Calendar as Culture

What our team calendar looks like, and why it matters

If you take a look at Clara Labs’ team calendar (which our very own Clara helpfully schedules around), you’ll immediately notice a peculiar naming convention.

Clara Runs. Clara Recruits. Clara Learns. Clara Swims. Clara Lunches. Clara Introspects. Clara Cooks.

Clara does a lot of things.

Obviously “Clara” here refers to our company — not our product. It just so happens that when your product is Anthropomorphized Intelligence, you get to have nifty calendar titles that intentionally blur lines.

Pseudo-wittiness aside, these events say a lot about our shared values:

• Clara “Runs/Bikes/Swims” together on a regular basis because we enjoy each other and want the people we work with to be allies in our personal health goals.
• Our recurring team all-hands is “Clara Introspects” because we think it’s worth taking time to self-analyze, and believe introversion can be a strength.
• “Clara Learns” are open-house events built around learning new crafts. We think there is more to share and gain from each other than “just another open bar” provides for. (Look for a future post: “Why you won’t find ping-pong tables at our startup.”)

Take a look at our website, though, and it will be immediately obvious that Clara the assistant doesn’t do all of these things — yet.

But we hope one day they could.

More than just being a clever wordplay, Clara <does X> reinforces our mission: to build a truly intelligent, personality-rich system.

Clara (the product) can’t “cook” or “swim,” but our company culture reflects our belief in the importance of the human aspect of designing any truly intelligent system. We believe being a successful “AI company” involves more than just building bots. It requires that we as a team internalize the capacity of human + machine systems, and aim to maximize the creative potential of the system as a whole.

To that end, our calendar reminds us not only that the Clara we’re building is beginning to “learn” and help some of our customers “recruit” — but some future version may one day “introspect.”

We think that’s pretty cool to think about.

Evan is a dog-loving manager of customer success and builder of internal dashboards at Clara Labs.

We’re looking for Software Engineers, Machine Learning Scientists, Product Designers and Marketers. Interested? https://claralabs.com/about/