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Chuck Clark, CTO at Canalyst (Photo submitted)

Every tech reporter knows the challenges of trying to get a comment from a corporate executive while working on tight deadlines. These leaders are raising money, hiring people, putting out fires, and building the future. Who can blame them for being hard to track down, right?

That’s what made our early interactions with the number crunchers at Canalyst so surprising. When the tech firm – which specializes in financial data and analytics – raised USD $70 million earlier this year, all it took was a short message on LinkedIn to get a text from CEO Damir Hot offering to speak. Soon after, we chatted to marketing VP Ashley Hargreaves, and not long after that, we had Chuck Clark on the other side of a Zoom call. All of that to say, the Canalyst crew have been some of the most available executives we’ve ever covered.

“I think that's probably part of our culture,” explains Clark, when we tell him this. “It definitely is accessible and open. That is part of how we try to operate. We are all real people, and we're nothing special. We just happen to have a role that's in a stronger, larger leadership position.” Clark says this style flows from the belief that great ideas can come from everybody in the organization. “So, we make sure we can be available for conversations, internal or external.”

For more on culture and hiring at Canalyst, here are the highlights from our conversation with Clark, as part of our How to get a job series.

This interview was condensed and lightly edited for clarity.

William Johnson: How did you end up at Canalyst?

Chuck Clark: I came to Vancouver 12 years ago from Chicago and met Damir, who was one of Canalyst’s co-founders. He had a vision early on before I was there. I said, ‘Look, I'll be an advisor. I'll help you keep from coming off the rails as you make technical decisions.’ It was funny because I also said, ‘I don't ever intend on becoming a full-time employee.’

We did this for a couple of years. I met with the technical team regularly. But it kept on getting cooler and cooler, and I saw where the company was leading. So, I talked to Damir and said, ‘You know what, I take back that I'm never going to come and work with you full-time. There's a cool opportunity, both from a business and technical perspective. How do we make it a full-time thing?’ He was thinking the same thing, so it ended up being perfect timing for both of us. Four years ago, I joined full-time.

WJ: So you’re a chief technology officer or CTO. What does that really mean?

CC: I think that it's one of the most malleable titles out there, and it really depends on the organization. I think that the way that I've tried to shape it at Canalyst is I'm there as an advocate for everyone in the software engineering organization for the work that they do. We're 200 people, but 130 of those people are in the research department. I'm also an advocate of how we can use technology to help make them more efficient and be better at the job that they're doing.

For me, I must marry that against a pragmatic business sense. I know some CTOs that are more like the chief architect – they want to sit in the corner and just craft code and think about this next kind of cool technical evolution. But I need to be at a place where I’m solving a real business problem; that it's not just about technology.

It's marrying [technology] with the demands of the business and figuring out that it really is an important role to be able to broker those conversations. Damir as CEO, he's focused on some of the things we've got with the sales team, go to market, and marketing. Technologists do speak a different language. So the question is ‘what can we do with technology, with code’ – this malleable, incredible, ephemeral thing that we've got that isn't physical? What can we do? That's my job: to help everybody understand what we can do and improve the business and be successful at it.

WJ: Practically speaking, how does someone apply to work at Canalyst?

CC: The first thing to note is that there are different types of hires. There are engineers, research analysts, and other types of employees. The first place to look is our careers page. That is a good forum to get started, as we spend a lot of time looking at every single message that comes through there.

We are pretty accessible, however. People DM me over Twitter and LinkedIn and say, ‘Hey, what's happening, you talked about your Series C, or there's been some big press release about kind of a fast-growing company in Canada, and I'm interested in knowing what you're doing.’

We're not so big that we can't have the executives talking to people, and so I engage with a lot of those people. And sometimes I'm the first point of contact. Until we really got deep into the pandemic, I met every person first for coffee and then we started the process. That wasn't really scalable, however, and it became hard to do during the COVID times.

WJ: Are you primarily remote or in person? Or are you hybrid?

I would say that we are hybrid. I live in Squamish. I was one of the first people to be remote, so I opened that up to everyone in engineering and we made that transition to pandemic times pretty easily. There are some people who want to get together, so we have an office still. We're there to support people to work in the way that's best suited for them.

WJ: What are some of the main tools that all employees use?

CC: Slack and G Suite and everything in there. For documentation, we use a cool tool called Guru. It’s like a wiki tool. There’s also Gitlab for software engineering practices and it’s just got everything we need inside of it.

WJ: Macs or PCs?

CC: Both. Our client base loves Excel, so we deliver Excel files. Half of our team uses Windows and does C# development. The other half uses MacOS and does Python and JavaScript development.

WJ: Hours 9-5 or flexible?

CC: Really flexible, I would say, and here’s an example to demonstrate why. We’ve done away with the notion of the daily stand-up that is part of so many agile development shops. You know, the whole ‘every day at the same time we’ll meet to talk about things.’ We instead went to what’s called a dark stand-up in Slack. You get asked questions by a Slack bot: What did you do yesterday? What are you going to do today? What's blocking you? And you answer those and it gets posted into a stand-ups channel. You answer at a time that works for you, so you don't have to stop when you're in the middle of something just because we hit some pre-described time.

It's not attendance or roll call, which is what the stand-up video calls feel like – like we’re checking to see are you sitting in your seat? That's not what we want. We're all adults.

This is about how we share what we've learned and accomplished. And if we're blocked, how do we get the help of others?

We're adults who are responsible. And that's the way we try to empower you to live your life – in whatever way that you need to live a great life.

The How to get a job story series is supported by VanHack. Hire from VanHack’s 300K+ diverse tech talent pool, fast.

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