How unorthodox rituals helped us "survive" an acquisition at Slido
summary
Company survives a surprise Cisco acquisition by formalizing rituals: three days a month rotate organization days, low‑hanging‑FR days and hackathons; a weekly one‑hour “Learning Thursdays” for team-led training; monthly Capture‑the‑Flag events to onboard cross‑team skills. Engineers build concrete tools — DBT coverage, Sliger (Google Slides templating), and an open‑source prompt‑rater IDE for prompt iteration — and claim 93% of people stay after the acquisition (93% retention), showing the rituals produce tangible projects, improved onboarding and measurable retention.
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chapters (29)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:24Slido and acquisition shock
- 1:48Surviving with new logo
- 2:30Mission clarity
- 3:12Impactful priorities
- 4:17Team cleanup days
- 4:37Small improvements days
- 5:19Hackathons for creativity
- 6:22Hackathon outputs
- 8:28Three-day rituals monthly
- 9:51Learning challenges
- 10:32Outsourced training flaws
- 10:54Learning Thursdays
- 12:20Public speaking safe space
- 13:03Capture the Flag bonding
- 16:11Keeping team together
- 17:16Ukulele therapy
- 18:19Ukulele team-building
- 19:22Sing-alongs and performances
- 21:10Culture preservation
- 22:13Three pillars of culture
- 23:17Slido’s handshake tradition
- 24:02Q&A
- 24:45Exporting culture
- 25:30Lessons for leadership
- 26:32Engineering challenges
- 27:36Documentation vs fixes
- 28:39On-call during rituals
- 29:41Negatives of big company
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