Grow Your Career
At FormSwift

Vik

What brought you to FormSwift?

I worked at another startup with David, Ray, and Tristan, and co-founded the company with David four years ago.

What is your favorite project to work on?

Working on determining our hiring strategy for the next twelve months. I love it because it ties in everything - product strategy, marketing metrics and growth.

What do you like about managing?

I love seeing people grow and develop - excelling at their current roles and learning a ton from new ones.

Have you continued to learn and grow?

Always. In a company growing this quickly, I feel like I have a new job every three months and constantly have to learn new things. When we started, David and I ran everything. Now, there are hundreds of things that happen every day that I don't even know about. This is where culture and values come in.

David

What brought you to FormSwift?

I worked as a Software Engineer and designer at the same company as Vik. We both left around the same time and decided to start something new. We experimented, learned, and built a product that became useful to millions of people.

What has been your favorite project to work on?

The PDFJS migration of our PDF editor. We took Mozilla’s awesome PDFJS library, and moved our entire PDF editor to work on top of it. It was a massive amount of work but it set us up for huge improvements.

What has been your favorite company outing?

Our recent trip to Monterey was incredible. It was so humbling to have such an amazing group of people together. We were like a big family, set loose onto this town. It was a blast!

What is most important to you in building a team?

Structured way of thinking that helps us make the best decisions. No ego.

Ray

What is a big challenge in your role?

A big challenge in my role is balancing the pace of new feature development with improvements to reliability, scalability, and maintainability.

What has been your favorite project to work on?

My favorite project to work on has been improving our Free Write PDF editor codebase to make it easier to implement new features.

What brought you to FormSwift?

I was drawn to FormSwift by the speed at which the company is growing. The ability of the team to react quickly to the opportunities from that growth has been our biggest asset.

Describe a typical work day.

A typical work day for me involves helping spec out projects, reviewing code, researching future technical opportunities, and developing awesome new features.

What do you like about managing?

My favorite part of managing is helping people achieve their career development goals and enhance their skill set.

Jackson

What do you like about managing?

I really like seeing the person grow into his role, and take ownership of his projects.

When have you “failed fast”?

I think a consistent improvement that I always need to make is just to be more immediately vocal with feedback, because most failures are a result of recognizing a problem but then acting to slowly in addressing it.

How would describe working at FormSwift?

Working at FormSwift is like having a second home. Somewhere that your talents are cherished and nourished by your superiors, and where you can always feel free to express your opinions.

What has been your favorite project to work on?

Currently working on the beginning stages of the complete overhaul of our SEO Pages in order to satisfy Google's new RankBrain algorithm. My favorite project so far is probably just all of the guides we have created since I got the opportunity to work with my college mentor, and they have been (knock on wood) very successful.

Elisa

Do you ever work remotely?

My favorite place to work outside the office is the outdoor cafe at the SF MOMA. It helps that we value output not facetime, so I've been able to to work remotely from all over the world.

What is one piece of advice your manager has given you that you really liked?

"Don't just execute, think about innovating." While the process we have now works well, there's always room for improvement and circumstances are always changing. Being encouraged to make processes more efficient keeps me on my toes and always thinking about next steps.

Have you continued to learn and grow?

I took a javascript class and a SQL class to improve the questions I ask, push the boundaries of my ideation, and create more thorough specs.

When do you work across teams?

Every day! I work with engineers, designers, data analysts and QA specialists. Because of everyone’s different interests and capabilities, it’s exciting to hear the ideas that they come up.

Tristan

Have you continued to learn and grow?

I started primarily as a backend engineer, but my JavaScript skills have gotten sturdy in my time here. Also I've had a chance to work on a bunch of DevOps stuff to the point that I'm confident with it, while before FormSwift it was a bit scary.

What is the greatest challenge in your role?

Coding and improving an online PDF editor is pretty challenging because it's fairly unique. Unlike working on a database-heavy or e-commerce app, there simply aren't thousands of people working on this sort of thing. When we run into a problem, we're largely on our own. This means often means diving into obscure open source code with little documentation or thinking about problems from new perspective to work around limitations.

Have you ever felt that seniority doesn’t matter?

Every single day. Really. When I worked with Ray and David at our last company I was actually Senior to them on the team there. Here, they are my bosses but it doesn't feel that way at all. We're all just on a team working hard to get things done together.

Brittany

What is most important to you in building a team?

I think a great working environment is where we can be honest with our concerns but also recognize and praise one another.

Have you continued to learn and grow?

Because my background is in more static types of design (catalogs, email newsletters, individual web pages), I am new to designing user experiences. I feel honored to have been entrusted with design that is more interactive than anything I have done before, and I am learning how to design an actual process that a user will follow. FormSwift has given me an incredibly open invitation to grow and learn, and the general attitude toward learning and growth opportunity is extremely encouraging.

Have you ever felt that seniority doesn’t matter?

The founders, David and Vik, are always quick to verbally recognize and praise other ideas from all different members of the team. Hearing them say something as simple as, "That is a really good idea" makes it clear that even the most senior members don't think that they have all the best ideas.

Mario

Tell me something about yourself.

I swam with leopard sharks last year!

What is one piece of advice your manager has given you that you really liked?

“Always copy and paste.” It’s not only funny, but useful and valid advice. It also showed me that environment at a startup isn't as stressful as I thought it might be.

What is the greatest challenge in your role?

Every programming problem is unique so you have to always be able to approach problems from different angles, which makes it difficult but interesting.

What has been your favorite project to work on?

Recently I was working on transferring some old SEO pages to be compatible with CloudCannon. It was fun because I got to see the progress I was making instantly. I also have an upcoming project where I'll get to add a feature to freewrite which will be exciting since it is a big task and will make a difference in the product!

Jon

What has been your favorite project to work on?

Working on the 'Careers' page has been great. It's one of the first projects built on top of a new front-end infrastructure. It was rewarding to focus on a project that will help grow our team.

What is a big challenge in your role?

When building A/B tests, it can be challenging to let go of designs or components that don't perform as well as expected.

What is most important to you in building a team?

Curating a team with a variety of skill sets and backgrounds. A diverse team can help cultivate unique solutions to difficult problems.

Tell me something about yourself.

I'm a lifelong musician and have licensed soundtrack music for TV and commercials.

Stephanie

What brought you to FormSwift?

My background has been primarily on all things 'People'. When I found out about the People Operations role at FormSwift I couldn't wait to throw my hat in the ring. I was able to blend my passion for nurturing company culture with the opportunity to create our hiring process from scratch. FormSwift is focused on investing in our employees to grow and scale with the company. I'm proud to be on a team that builds a collaborative environment to enable that growth.

What is most important to you when building a team?

Hiring the right people. I mean come on, I'm in recruiting! It's important to hire not only for skill; but also for a person's ability to grow into a role and work well with the team.

What is your favorite place in the Bay Area?

Lands End, hands down. Being an East Coast girl, the view of the Golden Gate Bridge took my breath away.

Marisabel

Krish