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By H2O.ai Team | minute read | April 11, 2015

Category: Uncategorized
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———- Forwarded message ———-
From: SriSatish Ambati srisatish@0xdata.com
Date: Sun, Jun 1, 2014 at 12:29 PM
Subject: Re: jirassic hierarchy.
To: Kevin kevin@0xdata.com

Cc: Tom Kraljevic tomk@0xdata.com, engr engr@0xdata.com, team team@0xdata.com
The best cultures are ones where it feels like there isn’t any.
Not saying scrum won’t fit, I actually think it’s the closest to us. Just see if it helps more than it hurts. JIRAs bring a bit of order over necessary chaos. (aka, let’s solve as many known unknowns.)
Our coding culture has been one of rapid prototyping, continuous evolutionary design with close customer contact.(and ever increasing value creation in each epoch.) Speed over safety. Accuracy over speed.
We continue to break new ground, and an honest strategy, that keeps us ahead in a fast changing market. Winning customers and keeping our engineer’s contract with as little technical debt as possible has been our thing. h2o2 is our third clean start in less than as many years.
The 20,000 ‘adhoc’ looking decisions we have made these past couple of years have codified a culture with them.
At the same time, like america, we have kept our culture forceful but young; malleable to new vision. “impressionable”. It’s an immigrant nation mindset. An evolving collage from passionate code-artists, fighting a pre-conceived masterpiece. beatles trying to win over bob dylan. We prefer creative tension over a peaceful follow-me.
A guerrilla, almost ghetto, mindset to implementing new ideas then retracing back to making elegance possible. And fast feedback loops. It’s the ideas, never the person.
Our waves of team additions represent the puzzles we want to fill.
The next wave of H2O will transform the previous one.
Let’s brave the new world we are making.
I’m glad we have the company, camaraderie and energy within the team, to make this beauty possible.
Sri
On Sun, Jun 1, 2014 at 11:27 AM, Kevin kevin@0xdata.com wrote:
On 06/01/2014 11:03 AM, SriSatish Ambati wrote:
Sure. scrum or a variation of it for our organization makes sense if it fits into our culture.
if it doesn’t fit, it begs the question of “what is our culture”
I think we don’t have one, so anything new should fit?

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H2O.ai Team

At H2O.ai, democratizing AI isn’t just an idea. It’s a movement. And that means that it requires action. We started out as a group of like minded individuals in the open source community, collectively driven by the idea that there should be freedom around the creation and use of AI.

Today we have evolved into a global company built by people from a variety of different backgrounds and skill sets, all driven to be part of something greater than ourselves. Our partnerships now extend beyond the open-source community to include business customers, academia, and non-profit organizations.