Careers at Coast

We help small businesses succeed by enabling their team members to communicate quickly and flexibly. Whether it’s sending a message, completing a checklist, tracking deliveries, closing maintenance issues, or getting a shift covered, Coast gives business owners and managers time back. Staff find our app so intuitive that they can use it without any training and can participate from Android, iOS, desktop, tablet, or even a flip phone using SMS.

Coast is actively seeking to diversify the team. Women, minorities, and individuals with disabilities are encouraged to apply. We recognize that not only does a range of experiences and backgrounds help make this team strong, it also helps us empathize and build better products for our diverse customer base. We are an equal opportunity employer and strive to create a joyful and supportive place to work.

We also welcome prospective applications to careers[a]coastapp.com.

Our recruitment process is very simple. We’re a small team so you’ll talk to all of us. We’ll have conversations to learn more about your technical skills and experience, your problem solving abilities, what motivates you, what you’re best at, and how you work with others (product, design, and engineering) from idea to deployment.

We know that applying for a new job requires a leap of faith so we’ve put together a brief summary of our key values below. These give a glimpse into what life is like at Coast and the type of company you’ll be helping to build. Our hope is that by sharing these values you feel informed, understand our process and are excited to apply.

We serve small business owners, managers, and their staff by bringing all of their communications into one place.

Imagine your favorite Italian restaurant. Their communication is scattered through group text message chains, emails, and other single utility apps, making it frustrating for their employees to contact people and find information when they need it. Similar to Slack, we’ve become the nervous system of each business, but with one main difference: we’re focused on the deskless workforce and SMB-centric tools through mobile. Using Coast, the employees at your favorite Italian restaurant can now easily share checklists, swap shifts, and run payroll, all in one place.

We know small businesses well; we spent years immersing ourselves in their work when building hyper-local networks for small businesses at our previous company, Townsquared. Essentially, we built Coast to serve members of the Townsquared community because we listened to what our customers were asking for.

Our users depend on us for their daily operations, so we always put their needs first. Customer feedback enters into our product roadmap in three main ways:

1. Direct support chats (ongoing). Individual users can seamlessly report bugs, give feedback, request features, and ask us questions. Everything they report is funneled to the appropriate avenue, and helps us determine what new features or updates to prioritize.
2. Live interviews and conversations (quarterly for engineers). We maintain close relationships with our customers, many of whom have helped shape our product from the beginning. Through in person, video, or phone calls, we listen to their pain points, concerns, and aspirations directly from them and in their own words. We develop extreme empathy for our users and are always building things that will have the greatest impact on their daily lives.
3. User testing (continuously running tests). We use UserTesting to source real people based on criteria we specify to answer questions as they interact with our prototypes. We quickly spin up tests, run A/B tests to get early impressions, flag usability issues, and do market research through this tool. This helps us run through several product iterations before it gets into the development process.

We aspire to the lean methodology of continuous feedback.

Every member of our team has a unique perspective and can contribute in valuable ways to both our product and our processes. We have formal weekly retrospectives as well as at the end of big projects. We don’t take these for granted since they are the best times to reflect on what we did well and where we can make improvements. The feedback we give one another is always specific, direct, and honest, and most importantly, it always comes from the desire to make the product better for our customers. We also do weekly demos to solicit in-the-moment feedback for work that is in progress and design reviews to critique upcoming feature work.

Informally, we give shoutouts to each other whenever someone is doing a great job or embodying one of our company’s core values. This includes transparency, supporting teammates and our users, or finding innovative, simple ways to make our user experience more delightful or approachable.

We operate with transparency around the business, our product, and how decisions are made.

We understand and are respectful of the fact that people need time and space to focus on their work. At the same time, we also believe better decisions are made when all members of the team are well informed. By being transparent about as much as possible, we make information accessible whenever possible. Everyone knows how much runway we have, how investors meetings went, about strategic partnerships, and is included in all hiring decisions.

Underlying trust allows us to speak frankly with one another and enables us to build an environment where people are encouraged to voice their questions, criticisms, and/or concerns. Because we truly respect each other, open communication feels effortless. Whether you agree or dissent, all opinions are valuable and will be heard.

In terms of day-to-day communication, a handful of us work together in a shared co-working space in San Francisco (PARISOMA), and the rest of the team is distributed working remotely. We recognize that working remotely comes with its own set of challenges, and strive as a team to make this a good experience on all sides. We use a combination of Zoom, various collaboration software (e.g. Notion, Google Docs, Github), and messaging on Coast (our own product) to tackle each new project or goal together as a team.

We also bring the entire team together for regular off-sites in person to ensure we get to know each other on a personal level so our team gels as a whole. At the end of the day communication is everything: healthy teams move fast because they trust each other, and trust is built through good communication.

We have light meetings by design.

Meetings are special and valuable times to discuss things as a group that would otherwise be impossible to do through 1-1s or asynchronous communication channels. More informally, we communicate with one another using our own product, Coast (dogfooding) so that we can respond to and digest information at our own pace. We’ll have ad hoc in person/video meetings if it helps us to get unblocked.

