What's the Work-Life Balance Like at Rundoo?

What practice keeps the pace of your work sustainable — and what signal shows it’s working?

The practice that keeps Rundoo’s pace of work sustainable is ensuring people love what they do. Scaling a startup requires working both smarter and harder; I don’t think there’s any way around that. However, I’ve found that burnout primarily happens if you are doing things you don’t like. If you are enthralled by the problem you’re working on, long hours feel like momentum, not drudgery.

How do we ensure people love what they do? By regularly asking! The key question is: “Are you operating at the intersection of what you love and what the business needs?” If the answer is no, we should shift things around. In the worst case, someone should leave: Life is too short, and most people who can get a job here are too privileged to be doing things they don’t love. More often than not, it involves shifting the work around or chasing a new problem. 

Our culture values spell out RUNDOO, and the “D” stands for delight. We look for people who truly take delight in their craft. They are a salesperson because they love showing a prospect how they can improve their lives, or they love software engineering because of the beauty of well-composed layers of abstraction.

Which policy or norm makes flexible schedules successful — and how do you measure impact?

In my opinion, the key to letting people live flexibly is clearly setting an objective, numeric goal with a timeline. If you can outline exactly what someone should achieve and a timeline that they feel good about, then just let ‘em rip. Outlining this goal is hard! It can require hours or days of massaging it into exactly the right wording. Ideally, you want to come up with a statement such that if it is true, then things necessarily look how you want them to be.

Don’t get me wrong, inputs have a strong correlation with outputs. But if you don’t have a clear goal, you can fall into a world where people are worried about time spent in the office or making their manager happy. It’s so, so, so much better to outline a clear goal and then give people the autonomy to get there.

Which resource do people actually use — and what data shows effectiveness?

We have a number of perks that have become commonplace at tech companies: a beautiful office, company-provided lunch, fully-covered medical premiums, gym memberships and so on. These are all great and really do help. For example, having an office that people enjoy coming to brings electricity to every day.

However, in the spirit of uniqueness, I’ll highlight something I haven’t seen at many other companies: We offer free audiobooks through Libro. People have loved it! We have a little book club where people can share what they are reading and recommend books. And people listen to all kinds of things like fantasy fiction, parenting help, business strategy and academic books. It’s been really fun.