Last week, I had coffee with an investor near my apartment in SF. Normally, these conversations revolve around our growth, product, and our customers. But this investor surprised me by asking something different: "What motivates you?"

I took a moment to think about it. My answer was simple: our team.

We Don’t Look Like Most Startups

My teammates fuel my drive to make Blaze great. Our crew has been working together for six years, starting with a completely different product, Almanac. Through the pivot to Blaze, 90% of the original team has stayed to this day, and our average tenure is 3.8 years.

This is all the more remarkable because the majority of our team are parents. Around 70% of the team have kids, most of them young. Eddie, my cofounder, had his first child right before joining the company in 2019, and he's had two more since. He's not alone: multiple people on our team have had kids during their time here.

Think about what that means: these people have been working for years on a project that only recently bore any fruit, at great personal cost to themselves, their partners, and their families. They've taken a bet on the company—and me. They've stuck with it because they believe in what we're doing. As a leader, it's my job to do everything in my power to make it all worth it.

That extends to my team's families, because I've seen up close how they've supported us behind the scenes. And I know that if I make Blaze everything it can be, everyone's kids will get to grow up very, very differently—with all the opportunities they deserve and more. Doing right by them drives the burning ferocity I feel to get it right and go big.

Hiring a Team of Thoroughbreds

What about our team is so different from most other startups? I think of us as "startup thoroughbreds." They're not people who would thrive in every environment—in fact, our best people wouldn't reach their full potential in a typical corporate setting. But here, they shine.

We're just 25 people—11 engineers, no full-time product managers, and just two designers. Our six marketers have helped us go from $0 to $10 million in just 17 months.

How has this small group of people from around the world defied the odds? The one non-negotiable quality that everyone on our team shares: they really, really care about what they do, down to the smallest details.

Working at an early-stage startup doesn't make sense for most people. You do it because it's the thing you love—because there's nothing else you can imagine doing. You have to care way more about your work than most do. When the focus is on moving quickly to outmaneuver bigger competitors, it takes superhuman competence and lightning-fast iteration to succeed. You can't just move quickly: you also have to measure twice and cut once every single time, and you have to keep going much longer than most people have the stamina for.

Finding people who can move with the care, speed, and endurance that we need isn't easy. That's why we've always done hiring differently. I don't care about a big-name job or school on your resume. I want to see your drive: what you believe you can achieve and how hard you're willing to work. And when you start at Blaze, this is the promise we make: you take big bets and give us your best, and we'll give you everything you need to make magic.

Finding Unexpected Heroes

How do we recruit these remarkable people? One of the most rewarding aspects of building Blaze has been discovering extraordinary talent in unexpected places. Being a distributed team and seeking out folks who don't fit the mold has allowed us to find people who don't fit the Silicon Valley stereotype—the types who are already great at what they do outside of startupland, but are itching for a place like Blaze where they can help build a rocketship.

Consider our marketing team. Our Head of Marketing, Andrew, came to us as an English professor with three teenage daughters and zero startup experience. He must have been great in the classroom, but his exceptional capacity for storytelling makes him absolutely brilliant at understanding our customers and crafting our message—and he experiments relentlessly at a pace you might not find in a college lecture hall. He is built for the pace and boldness of startup life, and I know he's grown faster and farther running our marketing department than he would have had he stayed the course in academia.

That pattern repeats across our team: our ranks are stacked with exceptional people with fascinating backgrounds who are able to do so much more at Blaze than they thought possible. Caylynn was a badass high school vice principal, and without her operations leadership, we would never be able to sustain our rate of growth. Matt had a successful real estate career before Blaze, but without his efforts producing our ad creative, we just wouldn't have inflected last fall. And there are so many more like them on our team.

These aren't just nice stories. They remind me that none of us could build Blaze on our own, and the most exceptional contributors don't usually come with the "right" resume. They bring perspectives and skills developed in completely different contexts. When we give folks who might have been underestimated by traditional recruiting a chance and remove the constraints to making great work, we create a special kind of magic that hiring conventional candidates could never produce.

