Happy Wednesday, Alpaca!

Pour yourself a cup of ambition, because today we’re celebrating Marina Erickson’s FOURTH anniversary at Alpaca!

Four years! Head of Fulfillment, then Office Manager, now Head of People Operations. Marina has done so many things so well here, and leaves her mark in so many generous, indelible, and delightful ways, that summing it all up is hard. Then a couple of weeks ago, I heard a story about Dolly Parton that I hadn’t heard before, and my immediate reaction was:

Wait. Are Marina Erickson and Dolly Parton actually the same person?

And I knew what this letter needed to be about. So here’s the story.

Back in the early 90s, Sevier County, Tennessee had a serious school dropout problem. More than a third of the high school students in this rural Appalachian county weren’t graduating, and many of them left school as young as 14.

Dolly wanted to do something about it, so she launched the Buddy Program. Silly name, but it had an extraordinary impact.

Here’s what she did. She gathered every 7th and 8th grader in the county (at Dollywood, of course) and she made them a promise. Each kid picked a “buddy” of their choice. If both buddies graduated from high school, she gave each of them $500. If one graduated and one didn’t, neither got it.

The dropout rate fell from 35% to 6%.

Why did it work? Well, if you’re trying to get a bunch of 8th graders to do something difficult, like stay in school when a third of their friends are dropping out, you can’t think like a philanthropist or a school administrator or a country music star. You have to think like an 8th grader. As the mother of one, I can tell you that middle schoolers care deeply about two things: making their own money, and being cool.

The program worked for two reasons:

1. It made success everyone’s job. The program assigned the work of holding kids accountable to the kids themselves. When your parent wants you to go to school, you might not. If you and your buddy made a promise to each other for that $500, you show up.

2. It made the act of taking care of each other cool, and it made it rewarding.

   When you can inspire a group of 8th graders to help each other stay in school and make the act of doing so fun and rewarding, you’re winning bigger than any graduation rate can measure — you’re creating an ethos in a young person that is focused on both being successful and taking care of one another.

Which brings me back to Marina. If I had to sum up four years of her work in one line, it would be this: she makes positive culture everyone’s job, and she makes taking care of each other fun and rewarding. Those two talents go hand in hand, and they’ve built a true “culturemaker” mentality in every single person at this company.

How does she do it? Thank you for asking. Let us count the ways. Four big ones, one for every year:

1. Morning Greetings.
   Every morning, Marina greets every single person as we walk in the door, with the joy, positivity, and ambition we expect of our team. She’s here early, she’s ready to work, and she’s here to help you start your day. It’s a lovely way to begin the morning and a joyful reminder to take the time to greet one another.

2. Fearless on the Phone
   Before this year, Marina had never picked up the phone for an outbound sales call, stepped foot on a trade show floor, or interviewed a candidate for a job. This year she’s done all of that (and so much more), constantly setting the example that we can all do the hard work of building this company, and nothing is “not our job.” At our stage, that matters enormously.

3. Power Hours
   When Marina noticed productivity and energy flagging in the afternoons earlier this year, she created “Power Hours” to get everyone calling, selling, moving, and drinking water, so that sales is everyone’s job and everyone contributes to our goals. When it’s time for Power Hour, we hold each other to the highest energy level possible to achieve big things.

4. Setting Up New Hires for Success
   This year, Marina helped build true onboarding at Alpaca, bringing together Alpaca leadership, working principles (like “Phone! Keys! Wallet!”), customer voice, shared peer experiences, and highly organized information so that new hires feel set up for success from the day they arrive (and even before). She helps each of us welcome new hires, and helps each new hire introduce themselves to the company in creative ways.

Marina builds culture the way Dolly built the Buddy Program: by thinking like a new team member, a sales team member, a people manager, and a leader, and then creating the work experience each of us can love and share with one another.

She asks us and inspires us to care for one another in unique and delightful (and hilarious!) ways.

She doesn’t take herself too seriously and demands the same of each of us. And above all, she makes our company’s success every single person’s job.

Marina, you’ve got dreams we’ll never take away. I can’t wait to see what’s next!

Happy Anniversary!
KB

Wow — what a week! New hires, big sales energy and the biggest thing — the launch of the Little Wins Library!

Product launch days are one of my favorite things in the company, because we get to celebrate our team and support our customers with something new all at the same time. This project was an absolutely huge undertaking, and required some new systems, new thinking, and a reimagining of Alpaca’s free resources.

There are SO many “little wins” that the team achieved with this library. Every resource has been rebuilt to be more useful for busy school leaders. Each one now helps leaders know upfront how long it takes, how much effort it needs, and who can run it. You can preview a whole resource on the site before you download anything, and grab just the printable pages when that’s all you need. New photos show real educators using these resources in real buildings, helping us achieve our core values to “tell stories” and “elevate every educator.”

We also made those resources more searchable and relevant to the time of year and “moments” of a school leader’s work. So whether it’s Back to School, the Mid-Year Slump, Testing Season, or a hard day nobody planned for, there’s a resource for that!

One of our early testers called it “like a Google for school leaders.” Another said it was “a unified resource of all the things I need to build culture in my building, and supporting my teachers.”

Why it matters at Alpaca

Why are we investing in a free resource library for educators? There are two reasons:

1. We want to strengthen the actionability of the Alpaca Pulse platform for Alpaca’s school and district customers. In Alpaca Pulse, we connect the things that teachers say they need the most to simple, actionable ideas for school principals. Now, those actions are linked to these new resources, which can be saved and accessed easily all year long.

2. We want to build trust with school leaders who are not yet our customers. Alpaca is kind of a new concept for a lot of education leaders — there aren’t that many “school culture platforms” out there, right? So providing free “little wins” to leaders who don’t know us yet is the way we introduce ourselves and begin a conversation about strengthening school culture together.

When one product launch can support both of those goals, an extraordinary opportunity arises. And I cannot wait to see it all in action.

What’s Next

If you haven’t yet, please get right over to the Little Wins Library and check it all out: Little Wins Library And if you know an education leader, please share this wonderful free resource with them!

Thank you!

To the extraordinary team of educators, designers, creatives, developers, content creators, marketers, and leaders who brought the library to life, CONGRATULATIONS and thank you for your tireless hard work! This is such an exciting thing to see go out into the world!

Let’s keep going!

KB

Happy Monday, Alpaca! And Happy 3 Year Anniversary to Alissa Christensen!

As you know, great ideas are in full supply at our company. There’s an idea for a new product feature, resource, pack item, and team outing shared over every meeting, lunch, or walk.

In some places and on some teams, people will try an idea once and that will be that. But the greatest work at Alpaca, I believe, comes when ideas follow this plan:

1. We try an experiment with audacious autonomy

2. We evaluate it honestly

3. We nurture that idea into an improved and evolved version of itself

Nurture? Nurture.

Nurture isn’t a word we hear in startups very often. But when you look at its core definition, to nurture is to care for and support something as it grows and develops. To evolve our ideas and experiments at Alpaca, I know that we need a leader who understands nurture. Today, we’re celebrating Alissa Christensen’s third anniversary at Alpaca, and I know of few leaders who know how to nurture ideas and teams like Alissa does.

Last year, we saw an audacious experiement in Camp Alpaca (our crazy two week internship for educators!). From that one (big) experiment, I’ve watched as Alissa has nurtured and developed several evolutions of the work created there and turn them into lasting value in the company. Let’s talk about what this magnetic force of a leader has done in just one year:

The Alpaca Educator Team

Following Camp Alpaca last year, Alissa created an educator team that works behind the scenes to improve our product, build new resources, provide language translation, and help us dream up new ideas. Alissa quietly leads this team and because of it, we are publishing new resources every week.

The Little Wins Workshop

Alissa was a force of nature in the creation of the Little Wins Workshop, our first ever conference for school leaders. Her guidance and educator focus, combined with unrelenting hard work meant that the day of the conference, everyone wondered how a thing could just “go so smoothly” and and how a virtual conference “could be so engaging and fun.” That’s because Alissa (and many others at Alpaca!) took what they learned from Camp Alpaca last year and nurtured it into an evolving idea of how we can support and engage educators and leaders.

Evolving Customer Success

This spring and summer, Alissa has once again been quietly building the evolution of an important part of what we do — onboarding new customers. Since her 2nd anniversary last year, Alissa has onboarded 150 new customers at Alpaca, while supporting another 150 existing customers. This summer, she rebuilt the program, adding more opportunities to engage in the goals and intentions of the school leaders using our platform. And on top of all of that, she brought on another Customer Success team member, who she quickly brought up to speed on how we help new customers get set up, nurtured her finding her own style and voice, and then sent her successfully into the work of making sure every customer finds value in our platform quickly.

The Little Wins Library

This spring, Alissa nurtured an extraordinary project that I cannot wait to see launch (next week!!!). From the resources that she has created since her first year with us, we knew that there was an opportunity to create a new type of resource library for school leaders. True to form, Alissa took what she’d created initially with Alpaca Resources and nurtured its evolution. She is thoughtful about how our leaders find and use our resources. She is thoughtful about how they look and feel. She is thoughtful about the educators who help create them, and she nurtures each contributor’s work along. You’ll see it and feel it in every aspect of the new Little Wins Library soon!

