Team Retreat and Giving Back
Rotera was founded early last year while we were still dealing with some of the more challenging parts of the pandemic. Since we started we have recruited a fully remote team that currently spans 7 states. While we knew we wanted to fully embrace a remote culture, many of us have also really yearned to get together on some frequency and meet many face-to-face for the very first time.
We were lucky enough to get the entire team out to Denver last week - coordinating all of our schedules was not easy and some could only make part of the week - but we did it! We now all know who is sitting across the Google Hangout from us quite a bit better. We had plenty of strategy discussion, product planning sessions, methodology development sessions, and the like. We even had every single team member build an app on our Alyks platform during a 1.5 hour session…..engineering, sales, implementation, consulting, and leadership. We proved that we could enable those without technical chops to create AI Assistant apps, fast, deploy in real-time, and be live in minutes or hours. We have a lot more in front of us, but it was a major milestone.
Remote is still our focus. Remote is the future….and that future is really now. But I think it is still really important to find the time to build camaraderie and tackle difficult problems together. Moreover, some level of offsite allows us to embrace the communities we live in and give back in a truly meaningful way. We’ll certainly be keeping our employee retreats up on at least an annual basis - what are you doing?
Project C.U.R.E.
All the work aside, we were also able to spend a lot of time together to having fun. But, more importantly, a few of us had a chance to give back. Roughly 50% of our team is in Denver and there happens to be a really amazing healthcare non-profit headquartered here that helps provide critical healthcare supplies to countries of need. Project C.U.R.E. provides health kits and newborn kits to mothers and children that may otherwise have to walk 10+ miles to a nearby clinic. They provide hospital supplies to clinics and hospitals in developing countries that often don’t have sufficient sterile equipment to serve their patients. Recently, they have been one of the largest donors of medical supplies to Ukraine via air, providing much more certainty of timely delivery. Project C.U.R.E. is an organization I have volunteered with in the past and one that I always know is having a positive impact on our world.
The Rotera team is proud to have spent an afternoon volunteering last week. We were able to sort several crates of supplies and package many more Kits for Kids to be sent around the world. We certainly plan to continue our support of their mission into the future.
