Cory Johnson, the Chief Market Strategist at Ripple, recently gave an interview to Cointelegraph (the video is available on YouTube) during which he revealed some interesting facts about life at Ripple’s headquarters in San Francisco. This article features some of the highlights from that interview.

Before joining Ripple on 8 March 2018, Cory, according to his bio page at the Ripple website, worked as “a hedge fund portfolio manager at Kingsford Capital Management and journalist at Bloomberg and CNBC covering high-growth technology companies.” But he’s also something of a startup expert: “he is the founding editor-in-chief of SLAM magazine, helped create Vibe magazine with Quincy Jones, and was the founding reporter of theStreet.com with Jim Cramer.”

Location of Headquarters

  • “Right down there is where was the first Bank of America building, before that was called Bank of Italy; it was funded by A.P. Giannini. The plaza behind this is A.P. Giannini Plaza. Now, they’ve changed to Bank of America, but it’s headquarters is still there. And so, it’s kind of cool that we’re sort of building the future of banking, banking software, right here, in the space.”

Work Environment & Corporate Values

  • “This is a very different work environment than what I have worked in the past… What really got me was my first weeks here. I’d go to leave the building and I’d go to hit the badge… you can badge in, right? When I was badging out, there’s nothing to hit. But I realized that what really goes on in this company is the focus is on getting your job done, not keeping attendance. You know what your objectives are, you know what your key results are supposed to be for the quarter, and that’s entirely our focus.”
  • “It’s… classic Silicon Valley: open, engineers are going to work the way they want to work. These are competitive days; you gotta make your workplace fun or people are not going to work.”
  • “We’ve got these corporate values, right? Like Leggo: ‘Live it, Enjoy it, Get it done, Go for it, Own it.'”
  • “It’s fun to work with people who want to hustle and get stuff done, but also kind of hold each other accountable to finish that work.”
  • “We are driven by what we have to get done, not how you do it. So, if you want to do it in flip-flops, or if you want to do in wingtips, it doesn’t really matter. We use a measure here called “OKRs”, which is a kind of standard Silicon Valley metric for knowing exactly what your Objectives and Key Results are for the quarter, so every person who works here, everyone, has a list of OKRs. And if we all meet these goals, the company will proceed towards success.”

Yoga Classes and Free Food & Drink

  • “It’s Silicon Valley: ‘Live Large!’… But you know, I think it’s expected in Silicon Valley. You know, you’re here, you work all day, you work all night, you’re here early and stay late… At least, free water, free snacks, we have meals together.”

Office Space

  • “[There are three floors.] That’s important. There were two floors only a few weeks ago. We are growing like crazy. We’ve got offices all over the world, literally. Here in San Francisco, in New York, in London, in Luxembourg, in Mumbai, in Sydney… We have joined partners in Japan. It’s a global operation; we’re really trying to focus on the places where we can provide help with our software.”

The Ripple Logo

  • “[It’s based on] the Golden Ratio [in mathematics, two quantities are in the golden ratio if their ratio is the same as the ratio of their sum to the larger of the two quantities.]… Out of that we create a logo called the “Trisekelion“, which is our Ripple logo, but it really does come out of that mathematical principle of the Golden Ratio.”

Featured Image Courtesy of Ripple