Welcoming Our 100th Team Member (And Our New Phase)

Learnings: From Two to One Hundred

September 2021 marks our 100th employee hire at Rasa.

A big step since our humble beginnings in 2016: our founders Alex and Alan sitting in a living room in Berlin, Germany. Since then:

• We became an American company and set up our headquarters in San Francisco (but we still have a very strong presence in Berlin)
• We've hired team members of 25 different nationalities - we don't want one country to dominate our culture. Instead, we decide what works best for us as an international team.
• We became a remote-first company, with our employee base located in the US, the UK, Germany, and other European countries.
• We fought for gender equality. Now, 50% of our team are women and non-binary people, with 42% of technical roles held by women and non-binary team members. (The industry benchmark is 29% and 26%.)

Those stats make us proud to work at Rasa. Yes, we speak different languages, and our diverse cultural contexts make having an open dialogue even more important as we build empathy for each other.

We acknowledge that our different locations have different realities. Everyone gets the space they need to deal with what is happening in their country or region. This way, we can understand each other better and make everyone feel included.

We understand that building a diverse and inclusive team is an ongoing learning journey for all of us. That's why we started a DEI Working Group in 2020: to challenge what the company and its leadership do from a DEI perspective. Also, we invest in helping our team to understand what DEI means at Rasa and how they can contribute to an inclusive environment. Every new joiner attends a DEI onboarding and, during summer 2021, each employee attended a workshop on how to be a good ally.

We know a company is built of people, and we want our people to truly live the empathy we ask them.

Rasa: A Value and Vision-Driven Company

One hundred people: and this is only the beginning.

By hitting this benchmark, we welcome our new growth stage, taking the time to revisit our values and leadership principles. So we can become an even better company for the following employees joining our team.

Because our company vision is at the heart of everything we do, we need diverse, inclusive, and multidisciplinary teams. And at Rasa, we want to empower those teams - within the company and in our large developer community - so they can build the best assistants.

For us, it's important to remember that:

• We celebrate what makes us human.
• We welcome our employees to make their voices heard and don't assume someone has less to contribute just because they are earlier in their career. Everyone is empowered to initiate change.
• We think big and question the status quo.

Things don't have to stay as they are. Companies can change and should be doing better. We know we're not perfect, but we'll keep it going no matter what.

The Next 100: Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion

At Rasa, DEI is not a project: it's a long-term commitment. To truly achieve a diverse and inclusive company, the work doesn't stop.

As we keep building a more diverse team, we are:

• Setting annual company targets for DEI. We believe that DEI needs to sit alongside other targets like revenue to signal that DEI is a company effort and not "just" a People Team project.
• Implementing diversity and inclusion surveys quarterly - without making judgments based on visible factors and establishing a baseline on how inclusive and welcoming the team is. This way, we can measure the impact of future actions.
• Continuing to implement our inclusive hiring measures.

Without our joint DEI efforts, we can't move forward and achieve our goals. A more diverse Rasa team is crucial to achieving our vision and mission.

The more languages our team speaks, the better we can support different languages. DEI is a decision-making factor in our work, including our:

• Product development,
• Developer community,
• New talent hiring,
• And leadership.

Our team members should be DEI advocates. Are you the next?

Would You Like to be Part of Our Team?

Our ultimate goal is to be a diverse, equitable, and inclusive company that embraces, represents, and gives opportunities to all possible team members regardless of age, race, sexual orientation, socio-economic class, nationality, religious beliefs or any other dimension of diversity.

Would you like to join us and help shape the future of AI assistants? We have 30+ positions open at the moment - maybe one of them is perfect for you.

To apply, check out our careers page here.