Week 979

Matt Kirkland

It's week 979!

I love May, as it's got a tremendous overlap of connotations. In the midwest, May is when you can really expect spring to be in full bloom - warmth is back, everything is green again, and you can see summer barelling around the corner in that hot, loud muscle-car convertible it always drives. And May first is even more loaded: it's an old-fashioned 'hang a basket of flowers on your door' tradition, it's a distress call (Mayday! Mayday!), and it's International Workers Day.

BNB is an American company, founded by two Americans in the 21st century, so we don't have a lot of dominant cultural history with the workers movements. But from the beginning, Nate and I have intended to make Brand New Box a place where WE would want to work, at least. We'd both had plenty of jobs before, good and bad, and had at least some vision of the kind of working environment we wanted to create.

The easy ways to think about this are employee benefits, right? Yes, we can pay people a good wage, and we can give them generous benefits (see the BNB playbook for how this actually works on the ground, with parental leave, flexible vacation, full insurance and dental coverage, IRA matching, education budgets, tech gear budgets, etc etc). And we structure our time so that everybody has automomy and independence about when and how they work.

On the other side, we want to do work that MATTERS. We take on projects where the result of our work means people are doing good things, and improving their small corner of the world, and using technology to skip drudgery and needless effort. We think about, and talk often, about how our projects are achieving that.

But the heart of it comes down to: we want to work with smart, ambitious, but real-actual-humans. And we want to treat each other as real humans too! So that means supporting each other and our families when we need to, and responding to changing situations with grace and patience. I'm sure we're not perfect about this, but I like where we are heading.