A company with a strong product requires a strong team. Building a strong team is about finding people who want to help achieve the vision of the company.

Because this is true, there are lots of little moments when I am wowed by the ways the team at Edthena are invested in the vision of the company as much as I am.

This week I ate lunch with Tanya. She’s one of two engineers in our company. If she had the title of software engineer in a large company, it would mean she was limited to working on and thinking about the code which causes the product to come into existence.

But that’s not how it works at our startup. We hired Tanya because she was skilled, yes, but also because she was passionate about helping us solve the problem of enabling coaching for teachers to happen anytime, anywhere.

Tanya’s personal investment came through in our lunch conversation when she shared suggestions for how we position our product publicly. Her point was that we need to do more to explain from a teacher’s perspective how we’re impacting their development. Since we’re defining a relatively new market, the average person might not understand why what we do is valuable for the teachers and why it’s important.

This was a great reminder that we need to focus on humanizing our brand through stories of real people versus just creating a brand around strong color and a logo. This was a reminder brought forward by one of our engineers who is officially tasked with writing software code.

I’ve commented before that not every moment of a startup is super glamorous. And this couldn’t be more true for the people that sit to my right in our row of desks.

I’m the one that gets pulled aside to talk about the company. This blog is case in point. But it shouldn’t be forgotten that they’re the ones doing the heavy lifting with me.

So, I’m publicly sending my love to them this Valentine’s Day.

PS-This team photo is from when my grandmother sent us cookies at the office!
PSS-Our designer, Anna, lives in Los Angeles, Ca., so she wasn’t here for the group cookies picture, but we love her just the same.