Starburst Company Culture & Values

What is the biggest challenge to establishing a virtual-first company culture? 

Fostering a fun, supportive and highly productive work environment was hard enough when things were in-person. People have different working styles, career goals, personal obligations — even different most-productive time windows. Being virtual-first just makes all those challenges 10 times harder.

We have to remember that even though our work interactions are mostly through a computer screen, there are living, breathing human beings on the other end, and their wants and needs aren’t different just because the company is virtual first. 

Starburst has been a huge supporter of virtual-first culture by providing the resources and support to help our teams form human connections, not just professional ones. We are encouraged to allocate budget for team offsite, and we coordinate in-person training and travel regularly to visit remote offices to form real relationships across time zones. 

Our people team helps to sponsor employee-organized virtual events on a regular basis.

What’s your number one tip for fostering connection and/or collaboration among virtual teams?

Treat people like people and get to know them. When everything is a Zoom meeting, it’s easy to just jump from one topic to another, which is something you would never do if the same meetings were held in person. In person, there would always be a few minutes between meetings to ask how someone’s family is doing or talk about how bad the coffee is that day. 

Making time for personal conversations during scheduled meeting times is a good way to foster trust and relatability, which is vital for collaboration. On Mondays, I run my full team meeting and dedicate at least five minutes to talking about what people did during the weekend. Some may find it a waste of time, but it acts as a forcing function for the team to learn a little bit about each other every week.

In addition, I like to schedule multiple touch points for my team throughout the week. We do cover important updates throughout the week, but more importantly, it gives me an opportunity to ask how they're doing personally and if I, or anyone else on the call, can help in any way.

What remote working tools do you lean on to reinforce culture?

In a remote environment, we have to give employees the tools, information and empowerment to figure stuff out asynchronously. 

We communicate largely through Zoom and Slack and collaborate via a shared document on which team members can write their weekly updates. This gives them an opportunity to see what each person is working on, review documents and share comments, while fostering transparency, accountability and collaboration.

Describe Starburst’s company culture in one word. What made you pick that word? 

“Bold.” We’re an up-and-coming company in a highly competitive market, so we need to undertake ambitious and often high-risk projects to get ahead. 

For example, we’re currently investigating radical changes to our architecture to drastically reduce delivery cost and improve user experience for our on-prem product. We also just launched our new Streaming Ingest offering that uses state-of-the art cloud architecture and a bottom-up design to cut the costs of ingesting data into a data lake by four to ten times. Both of these required a willingness to take risks and explore the unknown, which is possible here at Starburst due to the high trust and alignment across teams and the culture of boldness.

How long have you been with the company, and what professional growth or development have you seen in that time?

I have been with the company for seven months now, but it feels like a decade — in a good way. Things move fast here, and I always have a wide range of exciting problems to work on. That means there is plenty to do  — both inside and outside my comfort zone — but also that I’m learning a lot. 

Personally, the biggest growth has been in my ability to handle ambiguity and to prioritize. On the ambiguity side, I have learned to move forward even if I don’t have all the data I would have liked. I have also learned the importance of ensuring everyone is aligned on what to do next when the path forward is unclear. On the prioritization side, I have learned to say ‘no’ early and directly, rather than being overly polite or playing for time. I might be wrong from time to time, but then the person I’m responding to can escalate and we get together as a team to look at our priorities together.

Describe your company culture in one word. What made you pick the word “resilient” to describe your company culture?  

At Starburst, we are gritty, determined and in it for the long haul. Angela Duckworth, an American psychologist and popular science author, defines grit as the combination of passion and perseverance, and she often highlights how resilience is a key trait of gritty individuals. I personally live by this mindset, and I see it reflected in my team every day.

Resilience is at the core of our culture and an essential trait for a great sales development representative. Sales development is both an art and a science, but above all, it demands a strong and resilient mindset. Making calls, sending emails and reaching out to people we’ve never met requires persistence and a long-term outlook. Each small step — each call, email and LinkedIn message — brings us closer to our goals. No matter the challenges, we adapt, push forward and continue striving for success.

How long have you been with the company, and what professional growth or development have you seen in that time?

I have been with Starburst for five months, and in that time, I’ve been grateful to see our people and culture team thoughtfully evaluate and revamp our company mission and values. This shift has directly contributed to my growth as a director, helping me develop into an effective leader as quickly as possible. 

It has given me the confidence to be myself, lead authentically, and better motivate and align my team with company goals. The clarity in our values has created a strong foundation for decision-making and team collaboration, making it easier to drive impact and progress.

Describe your company culture in one word. What made you pick that word?
This is a tough one, but if I had to pick just one word, I’d pick ‘aligned.’ Whether it’s our value of working as “one team,” or keeping our “customer-obsessed” objective in mind — it’s centered around being aligned and keeping everyone moving in the same direction.

Our company is experiencing some awesome momentum right now and our All-Stars are doing an amazing job collaborating and working in sync across teams, goals and values to keep it going!

How long have you been with the company, and what professional growth or development have you seen in that time?
I’ve been with Starburst for almost three years, and one of the most energizing projects I’ve worked on recently was bringing back in-person new hire onboarding, which we call All-Star Liftoff. We designed a two-day immersive experience at our Boston headquarters focused on building cross-functional relationships, grounding new hires in our culture and product and aligning them with our go-to-market strategy. It was an opportunity for me to step back into the shoes of a new hire and reimagine how we set our people up for success from day one.

What made the experience even more meaningful was the timing — we’re in the midst of an exciting hiring surge, especially for engineers across the United States and Poland. There’s a real sense of momentum, and this program helps us channel that by making sure our new All-Stars feel connected and ready to contribute quickly. At the same time, we’re embracing AI in new and thoughtful ways — not just in our product, but in how we work. That shift has challenged our team to think differently about how we scale, stay efficient and build for the future. Being part of a company that’s both growing fast and evolving intentionally has been a huge part of my own development.