2020
OCTOBER
OCTOBER
CYNTHIA PLOTCH
FOUNDER'S GRIT BY
ERIC SILVERMAN
NATALYA SPICKER
SHANA STEELE
EDI TOR' S NOTE
As the world enters the final quarter of the year, we are faced with a few more uncertain doors that may or may not open. A lot of us are just getting back on our feet since the initial shock of the global pandemic. But will we be able to continue this recovery, given that we now have a looming threat of a second wave of the virus. It was encouraging to chat with enthusiastic and inspirational individuals for this edition. Despite being affected by the circumstances, people are finding new and innovative ways to keep their businesses running. And as cliché as it may sound, determination and resilience really are essential in continuing through tough times like these. As always, it is important to reiterate the importance of flexibility. Gone are the times when a one-size-fits-all strategy will work all the time. Businesses need to be agile enough to fit into into the times and circumstances they are going through. There is also a need for us to be empathetic with each other. Not everyone is doing well. Businesses are shutting down. Earning a livelihood is made more difficult. People working from home have more than just work to deal with. We must be mindful of others’ personal struggles. It is uncertain where the year-end will see us. We can only do our best to keep going whatever this ‘best’ is for you. Perhaps it is teaching your kids, running a company, or making lunch, or making your bed.
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OCTOBER 2020
Content
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Shana Steele: Community Building, Females In Business and More Cynthia Plotch Paving Paths To Success For Women Natalya Spicker Master of all trades
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Eric SilvermanIt's about going up
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Tackling Remote Team Management At Gaper
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Hiring Engineers: The Importance of Soft Skills
Editor's Note
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Contact us at: +1(530) 324 2349 gaper.io
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SHANA STEELE:
COMMUNITY BUILDING, FEMALES IN BUSINESS AND MORE
Shana has a professional background spanning 20 years in the field of hospitality and operations where she has worked with a diverse variety of businesses. Food and beverage, bars and restaurants, catering operations, event management logistics, even community building - Shana has done it all. Currently, she is a general manager where she looks over the operations, hospitality and sales of a professional community - she is a community builder. She helps members of her community connect with each since being in a co-working
"Just keep going," Shana says.
site, people come and go in and out of offices but don’t quite know who is working next to them. Shana and her team provide all the resources that these professionals need to communicate and network effectively in order to build meaningful professional and/or personal relationships.
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Views on the Business Community During The Pandemic Shana endeavors to find the silver lining in every situation. The start of the pandemic forced everyone to reevaluate their businesses; some had to revamp existing policies and practices, some had to take a break from professional activities, and some had to shut down altogether. Eight months on, businesses are resurfacing, opportunities to bring new solutions and innovations are being tapped into, and business activity is picking up pace again. Shana highlights the importance of how founders, business leaders, and team
leaders have been forced to take another look at their teams and work practices. They are having to redefine what it means to be productive and efficient. They are forced to assess their existing business models and products in terms of how sustainable they are.
Hospitality Industry and Remote Work This is an issue that every business leader has been forced to think about. Shana observes that a lot of businesses, having experienced remote work for themselves, are finding that there is little need to force everyone to come back to offices. Teams have been adequately productive when
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working through WFH setups. It is thus a smarter idea to redo business models to allow for remote working setups rather than reverting back to 95 work days. Shana remarks on the multitude of some remarkable digital tools that have been discovered and developed during this time to support remote working. These
tools mean that remote work is here to stay. This may mean that a hybrid model is implemented where employees’ turns to come to the office are rotated or perhaps they come for a certain part of the year and work remotely for the rest. The possibilities are many - remote work is the future.
Female Communities in the Business Arena Shana has worked primarily with female teams. These experiences have left her with a desire to help self-identifying women either through social impact or via businesses. Part of her community building efforts are directed at keeping an eye out for opportunities that could be appropriate for female founders in her professional network and communities she manages. It is very important to continue to network and keep introducing yourself to new people along the way. Shana has found this to benefit her in her community building work and expects it to come in handy down the road as well. Having worked with female focused groups like the Female Innovators Lab, Products by Women, NYC Fintech Women and several more, Shana finds that they are not performative in nature. They walk the walk. They conduct events, and make sure their groups are accessible to everyone who wants to learn and connect. Their teams aren’t characterised by any elitist notions.
