Three CEOs, Three More Words on Seattle Startup Cultures

On Friday, I wrote about the corporate culture of six Northwest tech startups, boiled down to one word each. From “paranoid” to “easy,” from “humble” to “obsessed,” these companies—which spanned business software, mobile, gaming, and other areas—clearly follow the lead of their CEOs and founders.

Here are three more, from the tech worlds of Internet, healthcare-IT, and e-mail and information discovery. Keep ’em coming.

Gist (Seattle)
CEO: T.A. McCann
Culture: “Focused”
Comments: With $6.75 million in new funding last spring and an aggressive new set of beta releases, Gist is helping more and more customers manage their e-mail and information flow. (We had to disqualify McCann’s other word choice, “metrics-driven.” No hyphens!)

Talyst (Bellevue, WA)
CEO: Carla Corkern
Culture: “Safety”
Comments: Talyst helps pharmacies manage medications safely, efficiently, and reliably. Corkern says her staff is focused “on doing whatever we can to help our customers increase patient safety. This permeates our culture to test exhaustively, share problems early and broadly, and to work tirelessly when we identify a potential problem.”

TeachStreet (Seattle)
CEO: Dave Schappell
Culture: “Growth”
Comments: Having recently raised $1.2 million in new funding and expanded to seven metro areas around the U.S., TeachStreet is looking to gain some serious traction in the student-teacher networking space.

Author: Gregory T. Huang

Greg is a veteran journalist who has covered a wide range of science, technology, and business. As former editor in chief, he overaw daily news, features, and events across Xconomy's national network. Before joining Xconomy, he was a features editor at New Scientist magazine, where he edited and wrote articles on physics, technology, and neuroscience. Previously he was senior writer at Technology Review, where he reported on emerging technologies, R&D, and advances in computing, robotics, and applied physics. His writing has also appeared in Wired, Nature, and The Atlantic Monthly’s website. He was named a New York Times professional fellow in 2003. Greg is the co-author of Guanxi (Simon & Schuster, 2006), about Microsoft in China and the global competition for talent and technology. Before becoming a journalist, he did research at MIT’s Artificial Intelligence Lab. He has published 20 papers in scientific journals and conferences and spoken on innovation at Adobe, Amazon, eBay, Google, HP, Microsoft, Yahoo, and other organizations. He has a Master’s and Ph.D. in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT, and a B.S. in electrical engineering from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.