So in the last month, the Zimbra engineers have been flooded with emails and phone calls from recruiters offering them jobs. This is very flattering. For two reasons, one its flattering because in the valley there are so many hot companies and so many hot engineers – but I guess Zimbra is now the breeding ground for talent. Second, as soon as these messages arrive – our engineers forward it around and are not tempted to leave a small fantastic startup to go work for a big company especially ones where recruiters blindly spam everyone. The latest rounds of recruiting spam to our engineers came from Mark Jennings who has a microsoft email address and there have been numerous recruiting calls from Google as well….
So that brings us to how we got the talent that we have and how we retain them. First – very high standards in recruiting, very tough interview process and, most importantly, word of mouth (no recruiters). Second, at Zimbra you work with the best and the brightest and are challenged everyday – its an honor to come to work everyday. Third, its the chance to lead a revolution in computing. Here we find ourselves at the crossroads of an internet revolution again – and in some small but definite way Zimbra is leading at least one battle. Finally, this is a fun culture – we definitely work hard and play harder and we all know each other personally as well as professionally. So that all brings us back to this question of how long before we start losing people…. I think we will lose people for one reason alone – we grow too big and our culture starts sucking (I won’t be here then either). But we will lose people to other startups, to new startups as I am confident that the kinds of people we have here at Zimbra have no interest at all in being in a company where they don’t influence the culture, direction and product strategy. They are all entrepreneurs by heart …..
