Kenchi
Modern tools for modern teams.
Kenchi supercharges teams. We take age-old efficiency hacks—think the best hits from HyperCard, Automator, and Greasemonkey—reimagined for the modern web and brought to the whole team.
While we’re quite early in our journey, Kenchi already plays a meaningful role for folks using us. Our median user spends over 3.5 hours a day in our app to get their job done, with folks hailing everywhere from SF to Lagos.
Kenchi is security-first, insights-driven, and tool-agnostic. We’re here to offer construction materials, not prefab houses. If we do our jobs well, we’ll be surprised by what folks do with Kenchi. (We already are!)
Needless to say, there’s a lot to do! We’re looking for kind, talented, thoughtful people to join our founding team and shape the future of Kenchi. We hope you’ll take the time to get to know us; we’re excited to meet you :)
Michael & Brian here—nice to meet you! We started Kenchi in 2020 to help teams transform clunky manual processes into simple automations and work smarter together.
Before Kenchi, we were both early employees at Stripe. Michael started Stripe’s Support & Internal Tools teams, while Brian led Stripe Connect and built Stripe Home.
- Design
- Eng
Our product is a series of tradeoffs: simple for newbies, powerful for pros, and turns people into power users. We’re looking for a thought partner to design a gorgeous, snappy UI built to incrementally expose this power.
Ideally, you are…
- Willing to learn basic ReactAlthough we don’t expect you to build features (though it’s a plus!), we’re a small, scrappy team. We’d like you to build UI components that can be passed off for tie-ins to data. No worries if you’re not familiar: we are more than happy to invest the time to help you out.
- Collaborative & customer focusedKenchi usage isn’t our be-all and end-all: we aspire to understand what our users are really trying to do. So we spend a lot of time talking to them—we want to work closely with you to share that feedback. We’d like to integrate you into our design/build/iterate cycle (and get your help shaping that process!) so you can have influence early and often.
- Comfortable with ambiguityWe won’t have all the answers on how something should work. (That’s part of the fun!) Striking a balance between educated guesses and getting something out in the wild, and between pixel perfection and experimental designs, is a critical part of our process.
Some challenges we’d tackle together…
- Build for both novice and power usersWe speak up to our users, enabling a lot of customization and control over Kenchi. But we also want to be accessible to new folks. Intro videos and tutorials are table stakes: we aim to do better with tactics like intelligently timed hints (for example, keyboard shortcuts, which are prevalent in our tool) and interactive onboarding (our extension format means we break through barriers between apps).
- Live outside our own tabMost of our customers use Kenchi embedded in a 300px iframe embedded in other tools, while their team leads pop into our dashboard for a zoomed out view to configure their Kenchi landscape. We want to make the experience feel consistent across these environments, but also play to each environment’s strengths.
- Statistician-level insights for everyoneOur app is a neutral player across all our customers’ tools, so we have unique data to help them pinpoint priorities. For the first time, folks can see exactly which replies result in low CSAT, churned users, and more. Well, sorta: it’s all trapped in a spreadsheet right now. We’d like to make this data available—and understandable—right in our product.
Perks
While we’re still tiny, we’ve tried to invest in the perks that will have the biggest impact for you. Here’s what we currently offer:
- Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance.
- Generous and flexible parental leave program.
- WFH bonus to spruce up your workspace.
- L&D stipend: books, educational courses, you name it.
- Health and wellness stipend: destress and invest in you.
- Flexible work schedule. (We expect you to use it—get some R&R!)
15% to the first 10
We view our founding team as a founding team: we’ve set aside 15% of our cap table for our first 10 hires. In order to increase fairness for candidates of all backgrounds, we don’t negotiate on compensation; we instead pre-allocate our offers and aim to make them generous from the start.
We’ve also dedicated 1% of Kenchi stock for charity as part of the 1% pledge.
We’d love to hear from you!
We’d find it helpful to hear a bit about your experience, a project of which you’re most proud, and anything else you want us to know.
We’re eager to get to know you, and our interview process is very much a two-way street: we’ll make sure you have plenty of time to learn more about us and Kenchi as well! We’ll be respectful of your time. You can expect quick, clear communication at every step.