What's the Company Culture Like at Fora?

What stuck out to you the most about Fora’s culture during the hiring process, and what was it specifically that convinced you to join?

The most prevalent thing that stood out to me was the genuine sense of excitement about what the team was building. The positive energy I got from everyone I interviewed with, from management and leadership to other engineers, made it easy to see myself working there. Eight months into my time here has proven that instinct correct. It’s been great! Fora is very family-friendly and growing fast, and I’m excited to come in to work each day.

How does the company culture encourage peers to connect with each other either virtually, in person or both?

Our company culture at Fora really lends itself to building connections with my coworkers. Our pod team structure encourages cross-functional communication naturally with designers, engineers and product managers working closely together to build the right things at the right time for our users. Our hybrid setup — currently three days in the office for engineers — has allowed me to get a lot of the benefits of in-office relationship-building and additional awareness of problems that people are solving that I was missing out on while being fully remote. I’ve been able to get people unblocked just by overhearing a conversation, which never happened during my years of fully remote work. 

Beyond our day-to-day work, we also have company offsites, happy hours and other activities that really allow us to connect and hang out as well. We recently had a team cooking class at a pasta-making studio in Greenwich Village, and I’m looking forward to putting the cooking class skills to use this winter.

What opportunities are available for employees to level up their careers?

Fora has a very strong demo culture, with weekly product and tech meetings where anyone can showcase their work to leadership and the rest of the org and take questions. We also have a robust hackathon culture, with hackathons occurring a few times per year. You get to work with people from other teams or areas of the business you don’t normally interact with, tackle problems outside your usual domain, and pitch ideas to the company. Several hackathon projects have made it into production since I joined, which makes you feel like there’s no limit to what you can come up with to solve real problems for the company and our users. 

I attended a conference earlier this year as a representative and brought back hands-on knowledge about feature flagging and AI agent implementation that I’ve directly applied to my work. The company’s willingness to invest in conference attendance shows they value continuous learning and bringing new ideas back to the team. At a fast-growing company like Fora, there are lots of interesting problems to solve, from engineering to organizational ones. The travel industry specifically is changing quickly with AI, and it’s exciting to be bringing new capabilities to our users.

What would you tell someone considering applying to your company?

This is something I’ve already told people I’ve referred to Fora. Regardless of Fora’s growth, it still feels like a startup in the sense that it’s a place where you can come in and really build something together and also on your own.

I describe this company as “you get out of it what you put into it.” You can come here, show up, do your work, go home and be perfectly happy — and you’d still be a great employee. But you can also come in, see something that needs improvement, notice another team that could use help or find an area where you can really lend your expertise.

You can build your own niche here if you’ve always wanted to create something or truly own what you build. You get that opportunity at Fora, but in a much safer and more collaborative environment.

If you see something you can do, you’ll be encouraged to do it. If the freedom to work on things you’re passionate about alongside your day-to-day work excites you, then this is the place for you. And if you simply want to contribute to a great team and platform every day, you can absolutely do that too, but there’s also room to grow far beyond your role if you want it.

What surprised you after joining?

I joined two and a half years ago now, so I have to think back a bit to when Fora was very different. What surprised then was how small the company was for how put-together the business already felt.

I think what makes Fora a stable startup, if there even is a definition for that, is our three co-founders. They each bring different strengths that come together under this travel and tech umbrella, so you don’t end up with one ego driving the company. You have three people constantly collaborating, communicating and bouncing ideas off each other.

That collaborative atmosphere trickles down into the culture they’ve created. People at Fora genuinely want to help each other. It’s not about being the smartest person in the room or getting all the credit. It’s about building a product and doing work you’re proud of.

What makes your culture motivating?

At Fora, our primary “customers” are our advisors. They’re everything to us. Our goal is to make advisors happy by building tools that improve their lives and their businesses. We want to solve their problems.

What’s unique about Fora is that at most companies, customers are usually loudest when something is wrong — when they’re frustrated by a design change or dealing with a bug. But Fora advisors, because of the trusting relationship our co-founders have cultivated with them, also go out of their way to tell us what they love.

They thank us, share what they appreciate and tell us how something we built changed their business. Sometimes they’ll even just share a big win, like landing a huge lead or hitting a major milestone.

Advisors are incredibly generous with their encouragement and kind words and I think we’re really lucky as a product team to be building for customers we genuinely love and who genuinely love us back. As someone who finds a lot of motivation from hearing gratitude, it just motivates me to build even more for them.