Meet Nexmo: A company founded in 2010 with more than 240 employees and a client list featuring Airbnb, Snapchat and Whatsapp. We caught up with the team to discuss diversity, inclusion and Nerf gun wars.
With 46 nationalities represented in the Nexmo team and a product and engineering department made up of 40% women, diversity is clearly not a challenge for this API platform company. Thomas Soulez ,VP of Product Management said one of the benefits of Nexmo’s diversity is an improved relationship with their clients.
“We need to create products which are representative of our customers and we can only do that if we are diverse in terms of gender, nationality and race.”
For Cesar Zurita, Director of Business Operations, diversity leads to a more well-rounded team. “Having people from different backgrounds and different cultures is so helpful. You can always learn from people who are different to you.”
Isabel Mohr, Nexmo’s Group Financial Controller, said she feels incredibly lucky to have such varied colleagues. “In London alone we have 46 nationalities working together and no two people are the same. It really gives us a nice breadth of personality and flavour in what we’re doing. You can be a little bit more reserved or you can be incredibly outgoing, you can be a total geek when it comes to tech or have no idea about it at all and still rock at your job!”
Armi Ingratta is Nexmo’s Head of Talent. For him, diversity is not about what gender or nationality you are but how you think. That diversity of thought is something he looks for in the interview process. How? Through some interesting questions.
“A lot of the time people get nervous in interviews so it’s good to ask questions like ‘what would you do if I shot you with a Nerf gun?’ to see what the reaction is. And at Nexmo it could easily happen that you’ll be involved in a Nerf gun war. I got shot in my first week!”
Armi believes that being committed to innovation plays a huge role in attracting diverse talent. “We’re the kind of company that’s open to new ideas and different people coming from different countries have different ideas. That’s what makes Nexmo thrive and move forward – that diversity. We find that a lot of foreign people that come to England, they want to make a difference and that makes a difference to Nexmo. These people don’t just want a 9-5 they want to be part of something that’s moving forward.”
While having a diverse workforce can sometimes lead to clashes among staff, Armi says this hasn’t been the case at Nexmo, something he attributes to their open and honest culture. “If you want to go to and talk to our CTO and say ‘we want to do this or I think this works better’ you can, no one is going to shoot you down. It’s a very collaborative culture and very flat management structure. We don’t throw around our titles, I’m Head of Talent but my team see me as a coworker and that’s across the board.”
Want to learn more about what it’s like to work at Nexmo? Find them at EXPAND London.