What Makes Special Teams Stick Around

It's not enough to just hire rockstars. You have to keep them for years to see real impact. And when it comes to employee retention at startups, no factor is more important than growth. You can be a terrible manager, but if you're growing fast, you can still retain people. And even if you're an amazing manager, if you're not growing, you'll still lose great teammates.

But at the end of the day, I think the relationship between the CEO and employees truly decides whether your high performers stick around, especially before product market fit.

The last 5 years have often felt like eating glass as we've taken on monumentally difficult technical challenges:

• Building a document editor with incredibly complex product requirements

• Then pivoting to building a Visual Studio and CMS, with even broader and deeper scope

• Now working on cutting-edge AI with no established playbooks

Our best people stayed through all that pain not just for the mission, but because we trust, respect, and like each other.

While growth ultimately makes retention easier, the bonds we've built in leaner times have become our company's strongest foundation. The strength of my relationships with our team has taught me to keep looking for people that aren't just talented high performers, but who share my values and align with how we prefer to work.

How I Invest in Relationships

To keep our amazing people motivated, I've tried to build deep, individual connections with everyone at Blaze.

I can often tell in the first couple weeks of working together who's going to be an A+ player. It's like that magic moment in dating when you realize, "Wow, this is someone special." I remember exactly where I was when I felt that way about so many people on our team.

But it can be hard to prioritize relationships when there are so many tasks to get done—specs to write, emails to answer. Different people need different support at different moments. I've found that the best connections form through the work itself—solving problems together, celebrating wins, and navigating hard decisions.

And I know our culture isn't for everybody. Just as it's hard to find your soulmate, it's hard to find people you want to spend 5-10 years working with. In some ways, it's even more intense than marriage: you might spend more time with your colleagues at a startup than your partner on some days.

One way I show people what the relationship means to me is by giving feedback early and often to show I'm leaning in and caring about their work as much as they are. This kind of candor isn't for everyone; it's hard for many people to not take work critiques personally. But when people can, it's truly magic. Ivan, our designer, has received hundreds of comments from me every single day for five years, and he's able to absorb what's valuable without letting the rest get to him. That kind of resilience is rare and it's one of the strongest predictors of who will fit in well at our company.

The reason I give so much feedback, and push both myself and those around me so hard, is because I believe that we truly have a championship team at Blaze capable of top .01% outcomes. The people who have been the most successful at Blaze understand that the way we hire, the way we work, and the high bar we set for quality and velocity are all ways I say "I believe in you and what you can do, and I know that we'll deliver together."

It's why so many people on our team naturally push themselves just as hard as I push myself. Gregorio, our staff architect, comes to mind in particular—time and again, he's pushed through endless sprints alongside me and our engineers, finding bottomless reserves of energy to beat through seemingly impossible technical tasks.

It Takes Two To Build

Hiring remarkable people and setting high expectations goes a long way, but it's not the whole story. We love giving people salary raises and equity increases for their hard work and contributions to our growth.

On average, team members who have been at Blaze for four years have received three or four increases in equity—for their performance, long tenure, or involvement in big wins. We recently created a team-wide incentive plan where everyone gets raises when we hit certain growth targets. I want to make it crystal clear that I'm serious about rewarding everyone's hard work and commitment as we go, without waiting years for an IPO or exit.

I've also seen how many life situations—sick parents, accidents, mental health challenges—that are more important than work come up for people. Part of repaying people for their investment in Blaze is helping them through these challenges with time, grace, and understanding. Doing that builds a foundation of trust that goes beyond compensation or professional development. And more than anything, it's just the Golden Rule—treating people like I'd want to be treated, human to human.

The Road Ahead

Our team is now doing some of the most exciting work of our careers. We're building a product literally on the edge of technical possibility, solving problems that don't come with existing playbooks. The challenges ahead will test our creativity, collaboration, and perseverance in new ways.

Through it all, my North Star remains the same: I want to create a business that rewards our team in life-changing ways that match the depth of our contributions, sacrifices, and commitment.

Team: you deserve the world for your efforts, creativity, and resilience. You've taken a bet on this company, and we owe it to you to deliver an outcome worthy of everything you've given Blaze. And there's no way we're going to fail at that.

Do you think you'd thrive at Blaze? We're hiring for some exciting roles, and I'd love to hear from you! Take a look here.