Medici Ventures
South Jordan, UT
Grade: A
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Editor’s Summary: Medici Ventures is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Overstock.com launched in 2014. Their ambitious goal is to change the world by advancing blockchain technology. One of the major benefits of Medici is the feel of a small startup company while enjoying the health and wellness benefits of a larger company. The fitness center includes: locker rooms, fitness classes, workout equipment, and secure, indoor bicycle storage. There is a strong focus on community service as well as worker satisfaction. Medici Ventures offers a 19-acre campus with some of the most unique architecture in the state of Utah. Entities include the office building (Overstock Peace Coliseum); covered parking with dedicated electric vehicle charging spots; a greenhouse with an adjacent koi pond; an amenities building with a daycare, a health clinic, life coaching, and a fitness center; and a sport court. There is also public transit adjacent to the campus, making commuting convenient. The onsite café, featuring locally sourced ingredients as well as produce from the onsite greenhouse, serves both breakfast and lunch daily. The café bar offers various meal options including sandwiches and wraps, soups, salad bar, pizzas, a grill, and two daily entree specials. Multiple healthy options, approved by our onsite doctor, are featured on the menu. We are very impressed with the company’s mission and commitment to an excellent tech culture. |
| Intro: Medici Ventures is a unique venture capital and software development partnership, with a grand vision to change the world through advancing blockchain technology. We know our employees are our greatest strength, and that knowledge guides our day-to-day decisions. We believe our stated vision and values must align with actions, so we collaborate directly with our employees to define and refine our company core values. Because our employees know our vision and our values, and our management team lives them, our employees are able to focus and execute on innovative blockchain-based projects and make an impact on the world.
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Impact statements:
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Compensation:
Medici Ventures determines compensation levels for team members according each individual’s contribution to building quality world-class products. We also identify compensation levels based on an individual’s contributions to team unity and the culture of Medici Ventures, as well as on their overall helpfulness and coaching of other team members.
Advancement Opportunities:
Medici Ventures’ business model is based on purchasing equity in blockchain startup companies that are aligned with our six focuses: identity, capital markets, money and banking, supply chain, voting, and land titling. This provides a unique opportunity for our employees to continue their career at any of the portfolio companies they have helped incubate. Medici Ventures employees also have the opportunity to transfer to and work for, our parent company, Overstock.com. These positions include senior technical and leadership positions.
Training Opportunities:
Medici Ventures provides numerous training opportunities for team members to increase professional development as well as gain more knowledge about technology and their job duties. The company provides Communities of Practice where individuals learn from their peers and can share their own knowledge. There are also bi-weekly company-wide presentations on several subjects where individuals can present their knowledge or talk about what exciting projects they are working on.
In addition, Medici Ventures publishes several internal learning courses while also providing live learning classes for team members. We also regularly promote book clubs. Employees are encouraged to develop knowledge bases for development practices, processes, and technical subjects. We hold annual hands-on Blockchain Developer Trainings to increase the team’s knowledge on blockchain development.
Medical Benefits:
Because Medici Ventures is Overstock’s wholly owned blockchain subsidiary, we have the feel of a small startup company while enjoying the health and wellness benefits of a larger company. We offer health and wellness benefits including a choice of medical insurance plans (including traditional PPO plans, high deductible plans, and a value option). We have options for HSA and FSA accounts to accompany these plans. Regardless, all plans also include a telehealth benefit.
Medici Ventures also offers an onsite medical clinic that provides a wide range of care for employees and their families. All employees, whether or not they have chosen to participate in the company’s insurance plan, only pay a $10 copay for office visits. Services provided at the clinic include primary care, referrals, chronic disease management, injury/illness treatment, sports physicals, minor procedures, medications, annual exams, pediatric visits, and women’s health.
Medici Ventures offers other additional benefits including, pharmacy, dental, vision, accidental injury, leave of absence, parental leave, and short and long-term disability. Basic life and accidental death insurance are provided with the options of purchasing additional coverage.