Today, Alissa is doing important nurturing work at home - caring for her beautiful new baby girl Ruby and her inimitable and fantastic daughter June. But because she nurtured so many important ideas and projects this year, we’ve had a strong foundation to work with while she’s away. When she returns from leave, our team will hope to have brought her vision to life, to have worked as hard as she does, and to have nurtured our customers and our product and each other in the way that she teaches by example every single day.

Happy Third Anniversary, Alissa! Thank you for nurturing every little idea with such care and thoughtful intention. It shows in absolutely everything you do!

Love,
KB

Happy Tuesday, Alpaca!

Did you know that our teammate Kate Christopherson has a photographic memory for names? It’s true.

When we were at a conference together recently, we were at the booth and someone came over to see what Alpaca was all about. They mentioned their district name and the fact that they’ve downloaded some of our resources and without glancing at a nametag or skipping a beat, Kate said “Oh yes! I believe we talked to your secretary a few weeks back — you’re Cheryl, right?” Obviously impressed and thrilled to have been seen and remembered, the two of them made an instant connection.

I watched Kate do this a dozen times that conference, and when I asked her about it, she said “I’ve always been able to do that! It’s just how my brain works. It’s like I have a database in there.” I told her it’s like she has a relationship super power in there!

Today, we’re celebrating Kate Christopherson’s FIRST year at Alpaca — and what a year it’s been!

Like Claire, Kate joined the company as one of our first two outbound sales reps, before we had much for training or process or proof that it could work. Kate had to use that superpower of hers to connect to people, remember their names, and build relationships, all over the phone. When she goes to conferences, she thrives in building true face to face connections with our customers, and when she’s at the office, she lights up our space with joy and positivity and humor.

We talk a lot at Alpaca about how organizational culture evolves, whether that’s a school culture or our own culture as a company. We believe in being “culturemakers” — where each of us comes into the organization with experiences, perspectives, and traditions, and each of us shares those with the team, so that they layer into the organization and evolve the culture. That means that the culture that Alpaca had when it was just Kimberly, Marina, and me isn’t the same as it is today with 20 employees, and that’s how it should be. Each new team member evolves our culture just a little bit, and it will continue to grow and evolve over time.

Kate is truly a Culturemaker at Alpaca. Kate is the reason we had a March Madness bracket for the team this year. She’s the energy behind potluck lunches (she’ll bring the potatoes, of course!). She’s the Nebraska cheer squad before and after every Husker football weekend. And she’s the bright and positive presence that Alpaca embodies, everywhere she goes.

What I’m excited about is that Kate is just getting started. Recently, Kate started building and closing her own new customer deals, connecting even more with school principals and leaders bringing Alpaca to their schools for the very first time. Seeing those relationships grow and flourish this year will be so much fun - I can’t wait to see her at conferences in a year, meeting in person the many school leaders she has supported in their first year with Alpaca this year.

Kate, thanks for bringing the puns, the potatoes, the hard work, the energy, and your unique skill of creating instant connections and lasting relationships to our team and to our customers. Happy anniversary - we are SO grateful to you for all that you do, and so excited for all that’s ahead!

Love,

KB

PS: Sorry Kate, you know I wasn’t going to let this post get published without this gem:

WOW it was so much fun welcoming new team members last week and closing the month strong! This week is another big week — we have so many new team members traveling and representing Alpaca at a conference this week for the first time — and I am so excited for y’all!

With so many traveling for the very first time, I thought it might be a good moment to offer all of us a refresher on some guidelines for traveling for Alpaca. As you know, I’m not much for policies and handbooks. I want each of us to operate as a team of owners, and a group of people looking out for the best interests of our customer, company, and team. That said, if you haven’t traveled for work much or been to many conferences, it can be confusing to know what to pack or how to plan, and we don’t want anyone feeling confused or unconfident. We’re never going to tell you exactly what to wear or do (that’s just not our way!), but thinking about three things will help you plan. Ready!? Here we go!

When traveling for work and representing the company at an event, consider these three things:

1. You are representing Alpaca’s brand and values from the moment you leave the office until the moment you return.

Your time at the booth exhibit hours is not the only time people will see you representing Alpaca. How you operate in the airport, during event set-up, at the conference hotel, and after hours is connected to how people will perceive our company. That means: probably don’t wear sweats to set up the booth, keep your language professional (even at the hotel bar!), and remember that on any given airplane, you might be sitting next to a superintendent (or our next hire!). No need for formality, but remember the importance of first impressions, no matter what you’re doing.

2. We are working to establish trust as thought leaders and peers. Dress the part!

“What do I wear?” is often a question for team members just getting started at Alpaca events. Obviously, you have your conference “capsule” so you have plenty of options for branded items to wear, and we typically recommend you wear something with Alpaca’s brand on it for each conference day. But what do you pair with that shirt or jacket?

The way we think about it is this: we want our customers to see us as respected professional peers. To achieve that, we want to “match the pitch” of the level of professionalism of the customers that will be at any of our conferences. That can vary depending on the conference itself and who’s there, so feel free to ask someone who’s been before what it’s like.

And if you’re wondering “Is this professional enough to wear?” ask yourself this: “If a school principal or district leader were wearing this exact thing, would I find that at all unprofessional or surprising?” If the honest answer is yes, you might just pick something different. Want someone else’s take on it? Just ask!

3. Give yourself the best chance of winning.

Everything we do while traveling for work or representing our company should help you feel more confident in your ability to win the day. If that means you need to wake up early and get some fresh air before the conference starts, do that! If it means you need to get to bed early, do that! If it means you need to call your sister to get some “conversation time” warmed up before you’re on the floor booking meetings, by all means, do that!

What you wear, how you show up, what you eat, how you hydrate, and how you find connection and support from your peers all goes into that equation! We can’t tell you the exact right thing to do for your day — but thinking intentionally about how you’re going to win the day (and then doing those things!) can make the difference in your ability to achieve your goal!

If you remember nothing else, know this: your team is here to support you and help however you need it. Need a pep talk? Advice? Outside walk? Egg bites? We’ve got you — and we’re here to win the day together.

You all are going to crush the goal at SAI!

KB

A couple of months ago, I had the opportunity to see a Broadway show called Every Brilliant Thing. So, the premise of the show is a little sad: it’s about a son who wants to help his mother see more good in the world, so he starts writing down things that are brilliant, beautiful, and good in the world.
Ice cream.
Sunsets.
Remembering the lyrics to a song from high school.

Over time, the effort catches in his circles and in the end, there is a collection of brilliant things, contributed by so many people, and a reminder of all the good that exists in the world, if we simply look for it.

The result is one of the most uplifting and delightful shows I’ve seen. It was in fact so good that it inspired me to start my own list of the good and beautiful things in my life.

Most of mine are about places I love, friends, family, experiences, memories. Most of them aren’t about work. But as I was coming home from a conference this week, I thought about this type of practice at work.

Why don’t more teams take a moment more often to simply list the good things happening?

Every one of us knows that building a company is hard work, and every single one of us is in the thick of it right now. Big work, big deadlines, big travel, big investments, big call volumes, big expectations, big risks, big rewards.

And we love hard work! So we embrace all of the big things in front of us and the big opportunity ahead of us. And also — sometimes it’s important to remember how FUN it is to build a company. How silly and smart and creative our team members are. How delightful our customers are. How much fun this is.

Keeping track of all of the good and beautiful things at Alpaca is a different way to live our values of Write Thank You Notes. It’s a teeny recognition and moment of gratitude of what’s good, what’s exciting, what makes us excited to get out of bed and come to our beautiful office every day.

And so, I thought I’d get us started. The first one I wrote down was:

The way Marina greets you when you walk in the door

From there, it was an easy list to write! And it’s not done yet — it’s a living note on my phone, and I hope you’ll join me in adding to this list. Feel free to add your own in the comments — and if we like it, we’ll build it somewhere that we can continue to add to over time. With no further ado:

Good & Beautiful Things at Alpaca

• Marina greeting you when you walk in the door

• The moment someone “gets it” on the demo

• Bongo Java

• Our magical plant that sprouts a leaf whenever something important happens in the company

• Working at Millwork Commons

• New hire happy hour!

• Lindsay realizing by accident that she’s a Disney Adult

• A bustling noisy office

• Our supply wall

• When we see a customer at a conference

• Finishing a packout

• Wilson Phillips Hold On

• Seeing our team go for walks together

• Repair and Restore

• “Friends don’t let friends have bad product photography.”

• The sound of the Vestaboard turning over

• When Jessica comes to town

• Road trips with Kaitlynn

• Camp Wandawega photo shoot

• The #happy-customers channel

• Eric Filardi flying from Alaska with his family to spend a week with us

• Hack days

• Hearing Alissa and Maci talk about Costco

• Mariah Carey’s Fantasy

• Ringing the Bell

• Car rides with each other

• Booking a meeting at the booth

• The revolving art gallery in our Millwork hallway

• Mimi

• When Nicholas’s designs hit just right

• Seasonal latte flavors at Archetype

• Fireplace conversations in Nebraska City

• Camp Alpaca

• Spreadsheet School

• Eyes emoji in the #sales channel

• When dogs visit the office

• When babies visit the office

• New Notebooks Day

• The Magic Table at Buvette

• Kimberly’s slide decks

• Birthday happy hours with crafts

• Seeing anyone make their first sale

• Susan freakin Toohey

• Team cooking night in Nashvillle (those cookies!)

