Cohort 14 Spotlight: Building Inclusive Workplace Culture with Bonda
In Blue Startups’ Spotlight series, we highlight the people and stories that make startups possible. In this Spotlight, we interviewed Pilar Zárate and Dr. Stephanie Palacios, co-founders of Bonda. Bonda offers quick virtual games & data analytics that are based in science, to help remote teams build positive culture.
How’d you both meet and what inspired the vision for Bonda?
I was listening to a podcast about psychology where Steph was being interviewed and she started telling her amazing story. At the end of the interview, she mentioned that she was from Colombia. I’m from Colombia, so I was like, “Oh my God, this woman is amazing. I need to talk with her!” I searched for her on LinkedIn and we connected. I asked her to be my advisor for my previous startup, but things didn’t work out with my previous co-founder. So, after a while, we decided to start Bonda together. We’ve been at it for a year and a half, but we actually met for the first time in-person when we got to Hawaii with Blue Startups!
One of the things that inspired Bonda was experiencing the toxic cultures in the workplace. I was coming from an unproductive relationship with my co-founder at my last startup, and I had experience working in corporate settings where I didn’t feel I really belonged. So I wanted to build something that could bring more connection and meaningful relationships in the space that we spend most of our adult lives in.
What’s your long term vision for the company and what are some of the ways that you hope to achieve it?
Our long term goal would be for company teams everywhere to be using Bonda as an integrated part of their strategy on multiple levels, including everything from recruitment, to top talent retention, to building team cohesion and employee engagement, and just building a positive company culture overall.
What it will represent in the future is that we are creating a cultural DNA for organizations. If you think about culture — culture is not static. It’s something that is constantly changing, depending on the people that you hire. We envision each organization having their own DNA for their culture. With Bonda, you will be able to match your own DNA, depending on your values and interactions, with that of the company. Then, you can create meaningful connections in the workplace, and translate that into positively impacting the way that you work with each other.
We are approaching this with science and methodologies that are proven to support real connection and belonging. We translate this into small, easy games that teams can play, and extract data that can be used to build off the strengths of their company DNA. Managers can get culture insights about how their team is doing in the moment and across time, the more they play. And the system that we’ve built is very dynamic in a reciprocal-type of system where the employees themselves are getting anonymous and aggregated feedback to inform them of suggestions for the next games.
What are some of the major hurdles that you’ve had to overcome in starting your company?
Being Latina women in tech says it all, unfortunately. Our society has not caught up to the reality that the landscape of the workplace is changing. It’s precisely why we’re doing the work we’re doing. There’s still way too much embedded systemic racism and sexism, and we constantly encounter it. It just shows how much this is needed. We need to question how women and minorities are being represented, treated, promoted, acknowledged, supported, and cheered on in the workplace. It all trickles down from every facet of society right back to our target client, which is the workplace.
We keep hearing the same thing over and over: “I want to support my team being remote because I realized how much that lifestyle is now valued, especially by younger generations coming into the workforce, I just don’t know how.”
Are there any exciting developments that have happened in the last year?
Well we’re a brand new company, so this whole year has just been an amazing roller coaster ride. We started the company at the perfect time, as more and more companies are shifting to remote or hybrid environments. It’s really exciting every time we talk to a new Head of People, HR Manager, or C-level founder. We keep hearing the same thing over and over: “I want to support my team being remote because I realized how much that lifestyle is now valued, especially by younger generations coming into the workforce, I just don’t know how.” In the entrepreneurship world, we also hope to inspire these companies with our own core values, finding fun in each day that we work and celebrate every little accomplishment or victory. We have 21 signed LOIs with paid commitments, and 61 organizations on our waitlist. We got all these contracts organically, without any paid marketing. We also have an amazing team that came to us because they experienced the same toxic work cultures and believed in our mission. Our team symbolizes a representation of diverse people from all around the world, hoping to show that although we are working remotely together, we still embrace and celebrate each person on our team.
How is Blue Startups helping Bonda achieve its goals?
Blue Startups has been instrumental in encouraging us and putting us in front of investors. We’re learning about how they think and interact with startups, and the best way to pitch our company. Also, being able to cultivate community with the other founders at Blue and sharing stories of success and struggle, and supporting each other in real time has just been incredible. For us, this is like our retreat as founders so it’s been an amazing experience, exploring this paradise while working diligently on our product.
Blue Startups is a Top 20 Accelerator in the US (TechCrunch) focused on helping scalable-technology companies compete globally. Blue Startups aims to stimulate economic growth in Hawaii and create new business opportunities by providing promising entrepreneurs with mentorship, access to business expertise, product testing, peer review, pitch development, introductions to investors, and seed funding.
