Hey! Welcome to the Clef team, we’re so excited to have you with us. We’re hoping you’re going to learn a lot working here and that we’ll learn a lot from you. But first, this document will help you start figuring out how Clef works and how we work together.
At Clef, we’re trying to build an inclusive and value-driven organization, so you’ll find that a lot of our policies differ from the norm at other companies. If you have any questions about why we do things a certain way, or have a suggestion about how we can do anything better, please let us know (or just write comments in the documents -- you should already have comment access to everything in the Clef handbook!).
Hopefully by the time you’re actually starting at Clef, you’ve already finished filling out the paperwork and you’ve showed up to a desk with a new computer and the accessories that fit your work-style. Today is all about getting you set up and making sure you’re ready to go.
The goal for today is for you to publish something live. If you’re a designer, that could be a color change for a button. If you’re a developer, it might be fixing a missing semicolon. It could be a tweet from the Clef account or a blog post, a support response or an infographic. Whatever you’ll be doing at Clef, we want you to ship something small today.
Otherwise, take some time to meet everyone you’ll be working with, and set things up the way you like them. First days are hard and mostly we want you to be getting comfortable today.
We’ll also do a team lunch today so that we have a little dedicated time to talk with everyone. If you have any food preferences or restrictions that we should consider in choosing a lunch spot, let us know.
We want you to stick around. Your successes here will be your team’s successes, and your team’s successes will be yours. We want you to build a career here, so don’t feel any pressure to cram everything into today -- you’ll have plenty of time to get things right.
At the end of your first day, you get to choose how you want to celebrate with your new team. You have three options:
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We can all do a group high five and cheer for you
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We can go out for a drink or dessert nearby together
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We can all go to dinner somewhere nearby
The first day can be intense, so if you’re feeling drained we can all cheer together and send you home to get ready for day number two. If you’re feeling energized and pumped to be with the team, you can choose one of the more involved options. We just want to celebrate with you however you feel comfortable!
Clef is a values-driven company. Hopefully you heard about this a lot during your interview process, but we take our values really seriously at Clef and they guide the decisions we make here. You can read more about the Clef Values, but the short versions are:
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Be better today than yesterday
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Treat others the way they'd like to be treated
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Fight the default of exclusion
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We succeed together when we trust each other
Clef isn’t a normal security company. Security is traditionally a very technical and inaccessible field. At Clef, we’re working to make security easy and approachable to everyone, and that radiates through everything we do. Our product is meant to be friendly and fun, and our attitude should never feel superior or smug. Clef isn’t about protecting people, it’s about empowering them.
Our ambition is huge. We want to build the identity standard for the Internet. This is a massive undertaking, and we have to be a little bit delusional to believe that we can do it. But every day we’re making progress and we’ve already taken this a lot further than anyone said was possible, so we’re used to making the impossible happen. This is hard, daunting work, but that’s how we make a dent on the world.
For now, Clef operates as a single team where everyone is working towards company-level goals. Since we’re still small, there’s not too much overhead in keeping up with everyone. There are still engineering-specific meetings, and marketing conversations that happen separately. But when we set our goals, we all think directly about how we contribute to the company goals. You’ll get to work with everyone at Clef in some capacity, and dip your fingers into all different kinds of thinking.
We believe that if you have too much on your plate, then you can only see what’s right in front of you. You need space and time to think about the future and plan ahead. If we give ourselves room to breathe and think and live, we’re capable of much broader thinking. To achieve that, we try to create a culture that’s not based on scarcity.
You should expect a typical workweek at Clef to be 45-50 hours. Most people show up between 9 and 10 and leave between 6 and 7. We don’t work weekends, but a lot of us host or go to events at night. This is to give you a sense of what’s normal here, but you should work the hours that are healthy and sustainable for you.
We try to make the office atmosphere welcoming and respectful for people of all different backgrounds. This is an ongoing process of negotiating and compromising as we share space, and depends on good communication. If there are specific things you like or want to change, let us know. We’re always getting better :)
Clef is a small company that is changing and improving rapidly. Today is about welcoming you and helping you join our team, but soon we’ll need your help growing and learning. Clef will be a very different company a year from today, and it’s hard to imagine what it will be like in 5 or 10. You will have a hand in building that company, and we’re so excited to have your help.