• Presenting with a customer

• Our Alpaca head stickers

• When Alissa and Lila get dorked out excited about a pack item they’ve figured out

• Investors who care about the impact we’re making

• Crinkle

• Not putting crinkle in the packs anymore

• Kaitlynn coming in with the low key funniest joke of the day, always

• Seeing Kate take an impromptu demo and nail it

• When someone at the booth says “we need this!”

• Winning the day

• Clean Slate bogo day

• Getting a shout out

• Sending a shout out

• When customers see their data for the first time

• People coming up to the booth and saying they love our brand

• 7:30 am light in the office

• When teachers get new headshots at Alpaca

• The new Little Wins library imagery

• Hitting our revenue goal

• Notebooks

• When a box of finished thank you notes shows up unexpectedly

• Video outtakes

• When investors say yes

• When customers say yes

• When a new hire says yes

• Office potluck parties

• Love is Blind bonding

• That time we caught a possum in the office but for two weeks we thought it was a burglar

• You all Taking pictures of my notebook after a meeting

• My Emotional Support Rainbow Slide

• Mark knowing exactly how to help win the deal

• Launching a big project

• When a teacher gets their first pack

• Little Wins podcast guests when they tell us something awesome happening in their district

• Kate Canales teaching our team

• Maci’s tiny pieces of paper filled with notes

• “Ope, dogs are out” — Kimberly Bailey

• School visits

• Lauren Muller bringing her light and joy to the office

• Marina’s tiny cowboy hat

• Egg bites

• Silly Goose Productions

• Winning

It’s funny how a single word or phrase can bring a smile to your face isn’t it? I hope you enjoy these and add your own. And I hope that if you’re having a tough day, you’ll know that’s ok, and that there are so many beautiful and good things in our work and our days.

Now let’s go GET IT for the last week of the month, Alpaca!!!

KB

Dear Alpaca,

Have you ever made an entire piece of clothing using only yarn, a stick, and your own two hands? Me neither. But if you have, you know that needle crafts like knitting and crocheting require completing and repeating literally thousands of stitches by hand with rudimentary tools.

In crocheting, mistakes will be made! And when they happen, it requires going back, undoing what you did, figuring out how to fix it, and then doing the work again.

If you are patient, curious, and willing to do the work, the result is that you’ve crafted something uniquely yours that didn’t exist before. Plus, you have greater skill and mastery than you had before. That’s becoming a “student of the craft,” someone willing to endeavor, fail, retry, and win.

At Alpaca, I believe the greatest thing each of us can be is a student of our craft. To understand deeply how your job works, get very real with yourself about where you can improve, and then do the work that gets you there is to find not only success for our customers and company, but also personal growth.

And if you were to ask me to summarize Claire Edwards’ first year at Alpaca, I’d tell you: Claire is a student of her craft.

Claire came to Alpaca a year ago today, as Alpaca’s first true outbound sales hire. To be honest, we really didn’t know what the role would look like at our company. We didn’t know exactly who we were calling, what we would say, or how they’d respond.

But we knew that in order to grow our customer base, we’d have to pick up the phone and ask for more opportunities for a conversation. Hello, Claire!

Claire came in as an experienced sales professional, but from a totally different background and customer base. We had no onboarding, training, or process to speak of. Oh and also, for her first two weeks, we asked Claire to support Alpaca’s back-to-school packout operation in our fulfillment center, nowhere near the role she was hired for.

To call it a challenging start would be an understatement. And yet! Claire knew what to do, because Claire is a student of whatever craft she chooses. She dove in, accepted the challenge, and whenever it didn’t work (for any reason), she asked for feedback and coaching, so that she could get better.

I honestly don’t know of another person I’ve worked with who requests as much feedback, coaching, and clear advice as Claire does.

That’s not a comfortable thing to do, and the answer is often not easy to hear, and Claire keeps coming back, because Claire wants to win more than she wants to be comfortable.

To date, Claire has opened up the door for more than 476 opportunities to connect with new customers. She’s fearless, driven, and goal-oriented at an education conference. She can (and does!) make more phone calls in a day than I could in a week. And in the moments where she’s behind on a goal she’ll ask “How can I change what I’m doing to win more?”

This year was a lot of firsts for Claire. Her first business trip ever. Her first presentation at a conference. Her first team retreat. Her first lightning talk. Lots of firsts — and for every single one, she simply asked “Okay, how do I do it?” and then after some practice, “How do I get better at this?” She takes the advice, does the work, and levels up. And then she does it again.

This spring, Claire was ready for the opportunity to expand her work to include our full cycle sales process, spent hours learning our product and our value to customers, and now rings the bell for Alpaca every week. After every demo, I hear her ask “where could I have done a little better?”or “How could I make that part more clear?” Then she takes the advice, does the work, and levels up again.

It would be one thing if Claire was simply out there to level herself up, but what I think is most remarkable, and the thing I am most excited about for her second year, is how Claire is ready to help those around her get better, too.

We have a lot of new team members in the sales organization now, and it takes some hard work to get up to speed. Claire is always quick to offer her support, find the right answer, and point new folks to the right mentors. Most importantly, Claire leads by example by continuing to improve her craft — finding the right messages, building connections to customers, and creating opportunities for everyone to improve. Claire wants us all to win together, and she wants to help each person find their place here in pursuit of their craft. And she’s willing to do it with thousands of little stitches of connection, improvement, and hard work.

Claire, welcome to Year Two! Thank you for always asking “how can we get better?” You are patient, curious, and willing to do the work — now let’s build something to marvel at!

Happy Anniversary!

KB

PS: And yes, in case you were wondering, Claire is also an incredibly accomplished crocheter and makes things a person can actually wear with her own two hands. This dress (that she MADE!) has more than 10,000 stitches!

Last week I saw a chart outlining our growth based on the products we sell — our teacher recognition programs on one line, and our pulse check-in software on the other. And I thought, “I hope Maci McWilliams knows the impact she is making in this place.”

So for her second anniversary with Alpaca today, I wanted to make sure we recognize the shift in the direction of the company that happened because we get to work with Maci.

All of us like to feel like we can see the impact of our work in the world. For educators, “impact” is the area where we hear the most positive sentiment. And for own team, I think it’s why many of us choose to join a start-up in the first place — when you work for a fast growing company, you get the opportunity to make a real impact for customers and for the company every single day you show up and win the day.

When Maci McWilliams joined our company, she was fresh out of the prestigious Jeffrey S. Raikes School of Computer Science and Management, she’d just gotten married, she’d just moved to Omaha, and we handed her wireframes and one goal: to launch our software platform by the end of the summer.

Now, we measure the company in before and after we sold software.

This chart shows customer growth from our teacher recognition programs (how we started the company) in green, and from customers who buy our software in blue. You can literally see the day that Maci joined the company and began to immediately make an impact. Check it out:

Alpaca Pulse changed the trajectory of our company, and on the impact we can have on teacher retention and educator wellbeing. There are a lot of individuals who have designed, built, tested, and supported Alpaca Pulse since we launched it two years ago; but the person who leads the charge and approaches the challenge with abundance and problem solving, and who keeps bringing that mindset to every new feature and challenge in our platform, is Maci.

Now, we see so many new opportunities with our product(s), and Maci is just warming up! The post-its are filled with ideas, the vision is big, the product is evolving and growing, and Maci approaches the opportunities with big learning, a lot of listening, and a mindset of abundance. Beyond software, Maci raises her hand to stand and the booth and book demos on the conference floor, because she’s willing to jump on any opportunity to better know our customers, our product, and the opportunities ahead.

Beyond that, Maci is an absolute delight to every single person on our team, regularly bringing little gestures, kind words, handpainted notes, and small kindnesses to each and every one of us.

Maci, Year 3 is going to be an extraordinary one — and your impact will only grow. Let’s keep going — up and to the right!

KB

This week, we’re celebrating Lila Padios’s second anniversary at Alpaca, and of all of the ways I can explain the value she brings this company, her ability to surprise us with the new thing she’s taking on or learning to do inside and outside the company is inspiring for every one of us. Lila’s an old soul with a beginner’s mind, and it’s an extraordinary combination of traits to see at work in our company. Let me see if I can explain what I mean.

Every day for 1,494 days, Lila Padios, Alpaca’s Operations Manager, has taken a one-second video on her phone. Every day for more than 4 years, she’s captured a tiny moment of her day, her work, her cat, what she’s learning, who she’s sharing her day with, and how she’s spending her time. It’s the video version of something our grandparents’ generation did a lot more of, keeping a daily log of the unremarkable details of their day. What they did, what the weather was, who stopped by the house. I love old soul stuff like that. There’s wisdom and tradition and storytelling in little gestures like recording a detail of your day.

In case you’re wondering what her compiled videos look like, here’s one she made last year for our retreat days:

As a company, we are lucky to have that kind of wisdom and consistency in our operations leader. Lila leads our sourcing, inventory management, and our hourly packout team with care and consistency, and her work shows through in the beautiful packs that consistently, reliably reach our educators every single month. She puts in the work and knows the result will follow.