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Advice for Young Founders Statistics show that female founders don’t close as many rounds as male founders do. They have additional hurdles and glass ceilings to break on a daily basis. If a door closes for you, another one always opens.
early stage entrepreneurs, or simply people who just have an idea should take the next step and go for it. Attend virtual events. Ask questions. Take the time to introduce yourself with your full name. Explain what you are working on.
The recent move to virtual platforms to conduct business means that a lot of resources are more accessible to communities that were underrepresented. Everyone is is operating on a more uniform platform now. Female founders,
You never know a week, month, year from now, you may meet your cofounder, a new head of product or your next angel investor. Make use of all the resources you have. Keep going.
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In this edition, Gaper is happy to present Stix as the featured startup of the month. Cynthia is a cofounder at Stix, a company that provides women with the products, education, and support they need throughout their health journey.
Cynthia Plotch - Paving Paths To Success For Women
CYNTHIA’S INTRO Before styx, Cynthia did the Venture for America fellowship, whichi is a fellowship for recent college grads to help them build startups. She then joined the founding team at Hungry Harvest where she worked with cofounder Jamie alongside whom she then went on to start Stix.
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EARLY YEARS The entrepreneurial journey is often described as a roller coaster, which though a cliche, is a completely accurate way of putting it according to Cynthia. It has incredibly amazing and rewarding aspects, but it is also very difficult to push through. The work demand resilience and tenacity.
Advice For Budding Entrepreneurs
"Don’t do it alone. Ask for help."
THREE YEARS FROM NOW? The main objective of Stix is to make women feel comfortable about buying the products they need without the dread so many associate with it. This they aim to achieve through: Creating better products, Better product experiences, Education, Community. However, being very realistic, it is rather tricky to have a crystal clear idea of what the next three years look like. When you are going with the flow, tackling daily tasks, taking care of new challenges every week, you cannot quite sit down and come up with a feasible idea about what things might look like in the long term. Certainly nobody predicted the pandemic three days before it started, let alone three years.
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Stix derives its motivation and inspiration for the future from all the women it has helped change the lives of - a business wholly propelled by the drive to serve and help a community.
ON REMOTE WORK Allowing people to have flexibility and autonomy is key to making remote setups work. But what really boosts their success is embellishing this individuality with healthy camaraderie. Companies just cannot run without team work. This is not restricted to business talk and strategy planning. It also involves casual and fun sessions that are enjoyable for everyone. We must find ways of replicating the water cooler/coffee station conversations online in a way that is comfortable for all.
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NATALYA SPICKER Master of all trades
Natalya comes from a very process driven background which is a result of her brief but valuable experience in a coal mining firm. Though recently engaged in the world of staffing, Natalya has an extensive experience in digital marketing, and graphic design. Her background is a diverse, impressive and fun mix of creative work, business development and sales.
AT TRANSPARENT BUSINESS: EMPOWERING PEOPLE Currently, Natalya is the Vice President of Growth and Strategic Partnerships at TransparentBusiness. Having started in 2012, their primary vision is to bring more transparency into the world of remote work and monitoring remote teams. This falls within the ambit of staffing, talent
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management, business developments and partnerships. In addition to covering all these bases, Natalya also works on talent certification and development, in addition to bringing awareness about this platform to help bridge talent gaps all over the world.
2020: A FAST FORWARD BUTTON FOR THE WORLD This year has certainly hurled the world into finding new ways of doing work. Businesses have had to accelerate their process, revamp their strategies and of course, work on resettling their employees in the work-from-home setups. According to Natalya, we have accelerated about a decade’s worth of a need for a technology to bridge these gaps. To her, the business world
"Do I feel like it is going to go back to what it was? Absolutely not�.
was ready for remote work. It just needed a (not so) gentle push to actually implement it.
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Natalya likens the new modes of working to using an iPhone. Once you’ve used it, you won’t want to go back to a 2005 flip phone. When it comes to technology, Natalya suggests we buckle up because this side of things is going to get real incredible from now onwards.
THE RECRUITING SPACE? TRANSFORMED. If staffing was fast before, it’s going to be lightening speed now. The pandemic has made people realize that face-to-face interviews aren’t necessary every single time. The same applies to being present onsite every working day. If one firm insists on in-office interviews and work times; well, there are ten other firms that are willing to
let their employees work more flexibly. Companies are going to miss out on good candidates if they no longer incorporate a virtual inclusion in their culture and processes. It is an adapt or die situtation. The recruiting marketing will see itself get more competitive though because of the digital platforms used.
Employers will want to be more specific about the digital solutions they are using to screen applicants, monitor worker productivity and conducting efficient communication. TransparentBusiness, for example, has components that identify when a employee is overworking themselves.
