Oso
Oso Company Culture & Values
Oso's culture is ambitious, ownership-driven, resilient, and growth-oriented, built on what we call the "Four Oso Expectations" rather than traditional corporate values: Ambition, Ownership, Resilience, and Desire to Grow. These expectations emphasize execution at the highest level, broad ownership of problems, coachability, and transparency across the team.
Day-to-day, our culture shows up in daily team check-ins, bi-weekly team retrospectives, regular 1:1s with leadership, transparent communication practices, feedback-driven processes, monthly team lunches, and quarterly hackathons. Our employees rate us 5 out of 5 stars on Glassdoor, with 100% recommending Oso to a friend and 95% expressing a positive business outlook. They highlight our strong, innovative leadership with an emphasis on winning, great culture, and excellent teammates.
Leadership reinforces our culture through transparency in recruiting and operations, structured feedback mechanisms, and regular 1:1s with our CEO and CTO. As a high-growth Series A company, we operate beyond the traditional 9-5 and focus on meaningful work, emphasizing results over time spent online.
We've been recognized by Primary Venture Partners' Infrastructure Focal list for New York founders shaking up the tech ecosystem, and featured in TechCrunch for our founders' commitment to building a diverse, inclusive, and equitable company.
At Oso, we take a different approach to company culture by focusing on "expectations" rather than traditional values. We believe startup values have become meaningless, so we've established the Four Oso Expectations (Ambition, Ownership, Resilience, and Desire to Grow) as non-negotiable qualities for everyone on the team, from new hires to the CEO.
Collaboration and ownership define how we work:
Oso is an intensely collaborative environment where everyone takes broad ownership of problems. Team members are responsible for taking on challenges, experimenting with solutions, and shipping results. We budget time for discussion and engagement, from pairing sessions during interviews to team check-ins where we solve problems together. The emphasis is on seeing the big picture of your role in winning and holding yourself accountable to results over process.
Our commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion:
We prioritize building a diverse hiring pipeline over speed and volume, with agreement at both the executive and board level. We set compensation based on expected contribution rather than years of experience, and we assess candidates using predetermined scorecards. We're a feedback-driven company that gives every team member multiple avenues to safely voice concerns and opinions through check-ins, bi-weekly team retrospectives, and regular 1:1s with both our CTO and CEO.
Our hiring philosophy focuses on long-term potential:
We optimize for performance at the end of Year 1, not Day 1. We're building for the long term, which means we prioritize long-term upside over immediate performance.
