Last Saturday was the SugarSync company picnic.  That event was a great reminder that one of my favorite parts of building the SugarSync team is getting to know the extended team.  I love getting to meet the partners, children, parents and friends of our employees, investors and consultants.  Our team is so talented it’s no surprise their partners are equally bright, talented and interesting. I love to hear about their jobs and backgrounds – where they come from (we are truly a global team) and what they do which has a side benefit of helping me get to know the employees better.  My favorite is meeting the children.  I must say that we have an awfully cute bunch of kids in the SugarSync world ranging from newborns to teens (see pictures below).   Certainly the cutest, I’m sure, of any company in the personal cloud space!

More importantly, as anyone in a startup knows, it is an intense experience with long hours.  The families and friends of our employees, by picking up the slack are so important to our success.   This event and others we do during the year aim to be a small token of appreciation for that support.   We’ve also done an intro to SugarSync event with babysitting for the younger kids and a demo and example “pitch” for the teens and adults.  I got the idea for this latter event from a conversation with Diane Green – it was 2009 and many of my employees were telling me that their families were nervous about them working at a very small startup.  I knew we needed to make not only the employees but the families as excited as we were about our future.

When possible I like to host these family events (and other offsite meetings) at my home – it’s a way for the team to get to know me and my family better and – while we did have a caterer for the big items it’s a chance to put a bit more personal effort into the appreciation aspect.  While I’ll be very excited for SugarSync to be too big to fit in our yard I’ll definitely miss that element!