Inclusivity by design: discover Coactive’s culture and team values

Have you ever felt like an outsider at work? Did your employer do anything meaningful about it? Most businesses pay lip service to company culture, especially when it comes to workplace diversity. Companies should and can do better.

At Coactive, our culture guides everything we do. We’re not just raising the bar of what’s possible with machine learning, we’re raising the bar for inclusive, diverse teams everywhere. In this blog, we catch up with Sudnya Diamos, founding software engineer at Coactive. Here’s what she has to say about Coactive’s commitment to culture.

Hey Sudnya! Tell us a little bit about yourself and what led you to Coactive?

I’ve been in Silicon Valley for twelve years now. I’m originally from India, but I always wanted to be in the heart of the action, so I moved to the US. I’ve worked at businesses of all sizes, from multinationals to other startups.

I was used to being the only woman in the room, and it was tokenistic. People would listen, but never hear me. It was lip service. So I wanted to be on a team that would grow me in ways I haven’t been given the opportunity to grow before; a team that would stretch me and prepare me to lead my own company in the future. That’s when I heard about Cody. The more I got to know him and his co-founder Will, the more I got excited about the whole Coactive vision and team.

What excites you most about Coactive — the culture or the product?

Honestly? Both. I’ve had a lot of experience with data engineering and data systems, and I see that ML Ops is the software stack that’s going to have the highest value and impact in the near future. Coactive is all about that, so we’re definitely mission-aligned.

But a huge pull for me was being able to join a company where I could shape the product and the culture. In terms of diversity, Coactive gets it.

Coactive has eight guiding principles on its company culture statement. Can you give an example of a time you’ve seen one of them in action?

One of our guiding principles is to act "Boldly and deliberately".

I joined as the third software engineer on the team. During my first week, I realized we could benefit from adopting some engineering best practices. Investing in engineering rigor early on would ensure that the team could focus on the high leverage problems instead of the minutiae that can be automated. Our positive company culture meant that I was able to take responsibility to address this gap (another one of our principles is to "not be a bystander " and take ownership).

As such, I identified which engineering best practices would be within scope for our early stage, and I launched a workstream to get everyone aligned. The team deeply valued my initiative, and we brainstormed together to make a game plan. We also received valuable feedback from one of our company advisors, who has scaled start-up teams in the past. Through this collaborative process, everyone on the team helped to optimize our engineering controls.

I have worked in a few start-ups before, and I’ve seen developers spend a lot of time firefighting or doing throwaway work. With Coactive, this is the first time I have seen an early-stage team being so deliberate about engineering rigor, while being pragmatic and nimble. I expect this time investment to pay dividends. Now we can avoid common start-up pitfalls while growing the Coactive team.

I think we can all agree that’s a “bold and deliberate” intervention in your first week, Sudnya, rock on!

Thank you. I know you only asked for one example, but…

Speak your truth, Sudnya. We’re here for it.

OK. Well, I actually think my most crucial contribution to the culture has been towards the "one team" principle. I strongly believe it is vital for an early-stage team to be very high trust and close-knit. So I started a weekly book club, as well as a regular lunch-and-learn program.

In the book club we all read and discuss technical books to level each other up, and we have accountability buddies to help us get through dense technical material. The lunch-and-learn sessions at Coactive are a forum for any member to teach others about a topic they are passionate about. As a perk, the speaker gets to order in a Coactive-sponsored lunch from their restaurant of choice!

That’s some tasty learning right there. What advice would you give to someone considering joining Coactive?

It’s important to know that when you join a startup you’ve really got to be bought into the mission. I love what Coactive does — we’re pushing the boundaries of machine learning and it’s going to be hugely impactful, so that was a clear fit.

But if you’re looking for cultural change, like I was, then you should definitely apply. The culture here is everything they say it is. The founders live and breathe the values and culture they’ve published on github. They take it really seriously – it’s mission critical to them. At this stage, most startups just focus on rapid iteration and shipping the MVP (minimal viable product) at all costs. But Cody and Will are really guided by their commitment to culture and inclusivity.

Looking outwards for a moment, how will Coactive improve its clients’ futures?

No one has solved the problem we’re solving. Our solution is genuinely game-changing, because we’re making machine learning accessible to businesses of all sizes for the first time.

The thing businesses need to understand is that good data is much more empowering than big data. Coactive is the thought-leader in this category. We're creating a new category in the market — we’re making unstructured data usable, and at the same time, we’re making the analysis easy for users. From a business process perspective, we’re also on the frontier of efficient active machine learning that puts a human firmly in the loop. (Our co-founder, Cody, wrote a great paper on this new paradigm). It’s going to revolutionize the way businesses leverage AI.

Punchy! OK, final question, Sudnya. Because our strength comes from diversity, everyone at Coactive brings a unique quality to the team. What’s your ‘superpower’?

I’m all about the performance and scalability of our platform. I love being the glue. My job is to make sure nothing falls through the cracks and that everything fits together while being scalable — I’m ensuring Coactive is usable on the massive datasets our clients have. My background spans robotics, ML, and high performance system design, so I’m able to bring a big picture perspective. I love combining my experiences to make a scalable production system that crushes it for our clients.

Thanks Sudnya, keep crushing it!

If you want to be part of the future of machine learning, and value culture as much as we do, then check out our job openings. If you’re a business and you want to see our product in action, just request a demo.