You can expect to attend ~2 hours of meetings each week. Our only regular meetings include:

• Daily 10-minute stand-up
• Weekly 30-minute kick off meeting on Mondays: to review priorities for the week, review data about product
• Weekly 1-hour on Friday: for reviewing the week’s work, demos, and/or a retrospective on the week

In-person meetings can be distracting so we ensure that everyone in a meeting is prepared in advance. Whoever is holding the meeting is responsible beforehand to prep people and create a realistic agenda for decisions to be made.

Your ability to work well with others is more important than your technical skills.

Having technical experience and knowledge is important to us, but only if it is coupled with EQ. Not only are we diverse in our abilities, backgrounds, and personalities, but so are our customers. As an early stage company, it is critical to us that we only hire people who recognize the importance of empathy and emotional intelligence.

In the past, we have passed on technically gifted candidates because they did not share our mindset around how to work as a team. As a small but nimble team, we operate with the assumption that everyone is working toward the same goal: creating the best experiences for our users. To that end, we look for people who are empathetic and curious, who have opinions but don’t assume they are always right, operate with an innate sense of urgency, are willing to take smart risks, and take ownership of their work.

During the interview process, we gauge this through the different formal (1-1 discussions) and informal (grabbing food with the team) interactions we have with each candidate. We hope candidates do the same evaluation of us. Ultimately, even the most brilliant minds cannot build good products if they can’t work well together. This is twofold for us as we serve a wide variety of customers ranging from restaurants, to retail, to medical offices.

We focus on our customers and their problems, not the solutions themselves.

We are building a team of people who have diverse backgrounds and have experience solving a wide variety of problems. Ultimately, their creativity around problem solving is derived from a passion for understanding the customer’s problem, not so much by the actual solution they can apply. Coupling diverse experiences with a strong understanding of the problem, we often come up with creative and innovative solutions to test. We look for people who have both a tendency to think creatively and a strong passion toward our mission and our customers’ problems.

We absolutely encourage all of our team members to have creative outlets within and outside of Coast. People have side projects that they foster and in some cases these directly aid Coast’s mission. To test high-impact ideas, we often hold internal hackathons. These projects are almost immediately followed by direct demos with customers to evaluate their efficacy.

We are a small team, but a very experienced one.

We have been lucky to surround ourselves with great individuals. Everyone on our team is exceptionally talented in their respective fields, and this statement extends to our advisors. From an operating perspective, each person has been at small startups and seen success (acquisitions) to building bigger companies.

Our Team:

• Pascal Balthrop – Staff Software Engineer, previously senior web developer at about.me and Broadly, formerly lead singer of Balthrop, Alabama
• Nathan Fitzsimmons – Staff Software Engineer and previously Staff Frontend Engineer @ Standard AI, Bevy, and about.me
• Kyle Hughes – Staff Software Engineer and previously Senior Engineer @ Robinhood and Amazon
• Miwa Ikemiya – Co-founder and Chief Design Officer and previously Chief Design Officer @ Townsquared, Researcher @ Microsoft Research
• Reid Knight – Staff Software Engineer, previously Software Engineer @ Copper Banking, Stripe, and Curalate
• Brian McCleerey – Sales Development Representative and previously a paralegal at the Law office of John Duggan, Sales specialist at Westside Bicycle
• Daniel Neale – Account Executive and previously Branch Manager @ OneMain Financial
• Rohit Prakash – Co-founder and CEO and previously co-founder and CEO @ Townsquared, MD/PhD @ Stanford
• Zachary Sesti – Lead Architect and previously Chief Software Architect @ NS8, Chief Architect @ Onu, Software Development Engineer @ Amazon
• Russell Taga – Head of Engineering and previously Engineering Director @ Fitbit, COO @ Coin (acquired by Fitbit), VP of Engineering @ HotelTonight (acquired by Airbnb)
• Sam Travers – Sales Development Representative and recent graduate from Northeastern University
• Bennett Ullom – Sales Development Representative and previously Teacher @ Yakima School District
• Sam Welch – Staff Software Engineer and previously Software Engineer @ Chewy, Facebook, Latch, and Amazon
• Warren Wu – Growth and previously Growth Lead @ UpKeep

Our Advisors:

• Mike Sippey – Former VP Product at Twitter
• Scott Cook – Founder of Intuit

We bring our best selves to work.

We have a high degree of trust in one another and each person’s capabilities. So as long as you get your work done, or communicate why you are blocked and ask for help, we don’t care how or where you do your work.

We work intensely and effectively during normal working weekday hours, and then leave work to recharge on our own time.

Having a balanced life outside of work only benefits the company because we believe this contributes to happy, healthy, productive people and therefore, more productive teams.

People are not expected to work weekends unless there is an emergency, hours are flexible able to accommodate child care needs and we are all free to choose where we work from. That said, we try to keep as many hours overlapping with the team as possible in order to facilitate real-time collaboration.

Outside of work, people love being in the great outdoors, traveling to places near and far, eating delicious food, spending time with family, playing music and playing sports. We love staying active, snowboarding, playing badminton, cycling, surfing, and hiking. Not only do we love food, but some of us also really enjoy cooking it! We have supportive and growing families who motivate us and help us to be our best selves. They play an important role in making us successful as a company and as a team.

Whatever helps you recharge, we want you to have the time and space to do it. It is truly the best way to drive creativity, collaboration, and productivity in your work!