Backplane Reviews

The management of the company has not participated here at all, but I can’t stand by and continually let a few people hurt the amazing team we have in this company. And let’s be clear, there can be no motivation for anyone to make comments here other than spite. Honestly, it’s difficult to respond to these types of remarks. One of our core values is Character and we have been rebuilding our team with that in mind. I know that we shouldn’t take things personally, but I truly don’t know what it says about the character of someone that supposedly worked here for 3 years, made friends, believed in our mission, but feels okay with hurting those same people and their families. That person would obviously not fit in the culture we are building today. Over the last year, our business made the transition from early stage startup, we faced hard challenges head on, and made difficult changes to the team and to the way we work together. Startups often begin their journey with a talented group of people, but to take the business to the next level it requires a different set of talents, more focused and determined. I can’t speak to the fraternal feel of the firm in it’s early days, but I also don’t necessarily think that camaraderie is a negative. That said, the company has as much responsibility to mature in its processes as any single team member, and in our case management was admittedly slow to guide that process. Backplane is no longer and most of the people here have never met most some of the original team. Place is the evolution of Backplane, taking the original value and making it possible for anyone to use our tools to organize people. As a startup, the early organization had people filling hybrid roles across design and engineering. As you might imagine, that led to not only inferior design, but inferior engineering. The team today is organized as a partnership between an amazing design and product group, and engineers that shock us continually with what they can do. Far from a fraternity, we now are more than 50% amazingly talented women. You have to do nothing more than come here to see a professional, focused team. We needed to make changes in order to grow and those decisions by their nature affect people on the team. I can tell you that these changes were important and necessary but it’s easier to let the results speak for themselves. Please take a look at our work, download our apps. They show what a truly talented group of people are able to do in spite of the difficulties we have to bear. Lastly, let’s talk about vision, we love doing that. There is some truth in what was stated above. We began our journey with the idea that people felt free and safe engaging in a world with purpose. When people come together around a shared passion, in worlds that aren’t exposed to everyone you know, the engagement levels are off the chart. Backplane did lose momentum when it began focusing more on strategic partnerships than on viral growth. But that is old news. Today, you will find a viral world that is driven by user-create social environment with growing verticals around anime, gaming, cosplay, music, sports, etc. Place puts the power of social networking back in the hands of the people. To explain what we do in the simplest way - if you pick up your phone and open Facebook, you are looking at everyone else’s life, what everyone else cares about. In social networking, our individuality is being lost, we are simply part of a crowd. Place, is your perspective on the world, it connects you to what you care most about, your family, your church, your favorite band, your school, a video game, dogs, etc. We don't believe that anyone should be able to know everything about you at the glance of a profile. We are each more fascinating than you would expect. We don’t have one face, but many. We express ourselves differently across different parts of our lives. Place, is all about you ... not who you know.

Let me address what’s happened in the firm in the two years since. We’re really happy in our cool, creative space on Market in San Francisco. We moved in 2014, after having promised the team a year earlier that we would make the move. With close to 80% of our team living in the city, we wanted to ease everyone’s commute, but also knew that it would affect people that lived in San Jose. A combination of flexible schedules and moving bonuses made it possible to make the move. Being in SF has since opened up a whole new pool of great candidates to add to our talented team. Soon after moving to the city we reached the first big milestone in our roadmap when we released the first version of our new product. Having worked on this product for over a year, we were excited to be able to share our work with the world. The most important objective on our roadmap was to allow anyone to create their own social network; completely managed, moderated, and monetized by them. On target in June, we released the Beta version which included new web and mobile applications. In just a few months of testing, users have created over 12,000 public and private social worlds. Check out some of the newest, including Travelocity’s Place (Gnomads) and MLB Player’s Place (InfieldChatter). It’s still very early in our process but we’re very excited about the progress over the last year. As a team, we use an OKR (Objectives and Key Results) planning process. The leadership team defines the company’s quarterly objectives. The individual teams then create their team OKRs that support the company objectives. At the end of each quarter, the team comes together to review the success metrics we set and ensure that we’re on track with the next quarter’s objectives. I would definitely encourage everyone to watch the Google video “How to Set Goals: OKRs” on Youtube to learn more about this process, it can be very helpful in aligning everyone on your team. Now, in case you happen to be asking what it is that we actually do. I could talk about how we create communities around interests and passions, give people the ability to own and monetize their audience, and take back control over the content you see, but bear with me as I try to explain it a slightly different way. Sociologists say that our social lives are made up of three distinct places: Home, Work, and what they refer to as “the 3rd Place”. The 3rd Place is defined simply as the social environments that are separate from your Home and Work. We like to think of what we do this way ... Home -> Facebook(family, close friends) Work -> LinkedIn(colleagues) Place -> for all those social environments that you want separate from your Home or Work Many people want to compare what we do to Facebook, but we compare ourselves more closely to forums. Places have subject and purpose. You decide what you want to join and where you want to participate. In friend networks, as your social graph grows the overall strength of your connections you made steadily drops. The content you see is based on what your friends care about, which means that more and more it isn’t what you care about. When you join a Place you can connect with what’s important to you and with people that love the things that you love. Lastly, the one thing that we take pride in is the transparency we have with the team. Our monthly town-hall meetings let everyone come together and discuss issues around our business, product, benefits, financing, office, and team. Communication is key to team alignment and is one of the core values that we live by.