But Lila’s story isn’t as simple as that. Because a year and a half into her time with our company, Lila said “I think I could be great at sales.” So every day for the past six months, Lila Padios has gotten to the office early to learn how to be in sales for our company - a job she’s never done but decided she wanted to take on.

She still does her full time job in Operations, but these days, you’ll find Lila starting or ending her day practicing sales demos, making sales calls, becoming a student of the world of selling, and mastering how she connects with future customers. She said “let me start on something completely different, and learn from a leader how to do something new.” This is often referred to as “beginner’s mind,” which is to look with completely fresh eyes at something that may have otherwise become routine.

Lila approaches every bit of her work with a beginner’s mind, dropping all ideas or expectations she has about what she’s capable of, and being willing to learn something completely brand new, from the ground up.

An old soul with a beginner’s mind? There’s something magical in that combination.

That’s wisdom combined with humility; a respect for tradition combined with the willingness to try something a brand new way; consistency combined with courage and confidence.

Lila, whether you’re selling your first deal, taking improv classes, watching a television show with audio description (”just because I’ve never done that before!”), leading a team, writing thank you notes, designing new packs, or just checking in with your colleagues -- you ALWAYS find new ways to bring both your old soul energy and your beginner’s mind to our team. We can’t wait to see what you do next!

KB

PS: If anyone knows anyone interested in our Operations role, it will be open soon! Lila’s moving to sales!

Happy Monday, Alpaca!

It’s been a few weeks since our last Team Letter — it’s been a crazy-busy time with TWO new hiring classes and so many new faces; The Little Wins Workshop; our very first School Culture Report; and ummm… 52 deals this quarter!? Let’s go! But keeping track of all these milestones is the whole reason behind Team Letter, so we are back at it!

(If you’re brand new here, I started writing a letter to our team early on in the company. We use it to celebrate milestones, talk about the WHY behind what we’re building, honor team anniversaries, and stay aligned as a team.)

So with no further ado, let’s jump in!

Earlier this year, we asked our customer, Eric Filardi, a principal in Juneau Public Schools, if he’d consider speaking at the Little Wins Workshop and participating in our customer training for our new team members. Without hesitation, Eric agreed, saying “I’ll be there and I’m bringing my whole family.”

I’m sorry, but do you know that Juneau, Alaska is 2,799 miles from Alpaca’s headquarters in Omaha, Nebraska?

I still honestly can’t believe the gift Eric’s visit was for our team. It was an opportunity to host a customer and dream big, to co-design product, and to build ideas for the future. It was a chance for our newest team members to learn from an exceptional educator and hear his extraordinary story firsthand.

Most importantly, it was a moment for every team member to see and know exactly who’s on the other side of the phone call they’re making, the product they’re building, or the story they’re telling.

Eric’s path in education is unlike any I’ve heard. He grew up on Long Island, and quite contrary to what his family was expecting, decided to pursue teaching, earning a triple major in English, secondary education, and theater (plus a Spanish minor) at SUNY Geneseo. He graduated in 2006 and landed a tenure-track English job back on Long Island, only to be among the first let go when the housing market collapsed. That setback became a launch point for an incredibly adventurous career.

Eric had been doing international volunteer work with the UN, and when he sent his résumé out into the world, he was recruited by the government of Abu Dhabi, where he spent about five years building curriculum and coaching teachers.

It was there that he met his future wife, traveled the world (70 countries!), and continued to build a perspective on global education that would guide his whole career.

At Alpaca, we talk about this question often:

Eric’s life is what it looks like when someone chooses education not as a fallback, but as the most adventurous, meaningful life they can imagine.

The great adventure eventually carried him to Alaska, where his first job was in Nenana, a village of about 300 in the middle of the state, at a K-12 school with a boarding facility for kids from remote villages across Alaska. He was hired to teach English, he said yes to nearly everything: he became the engineering teacher too, then STEM director, offered college dual-credit, taught as a university adjunct, and earned his pilot’s license.

It was there that Eric and his wife bought a foreclosed property and lived for three years in a 13-by-17-foot dry cabin with no running water while rebuilding the main house with his students as a hands-on engineering project, geothermal heating and all, picking up a solar-installer certification along the way.

He was a runner-up for Alaska Teacher of the Year in 2017, helped land a roughly $1 million grant from Amazon to build a computer science program, and was then tapped to be the principal in the Denali Borough — signing his contract in February 2020, weeks before the pandemic arrived. He spent three hard years seeing a tiny school community through the pandemic before the math of rural Alaska (there were just eight students left) sent him looking for somewhere new.

Eric then became the principal of a pre-K-5 Title I elementary school — the eighth principal there in ten years. His first year was brutal: a budget issue created a major shortfall and schools were consolidated, classrooms sat without teachers, and Eric personally substitute-taught about 80 days of a single school year.

Eric was, in his own words, deeply burned out and genuinely close to leaving public education for good. What helped pull him back was a combination of things he’s refreshingly honest about — therapy, running, rebuilding habits — and, somewhere in that mix, Alpaca. He’d found Pulse at a principals’ conference in Nashville, and rather than drowning in the hard early feedback (he jokingly describes that early feedback as “this sucks, you suck”), he and his team used the data to decide together which parts of their story to nurture, where to invest their time and energy, and how to come together as a team.

In their second year of using Alpaca, Eric’s team’s Positivity Pulse climbed from around 52% into the 80s, and they closed this past year at 91% — among the highest of any school we work with. Eric is careful to say that’s not just Alpaca’s impact, and he’s right. But to go from his level of burnout as a principal to where he is today is a remarkable story. He’s now the longest-tenured principal his school has had in nearly two decades, he says he walks in to work smiling, and he flew 2,800 miles with his whole family to tell our newest teammates about it.

When you start building a company, you don’t think about opportunities like this, or at least I didn’t. Here’s an extraordinary educator and professional living thousands of miles away, whose story we wouldn’t have heard if Kimberly hadn’t struck up a conversation with him at a conference, if Alpaca didn’t have a product that resonated with his team, and if we hadn’t built the relationship by staying in touch and watching his story evolve over the past 3 years.

Now, we get to have this extraordinary Alaska-to-Nebraska connection, and our team gets to hear the real stories of educators building extraordinary careers.

Alpaca, let’s stay curious about every educator we get the opportunity to talk to on the phone or in person as we start looking forward to the second half of the year — you never know what amazing educator journeys we’re going to hear!

Let’s go, Alpaca!

KB

PS: If you haven’t gotten enough of this story, check outEric’s Little Wins Podcast episode!

Happy Saturday, Alpaca!

Yesterday, the team was wishing Kimberly a happy 4-year anniversary at Alpaca one day early, and Kaitlynn said:

“4 years?! You basically have a bachelor’s degree in Alpaca!”

Kimberly started as Employee #1 at Alpaca four years ago today, which hardly seems possible. Four years of building our brand, our marketing efforts, and our customer base. Four years of shaping our team culture, our revenue strategy, and our presence in the world. Four years of leveling herself up, making changes when we needed them, and truthfully, helping to shape me into a CEO for the first time. Four years in a start-up truly is the equivalent of a full college education, and then some.

So, at a little celebratory lunch, Kimberly and I ran with the college metaphor.

I asked her the following questions, and then we reminisced and giggled about the answers for an hour. With no further ado…

If Kimberly’s time at Alpaca so far was a college education…

Karen: What did you major in?

Kimberly: “Repositioning.”

This is so true — when Kimberly started, Alpaca was a direct-to-consumer subscription box company with approximately 5 customers. Today we’re a software platform selling to schools and districts. Every step that got us there required us to reposition our products, our value, and our company to each changing audience.

Karen: What “intramural sport” have you played?

Kimberly: “Design: I’m the intramural sports player that takes it seriously and tries to win, even if it’s not the sport I actually trained in.”

Most of our team and customers would never know that Kimberly isn’t trained in design — she brings her keen eye and high standard to every piece of work we put out into the world. Definitely winning the intramural championships over there.

Karen: What is your favorite Alpaca “spring break”?

Kimberly: “Camp Wandawega.”

Can’t argue with this one - this is one of my favorite Alpaca retreats, with one of the most epic photo shoots our team had ever seen. Kimberly was in Wes Anderson-inspired photography heaven, and led the team to such a memorable shared experience.

Karen: What has been your favorite Alpaca “college party?”

Kimberly: “Wilson Phillips karaoke after winning the day at NCE.”

Funny enough, this is also what 80% of the team said was their favorite memory of Kimberly from this year. I’m not even going to try to explain this one, but Kimberly said it well: “There’s no celebration like celebrating after a big win.”

Karen: What is your most memorable “all nighter” at Alpaca?

Kimberly: “October 2022 packout“

We had an overly ambitious Alpaca pack, not enough hands, and new customers that we’d promised an on-time delivery. (And I do mean delivery — we delivered all of our packs by hand then). In case you’re on the team and don’t know the provenance of our obsession with Mariah Carey, it is this night. We had one goal after that experience: “no more midnights.”

Karen: What is your go-to “cafeteria meal” at Alpaca?