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UNDERSTANDING WORK-LIFE BALANCE In light of all the innovative technologies, communication platforms, productivity tools that have sprung up in the past seven months, people are realizing how valuable human interaction actually is. In a way, this is also making businesses realize that a work-life balance is incredibly crucial. Not everyone is suited to the readymade 9-5 mould that has been in effect so far. Employees are thus more valued, and many employers are learning to be more careful and equitable in compensating them for their work.
ADVICE FOR EARLY-STAGE COMPANIES 1. You are as good as your people. Spend time getting to know your team, even if it means virtually. Understand that your way of working or management won’t fit everyone. Build a culture around balance, inclusion and flexibility. 2. Create a culture that promotes connectivity outside work. Don’t schedule meetings, meetings and just meetings. Have a human component incorporated amidst the busy, serious, business meetings. Make people feel included. 3. Once your core team is formed, take care of your core. If anyone leaves, it will be incredibly hard to fill that place. You are also as good as the core you build. If they are neglected, overworked, and underappreciated, you are putting your business on a very shaky platform. Check in on them. If they are struggling, offer them help through their struggles.
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Eric SilvermanIt's about going up Eric Silverman is the founder and CEO of Futurepeek. Futurepeek provides frontend review capabilities that enable developers to get feedback from stakeholders at every stage of the product development and review process. FeaturePeek offers on-demand front-end staging environments with a drawer overlay that allows team members to collaborate on the implementation on the page itself. By creating a mechanism for clear, early feedback, engineers can become less frustrated and more impactful because they no longer have to context switch. They are also spared the stress and pain of undoing or adjusting considerable amounts of work at the last minute before a release goes live because changes are made throughout the development cycle. Organizations also benefit from Futurepeek’s technology, as it moves releases at a much faster speed. Furthermore, delays are minimized due to all team members being able to collaborate efficiently. Futerpeek’s abilities guarantee stability and quality, freeing up the team so that they can focus on other new features.
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FeaturePeek debuts another, free command-line apparatus with its most recent delivery that lets designers try out individual tasks without expecting to set up a Continuous Integration pipeline. They can also send their work to partners, easily conveying previews inside the platform and making it conceivable to comment within pages, giving a quick and simple approach to get feedback. The contribution works with all frameworks and hosting providers.
According to their founder Eric: "The key marketing point of their product is their ability to speak with their current customers about things such as how does the idea of feedback and review fit into a development cycle, how do teams like to work together, how do teams want to work apart on technical projects." He also expressed how the main thing they try to focus on is what kind of features they can put out there to meet our users. For example, integrating with the tools and build systems and bug tracking tools, what kind of friction points exist in this workflow. He explained how it is antiquated for an engineer to be sitting at their computer; they work on something, and then it goes all the way to production without the engineer receiving any feedback. There are too many dependencies and too many stakeholders at risk for something like that to happen. Therefore, they try to learn from their customer’s current processes to help make FeaturePeak more powerful and more essential in their workflow. The rate of change on front end interfaces increases exponentially as engineers strive to combine design and product concepts and collaborate to bring them all to fruition. In the current environment, however, finding solutions that readily engage the product and design teams early is especially difficult. They can’t just swing by the developer’s desk
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and look over his or her shoulder. Therefore, FeaturePeek wants to be sure that review cycles and QA testing are as simple and collaborative as possible, regardless of conditions. They have developed an easy-to-use, highly functional solution that is absolutely seamless to integrate. FeaturePeek was built to plug in with familiar tools, and its service is hosting provider agnostic. They argue that any developer or company can leverage its powerful tools without making changes to existing processes and setups. FeaturePeek supports all of the major Continuous Integration services and integrates with popular productivity tools such as Trello, Slack, and Clubhouse. The biggest achievement of FeaturePeek is that it solves one of the biggest frustrations for developers without requiring the replacement of any of their existing infrastructure. Plus, FeaturePeek helps teams keep up their pace and quality as they adapt to a new work environment in light of Covid-19.
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TACKLING REMOTE TEAM MANAGEMENT AT GAPER
Gaper has been a strong advocate (and adherent) of remote work even before the whole world was forced into adopting it. The pandemic actually drove us to upgrade and streamline our remote work setup even further which has allowed our team to reach higher levels of productivity than before. Gaper has also been aiding businesses looking to hire remote software engineers owing to the skilled teams of engineers we had already recruited, trained and vetted throughout the past year.
