashboard
• Regular customer interviews and feedback loops
• Feature decisions backed by customer data

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Data-Driven

Opinions are good, data is better

What this means:

• Every decision should be measurable
• We A/B test features, not just markets
• Intuition guides, data decides
• Failure is learning if you measure it

How we live this:

• All features ship with metrics and success criteria
• Weekly data reviews across all teams
• Experimentation framework for major decisions
• Public metrics dashboard for transparency

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How We Work

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Remote-First, Community-Centered

We’re distributed by design, but connected by purpose:

• Async by default - Documentation over meetings
• Global perspective - Team spans timezones and cultures
• Flexible schedules - Results matter, not hours
• Regular gatherings - Quarterly in-person team events

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Continuous Learning

Technology changes fast—we change faster:

• Experiment time - Dedicated time for exploring new technologies
• Internal talks - Weekly tech talks and knowledge sharing
• Conference speaking - Company supports and encourages speaking

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Sustainable Pace

We’re building for the long term:

• Work-life integration - Sustainable pace, not unsustainable sprints
• Mental health support - Therapy and wellness benefits
• Time off encouraged - Regular breaks and vacation time
• Long-term thinking - Career development and growth opportunities

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Decision-Making Framework

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The Developer Lens

Would this make developers’ lives better?

Every decision gets filtered through the developer experience:

• Does this reduce cognitive load?
• Does this save time?
• Does this increase confidence?
• Does this enable creativity?

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The Community Test

Would we be proud to open source this?

We build like the world is watching:

• Code quality that we’d want others to learn from
• Documentation that actually helps
• APIs that we’d want to use ourselves
• Practices that we’d recommend to friends

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The Long-Term View

How does this position us for 2030?

Short-term pressures, long-term thinking:

• Does this build competitive moats?
• Does this expand our ecosystem?
• Does this create network effects?
• Does this advance our mission?

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What We Don’t Do

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❌ Move Fast and Break Things

We move fast and build things. Breaking things breaks trust.

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❌ Growth at All Costs

Sustainable growth beats unsustainable sprints. Always.

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❌ Cargo Cult Best Practices

We adopt practices because they work for us, not because they’re trendy.

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❌ Feature Competition

We don’t build features just because competitors have them. Customer value drives features.

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Communication Principles

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Clarity Over Cleverness

• Simple words over complex concepts
• Examples over abstract explanations
• Direct feedback over diplomatic hints

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Written Over Verbal

• Document decisions for future reference
• Async communication respects global timezones
• Public channels over private DMs when possible

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Constructive Over Critical

• Solutions-oriented feedback
• “Yes, and…” instead of “No, but…”
• Assume positive intent in all interactions

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Hiring Philosophy

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We Look For:

• Technical competence - Can you build great software?
• User empathy - Do you care about developer experience?
• Learning velocity - How quickly do you adapt to new technologies?
• Community mindset - Do you lift others up?
• Ownership mentality - Do you take responsibility for outcomes?

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We Don’t Care About:

• Where you went to school
• How many years of experience you have
• What programming languages you’ve used
• Whether you have a computer science degree

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Our Interview Process:

1. Portfolio review - Show us what you’ve built
2. Technical pairing - Build something together
3. Values alignment - Culture fit conversation
4. Customer scenario - How would you help a struggling developer?

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Growth and Development

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Career Paths

We support multiple growth trajectories:

• Technical leadership - Staff engineer, principal engineer, CTO track
• Product leadership - Product manager, product director, CPO track
• Business leadership - Operations, sales, CEO track
• Community leadership - Developer relations, advocacy, evangelism

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Promotion Philosophy

• Impact over tenure - Results matter more than time served
• Growth mindset - Potential matters more than current skills
• Teaching others - Leadership means multiplying your impact through others

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Learning Support

• Mentorship program - Everyone has a mentor and mentors others
• Conference budget - Attend and speak at industry events
• Open source time - Contribute to the ecosystem we depend on
• Side project support - Use company resources for learning projects

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Success Stories

The culture we aspire to create should produce stories like these:

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The Weekend Hero

A developer discovers a critical bug in production on Saturday. Instead of waiting for Monday, they dive in, fix it, document the solution, and prevent future occurrences—because our customers depend on us.

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The Teaching Moment

A senior engineer spends three hours helping a junior developer understand a complex concept, creating documentation that helps the entire team—because building others up builds everyone up.

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The Customer Champion

A product manager talks a customer out of a feature request that would hurt them long-term, instead proposing a better solution—because customer success beats customer satisfaction.

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The Open Source Contributor

An engineer fixes a bug in an upstream dependency and contributes the fix back to the community—because we succeed when the entire ecosystem succeeds.

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Measuring Our Culture

Culture isn’t just aspirational—it’s measurable:

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Quantitative Metrics

• Employee Net Promoter Score - Would you recommend CNAP as a workplace?
• Internal mobility rate - Are people growing within the company?
• Knowledge sharing frequency - How often do we teach each other?
• Open source contributions - How much do we give back to the community?

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Qualitative Indicators

• Stories we tell - What behaviors do we celebrate?
• Decisions we make - Do our actions match our values?
• People we hire - Are we attracting the right people?
• Feedback we receive - What do customers and community members say about us?

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The Future of Work at CNAP

As we grow, our culture will evolve, but our core remains constant: we exist to serve the builder community.

Whether we’re 10 people or 1,000, whether we’re a startup or a public company, whether we’re building developer tools or consumer products—we will always be builders serving builders.

That’s not just our business model. That’s who we are.

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