Kimberly: “Egg Bites, of course.”

I think I’ve seen this woman eat approximately 200 egg bites in the last four years. It’s honestly remarkable.

Karen: Who has been your hardest “professor” at Alpaca?

Kimberly: “Customers who tell us no.”

I love this answer so much. Kimberly went on to explain it: “Listen, I think we’re really amazing. So if someone doesn’t, and they say no to working with us, I really want to know why. Could we have done something different? Did we not create the right relationship? Is our product the wrong fit? Is it really because of budget? Those are the questions that teach me the hardest lessons, and the ones I value the most.” <— May every startup company have early employees who think like this.

Karen: What do you want to get your “masters degree” in at Alpaca?

Kimberly: “Answering the question ‘What should we do next?’”

This answer pretty much sums up exactly where Kimberly is in her world at Alpaca right now: shifting from the purely tactical to the grounded strategic; from the fully experimental to the “we’re starting to understand what our customers truly want and need;” from a die hard member of the squad to the leader of a growing and evolving team.

Kimberly, if the last four years were a college education, I believe you would be graduating with highest honors with all the special lanyards and cords. You bring the highest level of rigor, excellence, joy, and love to every single bit of work you do for this company.

This year alone, we saw you lead our marketing team, run a summer camp for educators, take Alpaca to 34 conferences, roll out our largest presence at an event, and then casually run 2 marathons and earn a literal masters degree.

We’re us because you’re you, and I cannot wait to see what extraordinary work we have in store together in Year Five. Happy Anniversary, and THANK YOU for every single way you shape this company.

Love,

KB

At Alpaca, our #1 core value is Listen to Teachers.

It’s what our entire company was built on. Before we even started the company, I wanted to make sure I wasn’t inventing a solution for a problem I didn’t understand. So before I wrote the plan, I took coffee to dozens and dozens of teachers after school. I toured their classrooms, sat down in their tiny chairs, and said “Tell me about your work as an educator.”

We built our very first teacher recognition program based on what we heard in those classrooms, and we’ve built every product and feature since based on listening, listening, listening to teachers.

Late last year, we realized we had the opportunity as a company to listen in a bigger way. In December, we put out a call to our Little Wins Newsletter list (mostly school and district leaders) to take our School Culture Survey, an in-depth listening survey to understand where leaders feel great about their school culture, where they’re challenged, and what they see changing. We were overwhelmed with the response!

We then realized that we could analyze the leadership survey data alongside the pulse survey data we get throughout the school year from teachers, as well as the in-depth interviews we’ve done through the Little Wins Podcast’s first season, to create an unprecedented look at school culture in the US, right now.

Today, we’re publishing The School Culture Report 2026, and you’ve got the first look at it!

Download The School Culture Report 2026

I’m beyond excited! Here’s what’s inside:

Whose voices are here

There are a lot of voices in this report, friends. Here’s what you’ll find here:

• Pulse responses from 33,144 educator surveys across 280 schools and 34 states, gathered over eight months (August 2025–March 2026).

• A national survey of 155 school and district leaders across 35 states. Every role on campus — classroom teachers, paraeducators, specialists, school staff, administrators — is in there. Every community type, too: rural, suburban, urban. It’s the most representative listening exercise we’ve ever done as a company.

• 38 interviews with school and district leaders from the Little Wins Podcast

What we learned

Where to start!? When we combined these different voices (educators and leaders at the school and district level), we saw a unique look at what’s happening in schools today. Here are some of the biggest things we learned:

For me, there were a few important takeaways:

Health and wellbeing is the big story.

Across ten wellbeing themes we measured, the area where educators expressed more negative sentiment than any other was their own health and wellbeing. And when we asked leaders which area of school culture they find hardest to support right now? The very same thing.

“The pace hasn’t slowed, expectations keep stacking, and people are tired in a deeper, more cumulative way,” said Danae Acker, Instructional Coach at TL Hanna High School in Anderson, S.C.

So we have leaders everywhere who know their teachers’ health is the thing, and that is the thing they feel least confident about how to support. And yet, our leaders do know what does move the needle for school culture: relational leadership that emphasizes connection and personal relationships.

Connection is winning. When leaders told us what’s getting better in their school culture right now, the #1 answer was staff connection and collaboration. 27% of leaders named it as the single biggest improvement in their school culture.

“Relationships are the key — I make a point of touching base with every staff member at least once a day, to ask about something personal or professional, but just to talk to them,” said Julie Pearson, principal at Nathan Hale Elementary School in Whiting, Indiana.

The leadership practices leaders themselves named as most impactful for school culture — presence and visibility, 1:1 management, consistent communication — are the exact practices they wish they were doing more of. Leaders know what works. They are, by their own admission, doing less of it than they want to. “Leaders are stretched, and the relational work is the first thing that gets squeezed” is the way we heard it directly from the leaders.

The work in front of school leaders today is to find opportunities for the connective, relational work that they know builds stronger culture. That’s what the back half of the report is about: ten leadership practices, filled with some of the best practices in school and district leadership we’ve heard. This section has real examples, tips and ideas, and key insights about leadership practices like 1:1 management, communications, meetings & gatherings, and seven more.

I’m so excited for you to read it, share it, and for us as a company to continue to learn from it. I’ve read every single response from leaders in building this report, and I hope you’ll read it with a pen and highlighter in hand and the question in your mind:

“How can we use this listening to build Alpaca to support what leaders need today?”

A massive thank you to the Alpaca team — every one of you put hands on this in some way: on the survey, the writing, the design, the imagery, the editing, and the support to make sure we’re representing each voice with accuracy and care.

I hope you enjoy learning from this report, and finding new ways to connect to our core customers through this resource. Here’s my ask of you:

When you see or meet one of the 155 leaders who answered our questions, the podcast guests whose ideas helped shape the practices, and the thousands of educators whose voices anchor every page of this thing: tell them thank you.

And then buy them a coffee, go visit their classrooms, and listen some more.

With Gratitude,

KB

There’s a famous story by Brad Isaac about meeting the comedian Jerry Seinfeld. Isaac was a software developer and aspiring comedian, and he recalls that at a comedy club one night, he Seinfeld his advice for a young comic. The answer was this:

1. Purchase a large, one-year wall calendar and a thick red marker.

2. Every day that you write (even if it’s just one joke), put a big red ‘X’ over that day’s date.

3. After a few days, you will see a chain of red Xs. The only goal is to not break the chain.

It’s the premise on which a lot of modern productivity advice is based — little habits, done often, create little gains that add up to big change. It’s what our work is based on too — Little Wins, anyone?

So, back in January, you may recall that I asked you the question “What will you do 100 times this year?”

Our company goals are fantastically audacious and I think the best way to achieve them is with great habits — things we do every day. So my personal goals for the year are centered around creating excellent habits that make the work of building a successful company and a healthy personal life feel less like a Big Initiative, and more like muscle memory.

Last week we saw the 100th day of the year (can you believe it!?) so I took a moment to take stock of what I set out to do this year, where I am on those habits, and how I might focus or change for the next 100. Yes, I made a sticker chart. It’s fine.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far, personally:

Mondays are where I shine. I start off the week really strong in my habits and find myself waning by end of week, and sometimes crashing into the weekend on Fridays. I think figuring out how to get a bit of a reset mid-week would help even this out.

Habits really do stack. James Clear taught us this in Atomic Habits and it’s always made sense in theory to me: creating a small habit and then attaching another one to it creates a high impact chain reaction. When you have a habit to see the sunrise, it’s much easier to add a 1-3 mile run each morning, because you’re awake for it! What I found in my data so far this year is that I have days where I knocked out 7 or 8 of my habits, and days where I put up 0. I’m excited to see what I can easily add to my established ones to stack some more, especially in the areas that I’m scoring low today. Like eating breakfast.

Habits need accountabili-buddies. Well, at least MY habits need friends and family to help me keep them. Every habit I have successfully built up this year so far, I’ve done with at least one other person. I talked to 60 potential customers because our team diligently set meetings for me. I see the sunrise most days because I’ve committed to meeting running friends at the gym. One of the most powerful things I can do going forward is to just ask one person: “Can you help me with this habit?” That’s easy enough for anyone to do. Need a buddy for a goal? Ask me, please! I’m honestly so grateful for those who are helping me with mine.

What I’ve learned has already been helpful. But like all habits and goals, the key is to a) keep working on them with honesty and transparency; and b) edit them based on what you learn. Here’s how my next 100 days of the year is focused:

1. I’m keeping the real goal first. Consistency without quality may be counterproductive, it turns out. I’ve run 108 times this year, but if I’m being honest, sometimes I got out there for 1 dumb mile just to keep the streak alive. It did the job of creating the habit, but it did not improve my running, like at all. On running and strength, I’m shifting my focus to “quality workouts every day,” and working with a coach who can actually help me improve. Running garbage miles wasn’t getting me to my real goal, which is to improve my running and my fitness.
   
   The real goal in the company? Growth. If what we’re doing isn’t working, the answer is not to say “that’s not working” — the answer is to make our own luck. We learned that in Nashville, and we’re bringing it front and center this quarter.

