900 Broadway, Suite 404 in New York City. That’s where the Tanooki Labs office is. We have conference rooms, a kitchen, the usual stuff. Our extraordinary PM team is here, as well as our talented Creative Director and the full Management team. But for the most part our team is distributed across the rest of North America. That cultural fluency and ability to grok a feature is key to making great products. Hiring from different locations also helps make our products robust by ensuring that not every viewpoint is from NYC. But team members in remote locations means that we have to focus on building community since we can’t rely on proximity to take care of it.

Slack is more than just how we communicate with our clients, Slack is how we communicate with each other. Sure there’s tons of email, and we’re no strangers to Google Meet, but nothing can replace Slack for managing to keep projects flowing and connecting our team.

In addition to the regular Slack channels for projects, we have a few internal facing channels for all Tanookis to chat in. For us that’s #Social and #Tanooki-Team and the key for us has been that once you’re a Tanooki you’re always a Tanooki. #Social and #Tanooki-Team is full of all of the talented folks we’ve had the pleasure to have on our team in the past seven years. Whether you’re currently working on a project with us, or you were a contractor 5 years ago, you’re welcome there.

Tanooki Labs was named after the best power-up in the best version of the best video game on the best console (Tanooki suit, Super Mario Bros. 3, SNES, NES — change our minds) so retro gaming runs deep with our team. Our office has a custom arcade cabinet built by our own co-founder  Eric Skiff. Every month Tanooki hosts a competition for all Tanooki team members to win the coveted Golden Tanooki, built by Director of Biz Dev,  Dan Scholz. It’s a bit of silly fun and a trip down memory lane for most of us, and most days you’ll find some kind of chat either in the office or in Slack about the game of the month.

Every other month all Tanookis, both past and present, are invited to join in for the Tanooki Tech Talks. We’ll discuss some of the challenges we’ve encountered in recent builds and the often creative ways we managed to resolve them as well as the newest tools and best practices on everything from machine learning to database management.

We close things out with the always popular “what are you hacking on?” segment.

These touch points are the foundation of how we keep our on-site and remote staff close, and how we can bring our entrepreneurs the best talent for their projects, regardless of where they live.