San Francisco-headquartered Tophatter offers an irresistible spin on eCommerce as it continues to pioneer mobile discovery shopping. The company, launched in 2012, was founded by CEO Ashvin Kumar and CTO Chris Estreich. Discovery shopping, or “shopping as a pastime,” makes up about 50% of the overall retail market, and Tophatter aims to bring that experience to an ever-growing mobile shopping user-base.
For engineers, the culture at Tophatter still retains some of the underdog spirit of the classic garage era that marked the company’s early days. A return to the élan of those early garage days is part of the writ-in-stone myth of many Silicon Valley startups as they progress, but the ability to retain some of the freedom of those leaner days often proves nearly impossible as most companies scale.
At Tophatter, the romance for those early days lingers palpably in the culture, but the company continued to evolve as it grew—as evidenced by its status as a globally distributed operation, with offices now in Portland, Shenzhen, Shanghai, and Bangalore.
“We did work in a garage for a very long time,” VP of Engineering Matt Rubens says. “I think we kind of miss it. We have a really nice office now. So it’s been a little bit of a challenge, as in, how do we make this feel a little bit more like the garage?”
“I think it’s a good feeling, that energy. The excitement that you feel when you’re building something,” Senior Marketing Communications Manager Hanna Matyiku says of the feel the company was looking to retain.
Rubens freely admits working in a garage “wasn’t always great,” and that “people were on top of each other.” But missing the high energy of that environment, the company improvised. “I do think that we have consciously leaned in to that feeling though. We did a big reorganization of the office where we put people in closer proximity to the teams they are working with.”
“Tophatter has cultivated an environment where learning is priority,” says Shannon Nolan, Software Engineer for the company. “And so you’re always pushed to be learning new things and you’re always told to ask questions and not to get stuck on stuff. Everyone on the team is so nice, so it feels really comfortable to ask questions.”
Nolan was a Philadelphia elementary school teacher when she realized she wanted to get into the tech side of education.
“I think I always was interested in technology in classrooms. My teachers always liked that I would try to incorporate as much technology as possible. I loved the element of education where you’re helping people. I knew that if I was going to change careers, I also wanted to go into tech to help people. That seemed like a really natural progression for me.”
A friend had successfully taken a coding boot camp, and Shannon decided to do the same thing, including moving to San Francisco. Tophatter was the second company she found.
“I was looking for somewhere that I wanted to grow at in all aspects professionally,” Nolan says. “Tech skills, soft skills, any other skills that it takes to be successful in a work environment. And Tophatter definitely provides all those things for me. There’s new challenges every day, which is a lot of fun. I have grown exponentially in ways that I never even thought of as possible.”
“Matt has given me a lot of opportunities to do recruiting, too. That felt like a good fit because I’m a teacher and I like to talk to people,” Nolan adds.
“I think with Shannon, we instantly saw that she was just so good with people and so intuitive and so emotionally intelligent,” Matt says. “It just felt like, even right after starting, it made sense for her to start interviewing people and to go into recruiting and career fairs.”
Tophatter is most certainly a company that encourages professional development among engineers.
“We’re all about growth and challenging people. We just enjoy having people who are willing to try whatever needs to get done, and who actually enjoy getting out of their comfort zone and learning new things. I’m one of these people who just really enjoys jumping into new challenges and I found that with Tophatter,” Rubens says. “We do not have in our rubric a figure for how much time you need toil at each career stage. A lot of companies are holding off until employees have held a role for five years, that kind of thing.”
The company knows just what kind of person makes the right Tophatter culture fit.
“We have a very strong respect for people who are just willing to grind and to learn and to figure things out. It’s always been about the people with the hunger, the courage, and the ability to learn. They’re the ones who really thrive at Tophatter,” Rubens says. “You don’t hire for where the candidate is at now, you hire for where they’re going.”
Nolan adds that even missing skills aren’t always an impediment for a prospective candidate: “It’s kind of like, oh, the candidate didn’t know about this or how to do that, but you know what? I think they showed really great initiative and really great intuition on this. They can learn.”
Joe Manley, Head of Engineering at Tophatter India opened Tophatter’s remote engineering offices in Bangalore, India at the beginning of the year. He can attest to this: “I never expected I could do this,” Manley says. “But they always supported me.”
After having worked at a larger tech company where he found he was unsatisfied Manley had made a resolution: “I wanted to work for a startup where I could just work and I could just learn and I don’t have to worry about any of the other things. I was really picky about wanting to work for a small company where I know the other people and get to see them every day,” Manley says. “This is something I would have never dreamed of two and a half years after I joined the company, that I would go to India, and open an office there.”
Rubens adds of his own career development: “The Tophatter founders really believed in me. I’ve never been a VP of Engineering before and they’re just like, no, you can do it now. You’re great. You can do it.”
“And for me to just have the confidence in the room to make a bunch of mistakes and feel supported helped me grow my career,” Rubens adds.
The company knows just what kind of person makes the right Tophatter culture fit.
“We have a very strong respect for people who are just willing to grind and to learn and to figure things out. It’s always been about the people with the hunger, the courage, and the ability to learn. They’re the ones who really thrive at Tophatter,” Rubens says.
“There are companies that have a bigger brand name out there, and people are going to work at Google or Apple or somewhere like thatto scratch that itch of ‘I want this name on my resume,’” Nolan says. “I think the opportunities at Tophatter are much greater than they are at other companies for engineers at all levels. I don’t think a lot of companies have this process in place where employees can just really quickly level up and become trusted employees.”
