My co-founder and I started MaintainX in 2018. We had previously built and sold a company together, and in that process, we observed how underserved by modern software frontline professionals were, across all fields. This problem extends far beyond hourly workers to plant managers, mechanical engineers, chemical engineers and reliability professionals. The state of the art system of record in many of these industrial and frontline environments is still a clipboard.

We decided to build a simple to use workflow deployment and orchestration environment that would help underserved frontline professionals manage the maintenance, safety, and operations on their equipment and facilities. We envisioned it to be as easy to understand as Slack and Asana but very use case specific for frontline needs.

From the beginning, we wanted to build the company that we ourselves always wanted to work at. The more we thought about what was important for our team, the more it became apparent to us that the people we always gravitated towards and did the best work with had three main attributes in common: they were highly competent, humble, and optimistic.

Yes sure, so starting with high competence, this is critical because, at the end of the day, building a startup is like playing in the Olympics – it requires excellence. We can’t build and scale a successful company without it.

Along the way, we realized how important it is to be humble, and although one should defend their opinions, one should also be able to listen and pivot. If in the heat of a passionate pitch, someone gives you a data point that is counter to that opinion, it’s important to stop and recalculate: “If this data point is true, then what I’m saying now may not be entirely correct, so let’s rethink it a bit”. It’s extremely important to have that humility as we search for the objectively best strategies to grow our business.

In terms of being an optimist, to us that means seeing every outcome of a decision as a lesson that should be quickly learned and adapted to the next set of decisions we have to make. We’ve met highly competent and humble people, who take the failure of their ideas personally and this sets them into a bad tailspin. We find that too many people in startups focus on what can go wrong and, while this is healthy, it’s also important to be an optimist, learn from your failures, and focus on what can go right moving forward.

So that is what we look for in potential hires – highly competent and humble optimists.

We are currently at 93 employees and growing fast. We still screen for the three main things I mentioned above, and we have been careful about who we hire. We take our time to find the right professionals. This is our foundational team and we want to build it with people who align with our values and bring diversity to our company. The first 10 people determine who the next 100 people are, and the first 100 people determine who the next 1000 people are. Getting this right is crucial, even though it’s hard to maintain the discipline to say no in the face of fast increasing hiring targets.

On top of what we’ve discussed, I’d add that we have a strict no asshole policy and we only hire people who understand that, in our company, we have each other’s backs. Scaling a startup successfully is hard and no one should ever feel like they’re alone. When we have a problem, we solve it as a team, regardless of whether it’s in someone’s job description.

We believe in meritocracy, where ideas and effort are publicly celebrated. The person who is the most impactful and helpful to everyone around them will be rewarded. Politics are a big no for all of us and we particularly part ways with “political folks”, when we observe that culture mismatch.

I think most of our colleagues would agree with the highly competent optimists paradigm. Diversity of opinions, background and doing the objectively right thing is critical and fits within that framework. We don’t hire great people to tell them what to do, but rather to have them tell us what to do.

Keep it honest, never compromise on integrity, and make sure that people give credit to each other for their hard work. Feedback should be given with a high degree of candor and you have to genuinely care about the success of your team as humans, pursuing their personal career arcs. No one will care about your feedback until they know you genuinely care about them.