2. I’m asking for more help. More buddies, please. For the next 100 days, I’m looking for ways to engage more people (and more robots?!) in my goals, and to stack them in smart and creative ways. I started this week by asking my friend Claude for help with coming into conversations with potential customers with a greater level of hospitality, and it’s amazing what’s possible.

3. I’m tracking what’s easy. I’ll drive myself nuts if I try to keep track of or write down every time I make dinner for my family or text or call my parents. So, while I’m keeping some of those “hard to track” goals in mind and looking back at them regularly, I’m not tracking it all. I’ll track what’s already being recorded on my watch and my work apps, and “gut check” the rest.

   (Also, using Claude to analyze your goals against your Strava exercise data, Garmin sleep data, NYT Crossword data, and Hubspot sales data? Nice little Saturday morning. Highly recommend.)

I’d love to know where your goals are this year, and how I can support you with them! Let’s grab coffee after sunrise but before customer meetings start and talk about it — it’ll be a stacked habit we’re both proud of.

Let’s go, Alpaca — big things to do!

KB

PS: Were you wanting the actual score card? Here are my current stats on the “hundreds” I set forth.

Work Goal: Our company’s goal is to grow customers, revenue, and team by 100% in 2026. The things I PERSONALLY want to do toward that goal:

• 100 meetings with education leaders: Currently at 55 held meetings with education leaders, 2 podcast recordings, and 3 customer meetings, so I’m counting 60 total. Good start for the year, but we can do more.

• 100 handwritten thank you notes: I’m at 10. This one needs work. Perfect candidate for habit stacking — adding 15 minutes for this practice after interviews, meetings, and demos would be easy enough.

• 100 new customers: So far, we have added a little more than 20 new customers, so we’re sliiiiightly off where I wanted us to be by April. Not to worry, we’ve got a team, a plan, and a great leader to help us get there (and so much more).

• 100 returning customers: It’s renewal season now! So this work is just beginning.

• 100 published posts/articles: Well guys, this one has fallen short, with just 13. Time to fire up the writing a little more often.

• 100 investor conversations (current or future): I’m so lucky that we are at 20 here, but closed our bridge round in record time!

• 100 team 1:1s: If I’m counting correctly, I’m at 38. My favorite ones this year? Hands down, it’s Excel School, the every other week mentoring meeting I do with Kaitlynn to discover how we can be more AI and data conversant in every aspect of our work. (It started off in spreadsheets but we’ve evolved!)

PERSONAL

Personal Goal: Be consistently ready to run a half marathon (healthy, strong, nourished), enjoy excellent relationships with every member of my family, and take care of myself.

• Hit a 100 day running streak: I technically didn’t do it yet. I ran 100 days in the span of 102 days, but I missed 2 days due to international travel.

• 100 breakfasts: I think this number sits at 4? I may need a breakfast streak.

• 100 strength workouts: Started off a little slow, so I’m at about 12. This is a big priority for me this spring!

• 100 pre-10 pm bedtimes: Possibly my worst data point besides breakfasts. I have 12.

• 100 sunrises 🌅 CRUSHING IT! at 78 so far this year. Being up early is the literal best.

• 100 pieces of art made (any size!): Failing it! I’m at 5. Maybe 6, if you count the sticker chart that I made for my goal tracking. Thanks to Marina for making art part of our birthday happy hours, though! Those are 3 of my 5. (Wait Marina did you do that on PURPOSE!?!? You probably did.)

• 100 books read: This is a ridiculously audacious one, but I’m at 13. Did you want my favorites? Thank you for asking! Fiction: Theo of Golden. If anything surpasses it this year, I’ll be shocked. I loved it so much I’ve read it twice already. Non-Fiction: Unreasonable Hospitality. You won’t believe how this changes your mindset at work, honestly.

• 100 NYT crosswords completed: I’m at 62, and I’m quite pleased with this new habit in my life. It helps me feel sharper, it’s a fun thing to do with a friend, and the New York Times games app is just incredibly encouraging.

Thank you for your time last week at All Hands, Mini Hack Day, and Board Meeting — what a week! Q1 was one of our greatest learning quarters as a company. We won fantastic new customers, launched product features that make me smile every time I see them, and grew our leadership team with an eye on the future. There were more than a few moments that reminded me why we’re building this company in the first place, so I wanted to share them here!

Q1 Highlights

Our customers are growing with us, and seeing true positive change

I want to highlight one customer story that captures what we’re building toward. Council Bluffs Community School District is in their third year of partnership with Alpaca. Over time, we’re seeing a correlation of lowered teacher absenteeism with higher levels of positivity in the district. And most importantly: all 11 participating schools improved their positivity year over year. All of them!! We’re learning so much from the Council Bluffs team, and I’m so excited to continue to grow and learn together.

We crossed 500,000 Pulse insights.

This one is a quiet milestone that I think is actually enormous. We’ve now collected over half a million data points from educators across the country — giving Alpaca a true seat at the table educator in the emerging conversation on wellbeing and school culture. That data is the foundation of something big: our first School Culture Report, due out later this month. (More on this soon!)

Shoutouts came to life.

We officially launched Shoutouts — a simple, peer-to-peer recognition system for schools and districts — and educators have already shared more than 4000 shout-outs with their peers. Teachers and school leaders are using it to recognize each other in personal, meaningful ways. These aren’t automated “great jobs” but real, human, specific moments of gratitude.

We showed up big for education’s biggest conference

Our team showed up strong in Nashville for the AASA/NCE Conference! We booked over 100 demos with future customers with our largest presence at a conference ever. The booth was buzzing, the conversations were meaningful, and the energy was incredible. We learned how to talk about our product in new ways, and the “jobs to be done” for school districts.

Sales leadership to grow our future!

Jessica Johnston-Myers joined the Alpaca team as our Chief Sales Officer, full-time in March, and you already know — she is already making a huge impact. She’s hired and built our current SDR team and is bringing a level of rigor and ambition to our go-to-market that we’ve never had before. I cannot wait to see what this growing team is going to do in Q2!

What’s Ahead in Q2

We’ve got a HUGE quarter ahead! Here’s what we’re investing our energy in:

We’re launching major product updates — including the Little Wins Library, some new district tools and views, and improvements to Alpaca Pulse. These are the tools school leaders have been asking for, and I can’t wait to get them into their hands.

We’re publishing the 2026 School Culture Report — our first industry report on school culture and educator wellbeing, powered by 500,000+ teacher voice data points and 155 leader surveys. I am so excited to share what we’re learning by living our #1 company value: Listen to Teachers.

We’re hosting our first Little Wins Workshop — a customer and user conference designed to deepen relationships, gather feedback, and build community among school leaders using Alpaca. The speaker line-up is incredible, and I cannot wait to see leaders come together for this event!

We’re continuing to grow the team (know anyone looking to join an amazing sales org!?), learning from our customers, and building relationships with school and district leaders through events, conversations, and opportunities to build great tools together.

We’ve never been better positioned. And I’ve never been prouder of this team.

Let’s go make Q2 count!!

KB

Today’s a fun day — we’re launching one of our largest single product features we’ve ever built — Shoutouts!

For the last few months, our Alpaca team has been testing out Shoutouts each week when we do our own Alpaca Pulse survey. It’s a simple step at the end of our pulse survey to take one moment to recognize another member of our team. Just write your shout out, see it on our dashboard, and if you want, make a postcard to share.

The recognition is anonymous. There’s no reward attached, no leaderboard, no program. Just an open door to say something kind about someone you work with.

Pun intended: BIG huge shoutout to Maci and Alissa — this feature was part of their Hackday project back in October, and look what it has become!

So far this year, our small team sent 100 shoutouts to one another. So of course I did a little analysis (nerd alert!) on those shoutouts. I wanted to see what the nice things you said to each other could tell us about our year so far.

Here’s what I learned:

We talk about growth the way great teachers do.

When someone on our team is praised for being “open to feedback and willing to take coaching,” or for “pushing herself outside of her comfort zone,” the tone isn’t evaluative — it’s celebratory. Growth at Alpaca is spoken about the way great educators speak about a student’s breakthrough: with warmth, with pride, and with the understanding that the courage to stretch matters more than the outcome.

People here notice when a colleague refines their pitch or learns a new framework — because we’ve built the kind of safety where being a work-in-progress is something to celebrate, not hide.

We notice the work behind the work.

So many of these shoutouts celebrate the invisible labor that holds everything together. Keeping a software platform running 24/7. Coordinating conference logistics down to the last swag bag. Screening candidates with warmth.

Our culture doesn’t just value the big wins — the booked demos, the closed deals, the shipped features. It values the connective tissue: the person who makes the trip feel effortless, who keeps the data accurate, who makes a new candidate feel excited rather than anxious. I love this about us.

Care is the work, and the work is care.

It’s hard to know where our work stops and our relationships begin. Cooking a team dinner together appears alongside booking four meetings before noon. Airport pilates sits next to conference booth strategy. Someone is celebrated for “cutting the chicken for team dinner” in the same breath as “keeping us close to teachers and leaders in real time.”

The care we extend to each other — a ride home, a bit of encouragement, sticky notes left on a desk — is the same muscle we use when we build products and show up for school leaders at a conference.

Joy is a practice, not a byproduct.

