A week of stories worth telling

"Every startup is scrappy at the seed stage. The ones that stand out make an active effort to build a culture and personality all their own."

I wrote that line in my application to SageOx about a month ago. I'd spent three hours reading their blog and was awestruck. Everyone had an opinion, and every opinion got celebrated. By the time I closed the last tab, I already knew how Ryan thinks, how Ajit thinks, how Emory thinks, and how Lau thinks.

Usually getting to know a company feels impersonal. This felt like meeting people.

A little about me: I studied literature, and I've loved stories for as long as I can remember. Before tech, I worked at Unicorn Island, Lilly Singh's nonprofit, where I helped build a podcast that grew to millions of views and won a Webby. Somewhere along the way, I got curious about tech, and realized that's where I wanted to take my storytelling: helping companies tell better stories. That led me to my last role, as the founding marketing manager at a seed-stage, AI-native startup.

So when SageOx posted a role that matched almost exactly what I'd been doing, on a team this opinionated, it felt like it was written for me. I applied, and sent an ambitious email to the founders, hoping for a spot on the team.

And here I am, in week one, writing my first blog post.

A huge part of my job is storytelling, and this team gives me a story worth telling every day. So here are the highlights from my first week.

Day one, everyone builds the furniture

I expected my first day to be busy. And it was... just not the way I imagined.

Our lovely team is expanding fast, and we just got a new office, which needed furniture. So on a random afternoon, Alex, our head of operations, threw us a pizza and furniture-building party. We ate a bunch of carbs, and everyone, our three founders included, built super complicated tables and chairs, and even hauled out trash.

I love the fact that there was no hierarchy. It was team building in the most literal way possible. It's also the kind of human-first thing you find time and headspace for when AI, and products like SageOx, take the heavy lifting off your plate.

Trusting each other with the first draft

Emory is our only designer, and she designs directly in code. This week she built a skill that can create more than 4,000 types of pages, all consistent with our brand and design system. Any of us can use it to build a first draft, and Emory only has to review it.

Here's what stood out to me. When something is your job, it's natural to want full control over it. You want to do it well, you want every decision to run through you, and you want to be the only one who can do it, so you keep feeling important. Emory, and SageOx as a whole, have the opposite instinct. They have so much faith in every person they bring on the team, and everyone focuses not only on doing their job well, but on equipping their coworkers to need them as little as possible.

This balance, between depending on others and equipping them not to need you, is what the team means by working at 40x. I kept hearing that phrase, and didn't get it until I was part of the team.

From installing Homebrew to my first merged PR

This one has to be my favorite: I merged my first ever PR in week one.

I'm not new to AI. I use it constantly, and I've built plenty of skills. But I had never built anything directly into a codebase. This team made me feel empowered to try. Special thanks to Madhur, who walked me through everything, from setting up my GitHub account and installing Homebrew to merging it: a skill that helps everyone on the team create content.

Fittingly, the skill works the way SageOx does: before it writes anything, it pulls in our team context through the ox CLI, so every draft starts from what the team has already discussed and decided.

Finding a team worth betting on

All of this is to say: it's easy to find companies that want their story told. It's much harder to find one worth telling stories about. I think I've found mine.

I spent my first week learning about the team, what we do, and how we think. Next comes telling the world what this team is building, and why SageOx matters to the teams who use it.