Total Balance, our wellness program, encourages a healthy lifestyle through tracking physical and mental health goals. By participating, employees are entered into raffles where the prizes include electronics, swag, fitness equipment, gift cards, home goods, additional paid time off, and more.
We also have an employee assistance program (EAP) for all employees. This includes onsite coaches to help with personal problems or issues that are interfering with employees’ life or work. Employees have access to an onsite fitness center and sport court (basketball, pickleball, tennis). The fitness center includes: locker rooms, fitness classes, workout equipment, and secure, indoor bicycle storage.
Community service/charitable causes:
Our Company Volunteer Time-Off (CVTO) program offers employees up to eight hours of paid time off annually to participate in company-sanctioned volunteer opportunities. In previous years, we’ve provided a day of service to the Utah Food Bank. This year, however, we were unable to participate due to COVID-19. Medici Ventures joined Silicon Slopes, a nonprofit organization empowering Utah’s startup and tech community; this resulted in working with several Utah-based tech companies. We also made public statements in support of Black Lives Matter and how we can help create racial equality.
Measuring satisfaction:
Medici Ventures utilizes a semi-annual Review of Associate Development assessment, in which employees provide feedback on their team members in an effort to increase professional development and growth. We focus on providing team retrospectives, manager one-on-ones, and skip level one-on-ones. We also have an executive open-door policy in which employees have access to their executives to ask questions and receive guidance from them.
Peace Coliseum was designed with open office plan that inspires collaboration and innovation. Sound-dampening panels increase collaboration without increasing interruptions and with View Dynamic Glass, windows automatically tint based on the local weather and time, keeping our employees comfortable. Peace Coliseum has a unique circular layout with a coordinates system for meeting rooms so employees can easily navigate the building. The onsite greenhouse is open for meetings or can be used as a space to meditate, eat lunch, or take a break. The onsite gym facility is also provided for employees to keep the body and mind healthy.
Work/Life:
Work-life balance is very important to us at Medici Ventures. To begin, our associates have two work schedules to choose from–the traditional 40-hour work week or an option in which they can work 80 hours in nine days and have every other Friday off. We also provide a full-size exercise gym, café, daycare, and health clinic– all right on our campus.
During the Covid-19 pandemic, we noticed people were at their computers late into the night. So we provided workshops on how to reduce Zoom fatigue and fully disengage from work at a more appropriate time.
Creative meeting places:
Our global headquarters, Peace Coliseum, provides a space that encourages collaboration and creativity. The $100 million state-of-the-art campus boasts a lounge equipped with meeting spaces, a coffee and juice bar, and game room that allows for fun events and intuitive collaboration. Peace Coliseum also has an outdoor courtyard stocked with grills and fireplace gathering areas. The headquarters additionally offers an onsite greenhouse, where employees can escape to have a peaceful meeting or meditation session.
We have hosted events at local pubs and restaurants as well as Top Golf, which is located across the street from Peace Coliseum.
Perks:
Medici Ventures offers a 19-acre campus with some of the most unique architecture in the state of Utah. Entities include the office building (Overstock Peace Coliseum); covered parking with dedicated electric vehicle charging spots; a greenhouse with an adjacent koi pond; an amenities building with a daycare, a health clinic, life coaching, and a fitness center; and a sport court. There is also public transit adjacent to the campus, making commuting convenient.
The onsite café, featuring locally sourced ingredients as well as produce from the onsite greenhouse, serves both breakfast and lunch daily. The café bar offers various meal options including sandwiches and wraps, soups, salad bar, pizzas, a grill, and two daily entree specials. Multiple healthy options, approved by our onsite doctor, are featured on the menu. We also feature a separate café that serves coffees, teas, smoothies, and fresh juices.