Joy shows up constantly in these shoutouts, but not as something that just happens to this team. It’s something we build. March Madness brackets. Thank you note parties. Collaborative cooking. People aren’t credited for being joyful — they’re credited for creating conditions where joy can exist, even in the middle of a demanding week.

When we build products for educators whose top words include “fatigued” and “exhausted,” this instinct matters. If we know how to create genuine care inside our own team, we’re far more likely to build something that does the same for the people we serve.

Now — what’s missing.

I wouldn’t be doing this analysis justice if I only told you the pretty parts. We can also learn a lot by noticing what we didn’t recognize each other for. So here’s what I noticed in the gaps:

Let’s celebrate the impact, not just the effort

Our shoutouts are almost entirely about effort and presence — rarely about outcomes. We praise each other for working hard and showing up, but almost never for a specific result or a measurable difference made for a customer. Learning to celebrate impact alongside effort is an important edge for us.

More cross-department recognition

Most recognition stays within departments. There isn’t much flowing between, say, Engineering and Customer Success, or Marketing and Sales around shared wins. As we grow, those cross-team connections are the ones we need most.

Let’s say the hard stuff

In our shoutouts so far, nobody is praised for navigating something hard, failing, or recovering. We celebrate stretching — but not resilience through difficulty. No “we hit a wall and you helped us figure it out.” We have safety around learning, but we’re still building comfort around vulnerability in the face of actual failure.

Everyone is a leader

Our shoutouts so far don’t tell much about peer leadership. Shoutouts about leadership qualities cluster around our managers, with very little recognition of peers stepping up to lead a project or hold each other accountable. That distributed leadership muscle is going to matter a lot as we grow. Let’s look for it, recognize it, and encourage it.

Here’s what I know is true: recognizing each other makes a difference.

100 shoutouts so far is a tiny data set, and I cannot wait to see what a full year of shoutouts reveals about our company. But even in 100 little anonymous moments, the picture is vivid: this is a team that celebrates growth over perfection, notices the work that others miss, refuses to separate caring from doing, and treats joy as something worth building on purpose.

Congratulations to the WHOLE team for the launch of shoutouts — let’s keep building positivity together!

KB

Imagine yourself at 80 years old, reflecting on your career. Ask yourself: What in my work life gave me a sense of fulfillment and meaning?

If you’ve ever been a part of a performance review, I’m guessing this question wasn’t a part of the process? What gives you a sense of fulfillment and meaning? What does THAT have to do with how you’re doing at your job?

Your values have everything to do with your job performance, actually.

Because when our work gives us a sense of fulfillment and meaning, we inherently do better work. And performance reviews are about one thing: helping each of us do better work.

I discovered this question, and the Values Exercise, when I read Claire Hughes Johnson’s book Scaling People, and it’s arguably the best leadership book I’ve ever read. She adapted an exercise for the team at Stripe from Stan Slap, a leadership coach for companies all over the world.

The idea is fairly simple: to understand the best work each of us can be doing, we must first identify what our values are in our work.

Why? Because we spend a lot of time at work. And if you’re going to spend a huge amount of your time with Alpaca, you should find your personal values reflected in your day, every day.

Stan Slap says it better than I could:

“To not live your deepest personal values over half your life at work is a crime. Worse, it’s a preventable crime.”

— Stan Slap

If your personal values are around achievement, courage, and mastery, I want your time at work to be spent taking some big risks, learning new skills that support the company’s goals, and winning. If your personal values are around listening, connection, and integrity, I want you to apply your precious hours with Alpaca finding new ways to listen to and connect with educators while creating authentic and genuine experiences and connections.

This week, we’re going to engage in a different kind of “performance review.” Rather than starting with “are you doing a good job at your job as defined by your job description?”, we’re going to engage in an exercise that helps us understand three things:

1. What in your work life gives you a sense of fulfillment and meaning?

2. What are the top core values that are represented in your imagining of your fulfilled life (e.g., excellence, joy, balance, community, impact, learning).

3. What do you need to be doing at work to ensure you’re both supporting the needs of the company while living your deepest personal values at work?

The coolest part? Understanding your values helps your manager support you to be super successful in your role. Many (probably most) of our roles at Alpaca can be accomplished successfully in different ways. In a way, understanding your own values makes every role here completely unique. Think of it this way:

Your personal values + Alpaca’s company goals = Your job description

Finding your way of working that a) accomplishes our company goals and b) honors your values — that’s the work you and your manager have in front of you, and it’s the purpose of this exercise.

It’s not a one way street, either. You’re going to learn a lot about your values (of course), but you’re also going to learn what your manager and what our leadership team values too.

I encourage you to get curious about that question, and understand the values your leader holds most dear. Together, you can work toward the work that helps you both live your values every day at Alpaca. Again, Stan says it really well:

“You cannot live your values without the support of your people.”

— Stan Slap

Alpaca, I can’t wait to learn more about what makes you tick, what gets you out of bed in the morning, and what Future You looks like when you’re living your values while achieving our goals together.

Let’s keep going — it’s going to be a big, fun week!

With Gratitude,

KB

PS: Want to dig in more? Here are some extraordinary talks, books, and resources. Remember, Alpaca will buy you any book that helps you do your job better. Just ask - it’ll show up on your desk in a day or two.

Books:

• Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson: Like I said - this is one of the best leadership books I’ve ever read, and it’s a reference guide on my shelf. If you’re interested in leading people, get this book.

• Bury My Heart at Conference Room B by Stan Slap:

Talks & Sites:

• Learning Omnivores: How the Values Exercise is used with school principals

• Stan Slap talks at Google (17:25 is where he talks about this type of values exercise):

PPS: If you’re applying for a job with Alpaca right now, you’ll find the full exercise we’re doing at this link. Feel free to send us your top three values at careers@getalpaca.com.

The first day that I met Jessica Johnston-Myers, I knew there was something about her work that would become essential to our work at Alpaca.

It was in the very early days at Alpaca when I was invited to visit Apptegy, a company we all know is an aspirational leader in the education space. I was hosted by their Marketing leader (another of Alpaca’s great mentors!) and Outbound Sales leader — Jessica Johnston-Myers.

I am not exaggerating when I say I filled a notebook with learning about how she approached district level sales, events, and outbound sales — their approach was focused on both the relentless pursuit of growth, and extraordinary hospitality.

I wrote all about it in a Team Letter more than 3 years ago — you can check it out here if you haven’t read that one:

In many ways, Jessica was “working” at Alpaca long before she was working with Alpaca.

Last year, when we got the opportunity to work with Jessica as a consultant to help us build our sales team, I didn’t hesitate. I asked her to design and hire the first official sales team, set the expectations for how we do work, and question everything about how we’ve done things to date.

Well, she did. And on some days, it was terrifying.

She handed me hiring plans I couldn’t even imagine being able to accomplish. She gave us new scripts and strategies for our booth at conferences that we were scared to try. And she set expectations for sales activity that we’d never once come close to hitting before. And when I told her I was nervous about those plans, she asked me one question:

“Do you want to win, or don’t you?”

Well, after that, we did what she said. And we started winning. As a leader of a start-up, it’s both the most terrifying thing in the world and the greatest gift to have a leader who is much better than you at something step in and show you how it’s done.

That’s why I am so excited to welcome Jessica to the Alpaca team full time today, as our first Chief Sales Officer. Jessica will lead the sales effort at Alpaca, working closely alongside our VP of Marketing and myself, and together, we have BIG dreams ahead for the future of growth at Alpaca. (oh, and we’re hiring!)

It’s because of watching joyful SDRs make videos for superintendents that I knew that with Jessica, we could bring our silliest, craziest ideas to the world of school district sales.

It’s because of watching Jessica’s high expectations of the professionals who work on her teams that I knew our ambitions would match up. (And that Jessica could level ME up too!)

And it’s because of the effusive praise I heard from the members of her team (who did not know that I knew her) that I found confidence that Jessica would be a sales leader I would trust with this company’s most prized asset — our team.

Please help me welcome Jessica to the team full time — let’s go WIN TOGETHER!

KB

Do you remember our Post-Day 1 conversation in Nashville? Of course you do — it was a big moment of honesty and trust about work that was going better, but still wasn’t going quite the way we wanted. We listened, we offered ideas, and then we went out and made Day 2 amazing.

In a way, what you experienced there was a very informal, but high trust, project retrospective. And that’s what we’re talking about today — Project Retrospectives!

Going forward, we’re going to build a regular practice of Project Retrospectives at Alpaca — simple, brief conversations where the team that worked on something comes together to talk about what happened, what we learned, and what we want to do differently next time.

We’ll be starting with Event Retros this week, and Kimberly will be showing you a simple template for these at this week’s All Hands meeting. So before we jump into that today, let’s get everyone on the same page about what these are, and why we do them!

What is a project retrospective?

A project retrospective (retro!) is a regularly occurring meeting that happens at the completion of a project or event. The attendees should include all active project participants and all project stakeholders and decision-makers.

A retro should occur as quickly after the completion of a project as possible, so as to maximize learning while it’s fresh.

Why do a project retro?

The goal of a project retrospective is to get the participants of a project together to build a common understanding of the successes and challenges of that work, so that everyone can learn and improve upon the next one.

