The Art of Communication: GS Style

Nathan Thompson
Unofficial Grooveshark Blogger

December 5, 2007

One of the great things about working at a start-up like Grooveshark is the ability to communicate thoughts effectively. For the most part, I can talk to anyone in the company face to face, any day of the week. This makes it extremely easy to get ideas across and correct any problems we face. If I need to tell Josh, our CTO, that the new Britney Spears album isn’t buffering correctly, I can just look slightly to my left and yell some profanity at him until he acknowledges me. The same goes if I need to talk to Sam, the CEO. If I’m feeling bored and need a good laugh, I can just barge into his office and tell him a major blog has covered us, and he immediately launches into one of his epic, morale-boosting speeches. In effect, all the answers I need are within yelling distance.

But that doesn’t mean we don’t have communication issues at times. With each person doing their own thing to accomplish the bigger goal, sometimes we lose track of what others are doing. One of the major challenges we’ve dealt with is the communication gap between development and marketing. Often, so much is changing, and so much is going on at once, we have to stop and discuss where everyone is just to make sure we are on the right track.

One of the things we’ve done to fix this issue is encourage interaction between the team. We’ve set up blogs, email listservs, share documents, use skype and just about any other mode of electronic communication you can think of, but our biggest asset is our ability to just hang out. We spend so much time together that everyone naturally has grown closer. It’s an excellent environment for creative thoughts, constructive criticism and teamwork, because everyone eventually grows comfortable with telling everyone else what they really think. I’m not afraid to tell the development team when Grooveshark is screwing up, or the rest of the marketing department that we need to handle something differently. It’s this removal of political correctness and fake understanding that allows us to judge our work objectively from within the company.

At some point, I responded to a comment left on some coverage we got on Boing Boing saying that we are our own biggest critics. This environment we’ve created here at the office is why I believe it.