Machine & Partners was designed around a single concept: Be cool. We wanted to build a company that we would be proud to work at. But what does being cool mean to us?
I’m not going to sugarcoat it. We’re considered old people in the tech world. We’ve been around the block (a couple times). When we reflected on the best work of our careers we found that our favorite projects were the ones where we actually delivered something valuable. There are a million examples of building the beautiful, slick, complicated, expensive, but wrong thing. So now we are maniacal, sometimes uncomfortably so, about focusing on value. Are we really building the right thing? As part of our process, we explicitly ask ourselves this question every week. It’s awesome.
You can’t take pride in your work if you don’t own it. And owning it means believing in it. This approach compels us to fight for doing the right thing (see above). It means having high conviction, high autonomy, but also high empathy and respect for others' points of view. Because we know we’re all trying to do the right thing, and if we disagree on how, it means we need to keep thinking. Owning our work is one of the reasons we’re stoked to log in in the morning.
If you're thinking about getting a job at Machine & Partners, take this item seriously. It's the best and worst thing about working here. You get loads of autonomy, and loads of responsibility. No AMs or PMs to blame or hide behind.
French post-structuralist philosopher Jacques Derrida insightfully noted that the margins define the center. Normal is the least interesting average of a spectrum of weirdness. We’re a little weird. Some might call it divergent or out-of-the-box. But we don’t pretend to be anyone we’re not. We bring our whole selves to meetings and to our work in order to be happy and whole, but also to be creative and powerful. That’s cool in our book.
Hopefully this is the first and last post you'll read concerning French-flavored post-structuralism today.
One of the problems with having a super-smart team is that they get bored easily. And if you’re seasoned, you’ve probably solved most of the easy problems many times over already. Machine & Partners was built to solve problems that are arising for the first time thanks to the emergence of AI. Even some of these problems are easy. But we concentrate on the hard ones, the as of yet undefined ones, the 100x ROI ones, the holy-shit-this-is-going-to-transform-our-business ones. Nothing gets us more excited than not knowing how the hell we’re going to succeed.
One of the biggest sins of a service company is working behind a wall. Getting an assignment, going away, racking up hours, and returning months later with a big TA-DA reveal. We get it. You don’t want to work when you’re paying someone else to do it for you. But this AI stuff is different. It’s critically important to be transparent in our process and decision-making, especially when the projects we work on are as mission critical as they are. It’s important for you as a client to understand what we’re doing and to learn about the different approaches and strategies that are available to us with AI technology. Call us over-sharers, but we love and need our clients to be a part of the sausage making. And frankly, it’s just so cool to be in a client meeting watching a GM and a senior developer thoughtfully discuss tree-based modular parsing pipelines.
Naked is a metaphor here. But we're a fully remote team, so it's hard to tell what people have going on below the t-shirt.
We are Edmundo Ortega, Greg Shove, Chase Ballard, Joey Mazzarelli, Jean Perrot, and a host of other smart, curious, talented, and relatively happy people.
Naked is a metaphor here. But we're a fully remote team, so it's hard to tell what people have going on below the t-shirt.
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