I’ve been at CRIO for about 9 and a half years. In the early days, it was really just a few earnest people in a small office in Kendall Square, trying to figure out if we could build something that people would want to use. There was no Product Team, no Marketing Team, no HR. When we were designing a new feature, we would pile into the conference room and draw out possible approaches with an Expo marker on a whiteboard. We’d bounce ideas around, order pizza, and then jump back into the next room and start coding.
While I was on the Engineering team, I got to do a lot more than programming (the proverbial “many hats” of startup life!). I flew to client sites and did live training sessions, designed banners for conferences, and answered my fair share of customer support emails.
At the time, I had my personal cell phone number listed on my email signature. I remember one time hiking in Acadia National Park on a family vacation when my phone rang. Cell service in the woods! It turned out to be one of our clients I knew well, calling about an urgent issue. My parents smirked at me as I spun into “customer” mode, asking clarifying questions while navigating around rocks.
The CRIO team built a real sense of camaraderie, responding to the ups and downs of startup life. The whole company would walk to lunch at the Taiwanese restaurant down the street, and fit around a single table. We’d order a bunch of dishes, family style, and chat about new features we were building, weekend plans, and life. In between green beans and salt-and-pepper pork, a Livechat ping would come in on someone’s phone. We’d troubleshoot in real time. “Did you ask them to check the site setting yet?”
Then the pandemic hit, and we all scattered to our homes. It was a turning point for the company: suddenly, it became a lot more visceral how important clinical trials were- and why you might want to store study data in a way that you could access from your couch. Our clients were responding to the global emergency at hand, running critical COVID vaccine trials, and we were able to be a part of the solution.
Today, CRIO looks a lot different than it did in those early years. I no longer have the Livechat app on my phone (after all, we have a full customer service team). All of my meetings are now over video call, and I have over a hundred coworkers, located all over the world. We’ve built in more processes, validation checks, and documentation.
But what I appreciate about CRIO is what hasn’t changed: We’ve been able to keep that can-do attitude that got us through the precarious start-up years. I genuinely enjoy spending time with my coworkers, solving critical problems in a space where a new feature isn’t just cool- it might get treatments to market faster and save lives.