Medici Ventures offers a long list of corporate discounts to employees. These discounts range from healthcare, fitness club memberships, electronics, mobile phone plans, travel, ski passes, entertainment, financial services, and real estate. Other discounts and perks are also available to employees through AccessPerks.com
The company sponsors various mobile service offerings on the main campus throughout the month. These include dental care, barber and salon services, chiropractic care, car detailing, and massage therapy.
Medici Ventures employees also receive free Club O memberships, a rewards program at Overstock.com that offers 10% rewards on every purchase, free shipping, and free returns on select items.
Fun:
Our global headquarters is equipped with multiple unique activities for team members to participate in throughout the day. This includes pinball and arcade machines, ping-pong tables, a sport court with basketball hoops and volleyball equipment, and onsite massage reservations.
The company also hosts monthly onsite social events, monthly onsite gatherings around the firepits and BBQs, and team activities. These activities are currently done virtually due to COVID-19.
How corporate vision is communicated:
Leadership places an emphasis on communicating transparently to employees. Company, organizational, and team all hands standup meetings are performed regularly to bring opportunities to communicate vision and provide feedback. Medici Ventures regularly reviews company core values with management and teams, and we are building advanced tools specifically designed for communicating the vision and aligning team efforts to company vision.
Diversity:
We understand that in order to be successful in encouraging, promoting, and realizing a diverse organization, hiring managers cannot solely look for diverse candidates. An organization must create an always-inclusive culture. This means celebrating cultures, diversity and inclusion–even if your organization is not diverse at the moment. It means helping employees identify implicit biases and micro-aggressions, giving them the space to fail at both and helping them learn from that failure.
Finally, it also means changing systems, processes and approaches to hiring, promotions, and compensation to reduce and remove the effects of implicit biases. We’ve done this by implementing regular instructor-led implicit bias and micro-aggression discussions and education workshops. We have also created an approach to hiring that reduces implicit bias by removing identifying characteristics throughout much of the process. Our always-inclusive organization means diverse candidates can find a welcoming team from day one.
Medici Ventures has taken the ParityPledge to increase gender parity. This means that open roles for leadership positions must consider at least one qualified female. The company has also taken the ParityPledge for people of color, in which open roles for leadership positions must consider at least one qualified person of color.
Empowering employees:
We work to provide and support education and training for our employees. We also facilitate hands-off supportive management of employee roles. For example, team members in a multi-team project suggested they join one large team in order to better align on vision and goals. While management was unsure of a 20-person scrum team, we let them give it a try. The experiment was a huge success and the teams became more aligned with each other and the organization. New teams naturally formed and became new scrum teams.
We provide clear career paths designed to encourage employees to take charge of their development and continue to achieve. We encourage employees to contribute to the career path design. One of Medici Ventures’ principal developers devised a framework and came up with some roles beyond principal software developer. They presented it to their colleagues and management. This resulted in several additions and a more refined progression for our individual contributors.
Our teams are empowered to determine the best tooling and options to deliver value. They are self-organizing, cross-functional, Agile scrum teams with an embedded product owner, scrum master, and site reliability engineer. Team members own day-to-day decisions, and therefore, they own the results as well. For example, when our automation engineers were experiencing pain points with the testing software they were using, they researched and presented an alternative idea that has since enabled everyone to be more productive.
Team members are continually urged to innovate and effect needed changes at Medici Ventures. Everyone is encouraged to participate in the collaborative effort to create our core values, engage in mentorship
opportunities, and be part of hiring processes for new team members. Medici Ventures regularly hosts MEDTalks, where employees have the opportunity to present a topic of interest to the team.
Employees also contribute to Medici Ventures’ Value our Values program in which they nominate a fellow colleague for demonstrating a Medici Ventures core value.
Additionally, employees are invited to utilize the Idea Lab, a company-wide, open forum to which anyone can submit ideas to improve the company. Employees of all levels can submit an idea, browse existing ideas, add comments or suggestions, and vote for their favorites. The ideas with the most votes are floated to leadership for review and possible implementation.
Medici Ventures employees are encouraged to frequently discuss our core values. We have created a quarterly program where employees can receive recognition for displaying behavior consistent with our core values. We call this program, Value our Values.
