Fog Creek is now Glitch!
We’ve been thrilled to see the community embrace Glitch as the home for creating and discovering the coolest stuff on the web, so after 18 years, we’re saying goodbye to the Fog Creek name and betting our future on Glitch.
TLDR: We’ve renamed Fog Creek to Glitch, Inc. to represent our single-minded focus on Glitch. We’re hiring for a bunch of new positions (with more to come!) and welcoming a slate of new advisors. And it’s all in service of making Glitch one of the most important creative communities on the Internet, and having our company set the standard for thoughtful, ethical technology.
Back in 2000, two visionary founders, Joel Spolsky and Michael Pryor, envisioned a new tech company that would distinguish itself by the way it treated people — both its employees and its customers. Their belief was that being better to people would yield more invention, more innovation, and a much more pleasant place to work.
Well, they were right. The company they created, Fog Creek Software, has gone on to create multiple groundbreaking products and to help change the entire tech industry along the way.
From inventing Trello to co-creating Stack Overflow to pioneering bug tracking with FogBugz and launching other successful and influential products like Manuscript and Kiln and Copilot and CityDesk and many other experiments. Fog Creek has been a bastion of innovation for nearly two decades.
And today, we’re turning the page on that chapter for something new.
Becoming Glitch
When we started working on the project that would become Glitch, it was originally just part of our regular “Creek Week” process — the internal hackathons where members on our team come up with new ideas and try to inspire each other with cool projects. It became obvious pretty quickly that Glitch was something special.
Then earlier this year, when Glitch came out of beta, we saw an incredible groundswell. As a creative community, Glitch inspired people to create over a million apps in record time — including cutting-edge work in VR, machine learning, distributed apps, bots, and more. And Glitch has won the hearts of developers around the world who now feel that coding with other tools feels a lot more lonely and less productive. Just as importantly, Glitch has reminded an entire community that a healthy, independent, open web generates enormous value for everyone on the Internet, earning the attention and respect of many of the biggest players on the web.
One of the guiding principles for Glitch is that we should communicate with clarity, and that our purpose and goals should be self-evident in all we do. And that’s led us to recognize it’s time for us to become Glitch. It’s not just what we’re building, it’s who we are as a company. While the core values of Fog Creek still persist, we’ve also learned a lot and evolved a lot over the last two decades, and now our name and identity are evolving, too.
What’s Changing, What’s Not
In terms of Glitch as a community and as a product, nothing’s changing. We’re doubling down on being a friendly and welcoming community, and focusing our efforts and investment on extending our lead in innovative features that creators and developers love.
We’re holding tight to our values, honoring our core principles of valuing people — whether that’s our community members or the workers on our team. And we’re expanding our history of transparency and accountability, with meaningful efforts like publishing our entire employee handbook publicly. (It’s a Glitch app, naturally.) This lets us show the world how we put our values into practice. We also want to do more: Glitch, Inc. is designed to be a company that sets the bar on best practices for how we treat our community, customers, coworkers and collaborators.
There’s lots of news coming for Glitch as a product, too. We’re getting ready to open up Glitch Teams, to make it easy for your whole organization to collaborate on Glitch. (Tell your boss you want your team to be one of the first to use this new super-productive set of tools!) We’ll be building a powerful and valuable set of paid features on top of Teams to give even more options for organizations that want to get more out of Glitch, and to build a long-term sustainable business model for the platform and the company.
And we’re ecstatic to welcome a formidable slate of new advisors to help us grow Glitch, and expand our vision, and ensure that we practice the values we aspire to exemplify. Kimberly Bryant, Alan Cooper, Jason Goldman, and Franklin Leonard have a broad set of backgrounds covering everything from education to policy, user experience to filmmaking, social networks to social justice. And each of them brings unique expertise and insight into how we’re going to bring Glitch to millions more people around the world. We’re so thankful to them for joining us!
Join Us
That brings us to perhaps our most important announcement today: We want you to join us. Whether that’s as a member of the Glitch community, or by checking out the new job listings we’ve rolled out today (with more to come soon), we want you to be part of where Glitch is going.
Glitch is a very different kind of tech company, explicitly committed to setting the standard on thoughtful and ethical practices, and with an unparalleled track record of nonstop innovation for almost two decades. If that combination is appealing to you, take a look at the positions we’ve listed, and share the job openings with your friends who share those values.
