🏔 ️Kumu & Chamonix 2023

Work hard, play hard, right?

Once a year we throw “work hard” out of the window. The team of humans behind Kumu come together from around the globe and we go somewhere beautiful. We play hard and we shape our long-term strategy.

This year, we had our first European retreat, amidst the snow-capped granite Aiguilles of the Chamonix valley.

As a fully remote team, time together is precious. We embraced that by living, cooking, working, and relaxing together in a large chalet with picturesque views up and down one of the most scenic valleys in the world (the jacuzzi, the pool, and the sauna didn’t hurt either 🧖).

It’s been 3 years since we last saw each other outside of a Zoom rectangle and some people in the team had never even met in person!

Spending quality time together is the first priority on our company retreats, but that’s not all we got up to this summer!

• 🥐 Warm pastries from the local bakeries every morning!
• 🚠 Taking the cable cars to the summit of the Aiguille du Midi
• 🥶 Cold water swimming and hiking on a glacier
• 🧗‍♀️ Rock climbing, bouldering, and via ferrata
• 🍹Home cooked food and cocktail nights
• 🍿Continuing our team tradition of watching terrible films

We’re lucky enough to have a team full of climbers, runners, hikers and outdoor enthusiasts, and what better place for all of the above than the French Alps?

What you don’t necessarily see in these photos is courage across the team as people conquered heights on cable cars, balanced across wire bridges without looking down, and hung onto the side of cliffs!

You don’t hear the background soundtrack of live music (enough of the team play that we always make sure some instruments turn up)!

You don’t feel the hours on the trails, or the evenings spent figuring out what the next few years looks like for Kumu. We can’t tell you everything just yet, but we can tell you that we’re excited!

The more we’ve added to Kumu over the years, the harder it is for new users to hit the ground running. We’re thinking about how we can simplify the architecture and user experience. This doesn’t mean we’ll be taking our eye off the ball with sticky.studio though. We’re going to do more to get the word out there for both products!

So for now, we’ve returned to our respective corners of the world, where we continue to play hard and work hard, looking forward to whatever’s around that next corner!