To be succinct: the goals of project retros are twofold:

1. Shared ownership of a project’s result and

2. Shared understanding of how to improve future performance.

A good retro is a high trust engagement

To accomplish these two primary goals, retros need to be high-trust engagements.

Everyone in the room should feel able to talk candidly about what went well, and tell the truth about what happened. And everyone means everyone.

That means:

• No blame games.

• No defensiveness.

• No pretending everything went perfectly.

At the same time, this doesn’t mean retros are soft or vague. They should be honest, thoughtful conversations about real work.

There should be room for celebration. There should also be room for accountability. Trust is what allows both to exist at the same time.

Guidelines for a high trust retro

Creating an atmosphere of high trust isn’t about holding hands and doing trust falls.

A “high trust” retro should be a rigorous review of the project, with participants taking clear ownership for execution that needed improvement, and with stakeholders taking clear ownership for changes to scope or expectations. There should be room for celebration, as well as accountability; learning, as well as clear planning for future success.

Here are a few things that will help everyone take the best next step.

#1: Always do them, and use the same exact format every time.

One of the best ways to create trust is to ensure that everyone knows what they’re getting into every time they walk into a retro. So, starting this week, we will do a retro for every event we attend and use the exact same format every time (you’ll find our event retro format on Alpaca Notion in the link).

It’s important to not just do retros when the result is less-than-ideal. Doing retros only if we missed a goal would have two results:

1. People will be afraid when a retro is called; and

2. Successful projects will not get proper celebration and learning, which is demotivating for everyone.

When it comes to asking the same questions every time, some of those questions will feel difficult at your first retro. But if you set it up as “hey, so some of these are hard questions, but they’ll get easier every time!”, you’ll see trust in the process.

#2: Say what you said!

In a retro, make sure there’s no revisionist history — like “we said we’d launch these 3 features, not all 5 of them — those other two were nice-to-haves.”

Clearly say what you said you’d do, and on what timeline, and how you objectively performed against those commitments. Try these three discussion questions:

1. What exactly did we say we would do?

2. What are our results against those commitments and timelines?

3. Did we accomplish anything NOT on our list of commitments?

#3: We’ll celebrate and improve at the same time

A retro shouldn’t be divided into a “celebration section” and a “problem section.”

The real story of any project is always mixed.

Great teamwork might exist alongside a confusing timeline.
A strong launch might happen despite some messy coordination.

So instead of separating those things, we’ll talk about them together.

We want to notice:

• Who helped make something difficult easier

• What we’re proud of

• What we’d approach differently next time

#4: Retros are about the work - not individual performance

Retrospectives focus on how the project unfolded, not on evaluating someone’s job performance.

If someone on the team needs a performance conversation, that should happen privately and directly — not in a group retro.

The retro is about understanding the system around the work:

• priorities

• communication

• timelines

• expectations

• resources

When we improve those things, everyone does better work.

#5: Listening matters as much as talking

People who were deeply involved in the project will naturally have more context to share.

People who were less directly involved may have a different role — often to listen, ask thoughtful questions, and help the team reflect.

One way to think about it is a talk-to-listen ratio.

If you were close to the work, you’ll probably share more.
If you were more removed, listening is often the most valuable contribution.

Ready to try it yourself? Here’s how.

I encourage you to try out a retro for an event, product release, Alpaca resource set, a team event, or sales campaign soon. You don’t need permission - just give it a try. To get started on building a retro for a project you own, here are some frameworks and questions you can try:

Five Great Retro Frameworks

• Start, Stop, Continue: A straightforward method asking what actions to begin, cease, or maintain.

• 4 Ls (Liked, Learned, Lacked, Longed For): Promotes nuance by exploring what team members enjoyed, discovered, missed, or desired.

• Sailboat (Speedboat): Uses a metaphor to identify what propelled the team (wind), what slowed them down (anchors), and risks ahead (rocks/pirates).

• Glad, Sad, Mad: Encourages emotional reflection by categorized feedback into what made the team happy, disappointed, or frustrated.

• ORID (Objective, Reflective, Interpretive, Decisional): A structured approach for facilitators to guide the team from facts to decisions.

8 Questions for Retros

1. What problem were we trying to solve with this project?

2. Do you think we set the right goals with this project, why or why not?

3. What are you most proud of in this project?

4. What is one thing you wish you’d known before this project started?

5. Who is someone who helped you during a challenging part of this project?

6. What is one thing you’ll ALWAYS do on future projects, and one thing you’ll NEVER do on future projects?

7. What is a resource you wish we had to help our projects work better?

8. Active project participants, what do you need from stakeholders? Stakeholders, what do you need from project participants?

One last thing

Occasionally, we’ll want to step back and retro the retros. So if you’re participating in some over the coming weeks, think about these questions:

• Are they helpful?

• Are the questions useful?

• Is the format working for the team?

If something could make them better, say so and let’s adjust!

Like everything else we build at Alpaca, the goal is steady improvement.

Every project is a chance to create something valuable, but it’s also a chance to learn together. Retrospectives are simply our way of making sure we don’t leave that learning on the table.

Let’s get out there this week, Alpaca! 🦙

KB

And when you’re planning a retrospective for a project, an initiative, an event, or a campaign, it can be helpful to use the same format each time, so that people understand what to expect and feel safe sharing it. I’m a big fan of Miro — they create collaborative software for teams. Their blog focuses on great strategies to create more shared decision making and collaboration among teams. Their article on retrospectives is a fantastic read with great retro frameworks. Here are five that I think would work well for our team (and so many others!)

Top Retrospective Frameworks

• Start, Stop, Continue: A straightforward method asking what actions to begin, cease, or maintain.

• 4 Ls (Liked, Learned, Lacked, Longed For): Promotes nuance by exploring what team members enjoyed, discovered, missed, or desired.

• Sailboat (Speedboat): Uses a metaphor to identify what propelled the team (wind), what slowed them down (anchors), and risks ahead (rocks/pirates).

• Glad, Sad, Mad: Encourages emotional reflection by categorized feedback into what made the team happy, disappointed, or frustrated.

• ORID (Objective, Reflective, Interpretive, Decisional): A structured approach for facilitators to guide the team from facts to decisions.

As you may know, we’re working right now on the Alpaca School Culture Report, a deep dive into the state of school culture, according to the leaders and educators experiencing and building culture today.

As part of that work this weekend, I revisited my favorite learning on culture — the HubSpot Culture Code.

I love learning about how great companies build their cultures. A few years ago, I heard Dharmesh Shah, cofounder of HubSpot, talk about the hundreds of hours he has spent on an internal project — and product — called the HubSpot Culture Code.

Why would HubSpot’s Chief Technology Officer put such a huge focus on company culture, something usually owned by People Operations or “HR?” Because it’s that important, and Dharmesh makes a point of spending his time on the most important work of the company.

The result — The HubSpot Culture Code — is not just a manifesto or handbook — it’s a product, built for HubSpot’s employees. They’ve published the entire thing online, they’ve revised it 41 times (seriously!), and it’s worth reading once a year.

They call it the “operating system powering Hubspot” and I love that concept — that culture is the operating system that powers our organizations and teams.

Here are my favorite takeaways:

• “We’re building two products: one for our customers, and one for our employees. Culture is the product we build for ourselves.” YES, and this is true for schools, too. What is the culture product that teachers and principals are building for themselves? This has my brain going!

• “Culture exists whether it’s intentional or not.” Every company has a culture. Whether you’re intentional about designing the one you love is up to you.

• SFTC: “Solve for the Customer.” I love that the first tenet of an internal culture document is all about a relentless focus on the customer.

• Courage over comfort. Boldness over hesitation. Simply put, and a clear directive — HubSpot does such a service to its employees by being so clear with expectations of how to approach problem solving.

  

• “It’s not an open door policy. It’s a no door policy.” The idea that every employee has access to every other; that “debates should be won by better insights, not bigger job titles;” and that “transparency ≠ democracy” hits all the things employees desire in transparency, while addressing all of the things that create concern for company leaders.

• Use Good Judgment. This three word policy replaces most policies in the company. If you’re wondering where I get my opinions about having a lot of “policies,” it’s here.

• Customer > Company > Individual: HubSpot calls this the “cheat sheet on good judgment.” Don’t solve for your personal interests over that of the team, and when in doubt, solve for the best interests of the customer. If you remember one thing from the Culture Code, make it this.

• “Humility isn’t about thinking less of yourself. It’s about thinking of yourself less.” That’s the best definition of humility that I’ve heard.

• “We like learn-it-alls, not know-it-alls.” Stealing this.

• Free Books Program. “Request a book, it magically shows up in your inbox. No expense reports required.” What better way to encourage learning than that. Again, now you know where I got this practice!

Overall, one of my favorite things about this product is its simplicity: it’s an openly published slide deck, with a total of 58 slides, many of which have fewer than 10 words on the slide. That’s intentional too — because nobody has time for a 100 page manifesto, and if they did have time to read it, they wouldn’t remember it.

And culture is only as strong as the choices and values you remember and repeat.

Need a fun challenge this week? Spend a little time thinking about what values or choices YOU would put in a Culture Code product for Alpaca. If you do, let me know so we can grab a coffee so you can tell me about it!