When employees discover a patentable idea, Medici Ventures pays a patent bounty and gives that employee recognition in company stand-ups.
During weekly management meetings, each manager highlights one individual that has demonstrated exceptional effort, referred to as an Employee Brag. We also regularly give recognition to employees for their work during company, organization, and team standups, as well as in regular team retrospectives.
Ensuring well-being:
Our focus on Trust Driven Development leaves schedule management to individual scrum teams. Each contributor identifies the schedule that allows them to meet the needs of their home life, as well as commit to work and collaborate with their team.
We offer flexible scheduling in which employees can choose a standard five-day work week or an alternate schedule of nine days over two weeks, taking every other Friday off. Employees start with two weeks of annual PTO when they begin their career at Medici Ventures. This increases to three weeks after their one-year anniversary and then to four weeks after five years. Medici Ventures provides eight paid company holidays per
calendar year in addition to one floating holiday on a date of the employee’s choice.
At Medici Ventures, we heavily evangelize our core values and strive to live them day in and day out. As part of our core values “we believe changing the world takes amazing people, not just technology, and our employees are our greatest strength. We encourage and assist each of our employees to seek individual excellence through education, talent development, and a healthy work-life balance. We strive to maintain an atmosphere of kindness, integrity, and respect. We value diversity of thought, opinions, backgrounds, and ideas, and believe it results in greater creativity and innovation.”
The main objective of our COVID-19 safety precautions and work from home plan is to keep our employees safe. All decisions and plans for reentry into the office and for reopening the facilities have been built around this key objective. In addition, we have made sure that each employee has a comfortable environment to work in at home during this time. Allowing employees to take office equipment (monitors, docking stations, chairs, etc.) home has helped ensure this comfort and quality of work.
We offer generous health and wellness benefits, such as dependent care options (including onsite childcare), onsite fitness center, and areas on campus where employees can take a break.
We provide our employees with a manager that is responsible for guiding and directing employee growth and engagement at Medici Ventures. These development managers do not manage tasks or workload, instead they embody the values of transformational leadership–focusing on employee engagement, organizational identity, coaching, equity, and inclusion. Development managers have consistent one-on-one discussions with their employees to identify career growth, engagement opportunities, and personal improvement. We have continued this practice through quarantine, via video conferencing technology, providing awareness of any struggles or challenges our employees may be facing during this difficult time.
Communication is a crucial factor for success in any endeavor, even during the best of times. Our leadership team has placed an emphasis on overcommunicating while employees are working from home. With the threat of COVID-19, our executive leadership has taken additional measures to regularly provide weekly inspirational messages, updates to our COVID-19 plan, as well as celebrating company, team, and individual successes.
As an organization, we believe in Trust Driven Development, which means we expect all of our employees to work built on a foundation of trust. We expect employees to manage their time and team contributions to strive towards excellence. Employees expect management to act and behave with candor and transparency. This has become most obvious in our consistent communication with our development teams, as we make sure they take time off (PTO) and do not overwork themselves. Working from home has seen a significant increase in salaried employees putting in extra hours. Because we are committed to work-life balance, we communicate openly and directly that consistently working overtime reduces the overall efficiency and mental health of our employees. Leadership encourages our employees to have a schedule that meets their current needs without needing to work overtime.
Many of our managers have increased the number of virtual team activities to improve social engagement with coworkers. Also, we continue to hold regular virtual social hours. Employees bring a beverage of their choice and hang out together in a large Zoom room, which helps teams socialize and speak on topics that are not solely focused on work. Both groups of activities are communicated as optional, allowing employees to determine their own level of social engagement.
| Closing company statements: They must know that we focus on our core values. We are striving to change the world, and we continually improve our abilities and our processes in order to achieve our goals. We need responsible and accountable individuals that will bring their best selves and ideas into the Medici Ventures family to help us in those efforts. |
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Medici Ventures