Mixmax

Mixmax has not always been distributed. Until 2020 it was a hybrid company, with part of the team at an office in San Francisco, and it has run 100% distributed since; in 2022 it set itself the goal of becoming a top 10 distributed team. Because people work with almost no time zone overlap, the engineering team has written that it can't always rely on meetings to transfer knowledge or make decisions, so asynchronous communication is the preferred way of working: documentation in Notion, messaging in Slack, and meetings kept few and short so people keep big blocks of focus time.

That written-first habit comes with named tools. The Oracle indexes every document the team produces, each tagged with its author, date and status, from draft to deprecated. The Highway, a backlog of ideas and tech debt modeled on Getting Things Done, is re-ranked with RICE scoring in a technical session every eight weeks. Engineers have built against dev-sync, a remote cloud development environment launched from a custom mixmax CLI. A 2022 write-up of the team's rituals lists a coworking session every other week and a half-hour Demo Time on Fridays, where attendance is optional but wearing a funny hat is not, alongside an anonymous engineering culture survey, designed with the Head of People and run every six months.

In 2026 Mixmax rebuilt how engineering works around AI agents; its engineering job posting describes "a small, senior team that ships with agents doing most of the typing, and engineers doing the thinking." The product has widened too: Mixmax says many of its customers are not selling anything at all, using it for candidate, donor, member and investor outreach. Four values frame the rest: Create superfans, Is it awesome?, Win together and Why not now? The second comes with its own arithmetic: get 1% better every day, because 1.01^365 = 38.