Two months ago, I ran into one of our team members in the parking lot. We exchanged the usual “how’s it going” pleasantries but something didn’t seem right - he looked unusually somber.
I asked him if something was wrong and after an initial pause, he opened up - “my wife might be seriously ill. We are waiting for confirmation but it’s very likely we have a problem”. I asked him about his family situation and he told me they have young kids, and it was going to be tough dealing with this situation.
I did the best I could to comfort him (ensuring he has unlimited time off, insurance coverage, etc.), but I know there’s nothing I could do to make a real impact in such a situation.
Since then, I’ve checked on this team member a few times - luckily it appears his wife’s disease is expected to progress very, very slowly (maybe nothing significant for 20-30 years or more, fingers crossed). What has struck me the most is that, in the face of real adversity, he continues to be engaged at work, continues to innovate and just continues to be an amazing team player in every sense of the word. I personally admire his resilience - I do not know if I would have the depth of emotional fortitude needed to be so positive in such a tough situation.
Over the last seven years, we have been extremely deliberate in making ThoughtSpot a family-friendly place. Working at a startup with an ambitious mission to make a small dent in the universe is not easy - it requires dealing with lots of tight deadlines, managing chaos without well-defined processes, working with limited resources, selling a new product that is still building its brand - the list of challenges is endless. It’s a lot of hard work.
For those of us that come to work at ThoughtSpot, we get the intangible reward of working with some really talented people that have a sense of purpose, we get to work on hard technical problems, we get to market and sell a product that’s highly differentiated, and most importantly, we get to make a difference in the lives of our customers.
But if you think about the families behind each one of us, they do not get to participate in these mental rewards. Still, they support each one of us in our mission, allowing and enabling us to do what we do. This is invaluable - there’s no amount of funding or stock price increase that would ever be enough to repay the debt of their support.
As we announce our new round of funding today, I want to say to the ThoughtSpot families - we couldn’t do this without your selfless support to our mission. I am forever indebted for everything you do to support our team members who come to work at ThoughtSpot. And to every leader at ThoughtSpot, I want to say that we owe it to the families of our team members, the current team and even the ones that have moved on to do bigger things in their career, to make ThoughtSpot successful. I personally feel energized from this sense of gratitude every day. Thank you. And thank you again.
