Our 4 new awards say one thing: great culture starts with the CEO. 

You might remember a blog that I wrote just a few months ago on our exciting recognition from Comparably on Best Perks and Benefits, alongside Otta’s Rocket List 2022.

Founded in 2019, Chronosphere is a remote-first company built by engineers, for engineers. We are a leading cloud native observability platform aimed at putting engineers back in the driver’s seat to seamlessly navigate cloud native complexity.

In the past year, we’ve achieved some pretty amazing things: like tripling our team, adding key executive leaders, and retaining 100% of our valued customers. At this year’s KubeCon + CloudNativeCon we announced our latest launch of the Chronosphere platform which continues to disrupt legacy solutions that we think provide too little, too late for too much out of pocket. Needless to say, we’re on a mission to change the observability world, and it starts with our people.

In October, we saw two awards as a result of our great culture. Today, we couldn’t be prouder to add four more awards to the list including:

🏆Best CEO

🏆Best Company Culture

🏆Best Company for Women

🏆Best Company for Diversity

What do these awards say? These Comparably awards speak to the special culture that we’ve cultivated together, and our leadership that takes us to the next level.

Let’s take a dive into what each award means.

Comparably released their 6th annual list of Best CEOs, based on anonymous employee ratings over a 12 month period. The final rankings were determined from sample questions and approval metrics of CEOs. We were ecstatic (but not surprised) to see none other than our trailblazing CEO, Martin Mao, grinning in 1st place on the small/mid-size companies list!

Martin leveraged his success at Uber, where he and future co-founder and our CTO, Rob Skillington worked on an open-source observability tooling (M3!). It provided Uber with the power of a scalable, remote storage time series database. With “uber” relevant experience under their belt they founded Chronosphere, as a people-first company with a passion to develop great, mission critical products.

At any company, the cultural mindset starts with its leadership and in particular the CEO. Martin believes — and it’s echoed throughout the leadership team — that transparent, people-first leadership is key to the success of every teammate. With the important pass-along effect of enduring camaraderie and care (amongst the rest of our values), we feel unstoppable in our mission and solutions.

See Martin’s leadership in action in this video from our company-wide third birthday celebration!

Comparably’s company culture rankings were determined on 20 core culture metrics — from compensation to career growth and leadership. Chronosphere came out with an A+ rating across the board — with the majority of voters noting that they truly look forward to interacting with their teammates (+1 to that. I mean, our team is pretty great.)

We believe in a work environment where all Chronospherians can thrive. Although our headcount has rapidly expanded we work to maintain a culture of trust and transparency. We think it helps make us collaborative, innovative, and successful in all of our endeavors — from teams down to the individual.

At Chronosphere, we offer an extensive list of global perks and benefits – to support our people, such as gender affirmation spending accounts. And, we’re always finding different ways for Chronospherians to connect — whether that be over free lunches, at monthly hub events, or even global, company-wide trips at exciting destinations!

How about the award for best company for women? Yep – we’re on that list too. Chronosphere actually ranks in the top 5% of companies for our “Gender Score”, which measures how female employees rate their experience across multiple dimensions.

This “Best company for women” award reinforces our commitment to our continued efforts in creating a diverse, equitable and inclusive work environment for all female-identifying teammates; especially in a famously male-dominated industry. For example, while the engineering org increased by 54%, we increased the number of female identifying engineers by 325%.

The Chronosphere team also expands inclusivity efforts outside of the company, like partnering with Girls Who Code, the largest pipeline of future female engineers.

Finally, check us out on the list for Best Company for Diversity. Small tech companies with less than 1,000 people actually hold the largest female employee ratio, with 30.2% – according to this FinancesOnline article. We’ve bested this number.  With approximately 250 employees, we’ve achieved greater parity with no single gender comprising more than 65% of our workforce.

But, we are going further.  For instance, you can see the average employment trends in tech in this special report by the EEOC, which highlights minority employment disparity in the tech industry.  We aim to do better. Much better.

As part of our Q3 DEI goals, Chronosphere has pledged and achieved to ensure greater diversity across the organization where no single ethnicity would make up more than 55% of the team.

What does Diversity, Equity and Inclusion at Chronosphere look like?

Diversity

The presence of difference.

It’s about taking intentional steps to establish mutual respect, understanding, and recognition for our unique qualities and experiences. We start with our hiring practices: further exposure to our role with job boards, asking for resumes to be blinded by candidates, and tracking efforts through DEI surveys.

Equity

Treating everyone the same.

We aim to meet people where they are, so that all teammates have an equal opportunity to be successful. We look at our practices and policies for this. How we think about compensation, and onboarding a Head of Total Rewards are a few ways we make sure people feel valued.

Inclusion

Creating an environment where everyone feels respected and connected to one another.

We practice inclusion at Chronosphere by seeking various ways for team members to not just feel invited to the party but feel part of it, too. This means in-person events and virtual events to acknowledge levels of comfort, sponsored meetings and work locations, and pulling in multi-level and multi-background individuals.

One of our priorities in 2023 is to have DEI innate to who we are — with DEI awareness events internally, alongside continued efforts to diversify the candidate pipeline. For FY24, we hope to launch at least two additional employee resource groups.

And stay tuned – we aim to release our first annual DEI report in March of 2023!

You can check out all of our latest happenings here!

As always, we’d love to hear from you.

Happy 2023!