THE ABSOLUTE KEY TO ENSURING PROGRESS IS CONSISTENT AND MEANINGFUL COMMUNICATION.
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For business owners and founders who are still struggling with the remote management of teams, the following are a few tips and tools I have found to be remarkably useful.
Managers and department heads are used to directing everyone on their team in an office environment. In this case however, it is a good idea to also let your employees set the tone for the workflow in terms of finding the right digital tools. Ask them for suggestions about software, productivity applications and anything else they may already be using that the work team could benefit from.
Related to this, it is also a good idea to familiarize yourself with new team members, especially those from different cultural backgrounds. You will struggle to put together a team if adequate measures for their wellbeing aren’t in place. A study by UpWork showed that even though 63% of the companies work with remote remote employees, 57% do not have any remote work policies. It is high time that employers stop considering remote work as a ball in the park.
The absolute key to ensuring progress is consistent and meaningful communication.
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Don’t micromanage those who don’t need to be. In fact, if you use digital platforms to assign work and track their completion/progress on a daily basis, the need to individually manage everyone may be eliminated. Notion is one very flexible application that can act as virtual office space of sorts if optimized creatively.
Depending on the nature of your work, you will have to figure out how many such collaborative tools you need to build your team’s competency with. Things may feel overwhelming and complicated at the start, but once everyone gets used to it, efficiency will follow.
These are uncertain times where we are unsure of the extent to which we need to replace our old work routines. But one thing is certain: business’ modus operandi before the pandemic may not be applicable now, but whatever measures we take to streamline remote work will remain relevant beyond this lockdown ‘era’. It is better to be agile and selfevaluative than be resistant to change and harm one’s own company.
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Hiring Engineers: The Importance of Soft Skills Gaper’s workforce doubled in the past six months. As the company looks at another imminent period of onboarding, there is one oversight that must not be made: the ‘soft skills’ of employees, specifically those hired in technical positions.
Robles (2015) describes hard skills as the technical expertise and knowledge required for a particular area of work. Soft skills, on the other hand, are a person’s social skills, and personal characteristics. A 2015 report by Child Trends defined them as skills that are important factors in determining how an individual navigates their environments, conducts social interactions with
others, and manages their own selves in relation to their work and colleagues. And these skills are overlooked by employers and managers far too often. Later it is wondered why the company’s team culture is bereft of any cooperative team spirit and empathy. And it isn’t just that. There is myriad of reasons why soft skills
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bring more than just teamwork to your company.
Building a Rapport With Clients Good soft skills mean your employees are also better equipped to handle clients if and when required. They have the ability to deliver good presentations, conduct negotiations and lead meetings. Leaving a good professional impression on a client can contribute to getting more work as well as new clients.
Doubling Down On Networking A natural outcome of decent soft skills? Networking. Your employees can represent the company appropriately in professional settings. Interactions with fellow businesses and potential customers are effective and productive. Don’t underestimate the importance of Individuals with well-developed negotiation and networking abilities. They are an invaluable asset.
Productivity Bosot If your employees have good soft skills, you won’t have to worry about micromanaging every single thing they do. They will already have time and work management skills required to deliver good quality work. They will have the interpersonal skills to organize and delegate tasks to other team members as required. This selfmanagement leads to massive bouts of productivity that helps companies progress.
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Flexibility 2020 showed us that companies with rigid policies and work practices are not equipped to deal with unforeseen circumstances. Such business models are becoming redundant and unsustainable. Employees who are able to communicate amongst each other effectively and come up with better solutions in trying times can be the key to ensuring that your
company stays afloat. This flexibility means that changes are always being made to adapt to changing times and keeping ahead of competitors. Nobody is stuck on practices that are no longer delivering results. An agile and flexible company culture is only possible if your teams are good at adapting and communicating.
Introverts With Soft Skills But don’t get us wrong. This stress on soft skills does not mean that introverts or asocial folk are not a good fit. Having soft skills just means that they are able to collaborate, as necessary, with their team members on work-related projects, address challenges in an appropriate manner and generally subject their fellow colleagues with kindness and empathy. While soft skills are trickier to assess than technical skills, they are essential. Every person will have different combinations and permutations of soft skills. It is unrealistic to expect a full-package with each individual. But put together a group of people each with their own set of soft skills and you get a remarkably efficient and productive team of professionals with self-accountability and a responsible attitude. Nowadays, employee soft skills may even determine whether a company survives troubling times or not.
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