We set out to build a company that helps teams make the most of their time. Why? Because time is the most valuable asset, we can spend it only once. Not coincidentally, the central point in Rick’s bestselling book.
There are thousands of books and apps that promise more focus and productivity. A lot of them require a healthy dose of discipline. We made it our goal to build a tool that solves a problem instead of yet another complicated workflow to adopt.
In our research we found: most teams know what’s important, they just don’t have the time. Schedules are packed and distractions are everywhere. And because everyone has different working schedules it’s impossible to be mindful of everyones preferences. So we opt for the very next empty spot we can find.
It does not matter how empathetic you are as a leader or co-worker, you simply don't have the time to make it work for everyone.
We set out to fix this. Rise is a webbased calendar that sits on top of the Google Calendar API, so there's no signup or data migration required.
Dany – Front-end Engineer from Berlin
Daniel – Back-end Engineer from Cologne
Willem – Back-end Engineer & Cofounder from Amsterdam
Rick – Front-end Engineer & Cofounder from Amsterdam
Emiel – Design & Cofounder from Amsterdam
We're a mix of people with different experiences, ranging from early stage startups, big tech, founding companies and fresh from university.
We've worked at companies like Uber, Tidal, Superlist, managed big teams and started and built multiple companies before.
We like to build a small team with very skilled people rather than adding a lot of positions. We believe with the right people you are able to move faster.
small team with very skilled people rather than adding a lot of positions. We believe with the right people you are able to move faster.
Willem worked at Uber where he was responsible for large parts of the payments infrastructure and built the Amsterdam team from 7 to 220 engineers in 5 years. He once caused a bug that cost Uber tens of millions. You should ask him about the story there when you're interviewing.
Rick wrote Grip, a book about productivity, which sold around ~100k copies in over 6 languages.
Dany is a big fan of tailwind and built tailwind-merge that solves the pains of using Tailwind CSS in a design system. This is being dowloaded 90k times per week now.
Rick and Emiel worked together for more than 3.5 years at the Dutch startup Blendle where Rick was CPO. Few years later they worked together on the Dutch Covid Notification app that led to the idea of building Rise together.
We care deeply about having a great sense of flow. We do that by having everyone own projects and having maximum amount of time to focus deeply on tackling the work. In clear terms: not too many meetings.
That said, killing meetings is not our goal. Our goal is simply to build the best possible product, which means that we like one-on-ones for catching up, ad-hoc meetings to flesh out details and real time polishing of details by sharing screens and code.
We run two week cycles, defined in Linear. We have a cadence of three team meetings per week: a kickoff on Monday, a weekly team lunch on Wednesday and a demo on Thursday or Friday.
We have been sending investor updates since the very beginning of building Rise, which contain our key metrics, financials, insights and plans. All of that is transparent for everyone in the team.
All of this is there for one reason: to allow everyone in the team to spend as much time as possible on building a world-class product.
The Rise backend powers our frontend on one side, and integrates with downstream calendar providers like Google Calendar on the other. Additionally we've built a scheduling engine that can instantly rank and score timeslots for our Find a Time feature. The initial backend is built with a Heroku/Ruby/PostgreSQL/Redis/Sidekiq stack. We are looking for a senior backend engineer to help launch and scale the Rise product.
Interested and ready to Rise? We'd love to jump on a call with you.
Share your CV, or even better: send a video of something you've built. If you cannot share this in a video we can also discuss it later. Email your CV/video/questions to willem@risecalendar.com or @wspruit at Twitter (DM's are open).