Marco Polo

At Marco Polo we share the belief that lives flourish when people feel close. It’s our company’s purpose – to help people feel close – and accomplishing this through technology is why we are all here. Employees are motivated and excited about the future because there is currently a huge need for human connection: in 2023 the Surgeon General published an advisory about the public health crisis of loneliness, isolation, and lack of connection in the United States. Our goal and motivation is to be part of the fixing the current loneliness epidemic.

Our 6 company values – purpose, ownership, velocity, humility, joy and belonging – weren’t values created by leadership and mandated to everyone, they were co-created through several conversations and iterations as a team. Because of this, we are all aligned to living our values every day and ensuring they aren’t just words on a wall. Furthermore, we bake them into our every day: using them to inform decisions, how we treat each other, the key characteristics we look for when hiring, and how we approach challenges that inevitably bubble up. Our values are what bring us together and help us achieve our purpose at scale.

Our CEO & Co-Founder, Vlada Bortnik, models our values every day by publicly appreciating employees for modeling our values, driving us all to keep our values in mind when making business decisions, and frequently asking for feedback in how she can improve her leadership (with our values in mind).

Though our backgrounds are diverse, we share a belief—lives flourish when people feel close. That common inspiration keeps us aligned and collaborating with our purpose as a team. We know that good ideas can come from anywhere, so we openly share what we are working on through avenues such as weekly demos. The goal is to get feedback and stimulate even more ideas. One of our company values is ‘Belonging’ – that we all actively seek ways to co-create an environment where everyone feels safe to show up as their authentic self and bring ideas, thoughts and feedback. We bake this value into everything we do – from how we hire, to the benefits we offer, to how we make decisions and how we build processes.

Although we are fully-remote, we have some clearly defined (and iterated on to perfection!) norms that we all follow to ensure maximum collaboration in our remote environment. We have what we call our Core Collaboration Hours – the hours we are all online, actively working and available for meetings and ad hoc collaboration, regardless of timezone. We also have clear norms and tools to use for collaboration – synchronous or “real-time” collaboration norms for Slack and Zoom and asynchronous collaboration norms through our app, Marco Polo. Not only does using our app help us increase our collaboration, but it helps us test our product before updates get released to customers – double win!

In addition to comprehensive medical, vision and dental coverage we have an array of benefits that support our team’s mental health and emotional well-being. We have Flexible Paid Time Off, generous company holidays and quarterly self care days. Team members get reimbursed for out of pocket expenses related to working remotely and are offered flexible work schedules built to fit their real lives. We have quarterly in-person and virtual team retreats, all expenses paid.