A Few Days in the Mountains With the Humans of Stacker

There is something objectively strange about getting on a plane to spend several days in the mountains with the people you already spend most of your waking hours talking to on Slack, Zoom and the phone… and coming home wishing you had more time together. But that is more or less how I feel after a few days in Park City, Utah, at our diner-themed Summit (an ode to some longstanding Stacker lore around stacking pancakes).

We packed a lot into a few days. We talked about where Stacker is today and where we want it to go, heard from teams across the company, brainstormed, bonded and spent time imagining what a wildly successful Stacker looks like three years from now. We also ate an impressive amount of fantastic food, hiked mountains, rode bobsleds, tasted whiskey, competed aggressively in activities that absolutely did not warrant that level of aggression, and spent a lot of time laughing.

What Keeps Us Up at Night

One session that especially stuck with me was a showcase where each team shared a few things they were proud of, described themselves through a metaphor (which ranged from Tom Hanks and Wilson to the Avengers), and, most interestingly to me, talked about what keeps them up at night.

I walked away realizing two things: first, I do not know nearly as much as I think I do about what every team is wrestling with day to day; and second, several teams were independently losing sleep over versions of the exact same problems without realizing it. Watching people make those connections in real time and immediately start brainstorming solutions with two or three times the brainpower they walked into the room with was probably the best possible argument for getting everyone together in person.

That said, there are a million practical reasons to bring a remote company together. It's easier to solve certain problems when you're sitting across from someone instead of staring at their initials in a little circle on a screen. Ideas get better faster and conversations go places you didn't expect. Plus, you can grab the person you've been meaning to talk to for three weeks and hash something out in ten minutes over breakfast. And, as our CEO, Noah Greenberg, likes to say, you don't feel quite as bad asking someone for a work favor after you've sat hungover next to each other during a Summit presentation.

I even talked with someone who had come into the week feeling pretty burnt out and slightly apprehensive about several 10-12-hour days of team bonding. They said that they actually felt refreshed by the end of it. Sometimes just getting out of your day-to-day life, looking at the work from a different angle, and having some fun with the people you do it with can be surprisingly restorative.

But I think the biggest benefit is that you remember who you're building the thing with — and we have some really, really talented people building this thing. We also have an unusually high concentration of smart humans who care deeply about doing things well… sometimes perhaps too well, which became clear almost immediately during our team-building activities.

Turns Out We're Competitive

We played get-to-know-you bingo, a fan favorite and a reliable way to learn some surprisingly specific things about the people you work with, and then built catapults, which was insanely challenging. It sounds like a charming little team exercise until you are given limited materials and asked to construct something capable of actually launching an object, at which point a group of adults who ostensibly work at a media company suddenly have very strong opinions about structural engineering.

I, for one, thought I would hate that exercise and instead found myself taking my role as "glue gun gal" extremely seriously. Not only did every team build a working catapult, but several teams (not mine) successfully launched a ping-pong ball into a bucket… one team MULTIPLE times!

That bonding/icebreaker exercise also happened to be part of an overarching team challenge called the Griddle Games. My team took third place overall AND received a bonus award for "most effort," which feels about right considering I am a spirited gal and had two seasoned journalists on my team who apparently do not know how to receive an assignment casually. We did not win, but we did try extremely hard, and I choose to believe that counts for something. Having multiple ways to earn points scattered throughout the day, both through pre-planned activities and secret team-specific challenges, was a novel way to thread everything together and make the entire week more engaging and just competitive enough.

We also had the privilege of hearing from Scrunch CEO Chris Andrew in what was more or less a fireside chat. It was a closed-door session, but having one outside voice in a few days otherwise very intentionally focused on our own team and company was incredibly valuable.

Moose Sightings and Mountain Dinners

We also ate exceptionally well: long breakfasts and lunches, dinner at Riverhorse on Main, trivia at The Spur, and the kind of meals where conversations somehow bounce from company strategy to deeply unserious topics within about 30 seconds. You end up talking to people you don't necessarily work with every day, hearing stories you'd never hear on Slack, and realizing that someone you've known professionally for years has an entire side of their life you knew absolutely nothing about.

Somewhere in there, our Head of Sales, Coleman Walsh, also managed to encounter the same moose multiple times, which feels like it should be some kind of sales metaphor. I haven't figured out exactly what it means yet, but presumably if you are always looking for the next big opportunity, occasionally a 1,000-pound one walks directly into your field of vision. We’ll workshop that one.

Going into the Summit, there were a few newer employees I didn't know particularly well, mostly because they sit on teams I interact with less often. By both design and happenstance, I ended up spending time with those same people over and over again. Not only did I leave with a better understanding of their roles and what they want to get out of Stacker, I also learned we had a lot in common despite barely interacting up until that point.

None of this happens by accident, and a huge amount of credit goes to our Head of People Ops, Ellie Gilwit, who planned a truly insane few days where seemingly every detail had already been thought through. Getting a remote company into one place is one thing; feeding everyone, moving dozens of adults around a mountain, coordinating meetings, activities, transportation and dinners, and accounting for the million tiny logistical details nobody notices unless they go wrong is another.

What I Came Home With

Recap aside, I came home grateful for the whole group. Building a company is such a weird exercise in choosing a path and then choosing it again and again and again. Almost nine years into Stacker, one of the things I appreciate more than ever is how many extraordinary people have decided to spend a meaningful chunk of their lives helping build this company.

There were a few moments this week when I looked around and thought about how improbable the whole thing is. All these people with completely different backgrounds, talents, and personalities somehow ended up here, working on the same weird, ambitious thing. And they care a lot about the work, our customers, journalism, getting better, Stacker, and, very clearly, each other. That part isn’t something I take for granted.

I'm also coming home with a pretty healthy list of low-hanging-fruit "growing pains" that we uncovered simply by being in the same room, along with some new product ideas that somehow coalesced out of sessions that weren't even designed to do exactly that. There is plenty to get to work on. I left Park City tired, very well-fed, and mildly humbled by our third-place finish, but mostly really grateful for the humans building this thing.

Cheers to the people of Stacker and to the team who planned one hell of a trip.