Squarespace employees describe Hack Week, a company event where staff get two to three weeks to build anything they want. A guitar amp, rapid prototypes, cross-functional friendships, and features that ship to customers all came from it. The company sees it as both creative freedom and strategic investment.
It's pretty exciting during Hack Week to see someone come up to the podium who normally doesn't present publicly and say, for my Hack Week project, I worked on this, and they talk about it and they present the details, and everybody's face melts because it's a mind-blowing idea. During Hack Week, there are no rules. You can work on anything you'd like. You can be a designer and you can write code. You can be a developer and you can do design. You can be passionate about music and decide you're going to build a guitar amp that week. So it really is a safe space. There are no wrong projects. There's nothing that's out of bounds. You just get to do what you want.
My favorite part of Hack Week is just seeing the creativity that the teams come up with. When all constraints are released, people come up with really incredible things.
This is an opportunity to do something that you otherwise wouldn't be able to do, or that we wouldn't normally get around to because we don't have the time or the resources.
The energy is growing as we all kind of Watch what we all do. It's like you feel the energy of someone else trying a big risk and you're like, oh, I can— maybe I can take some of that. Building off the energy of each other.
This engineer gave this presentation and my mind was blown. The creativity, the genius behind it, how smoothly the entire demo and process worked, and he did that in 4 days.
Hack Week is a different kind of risk-taking for many people. They have a limited amount of time and they have an idea, but they also need some collaborators. So we find people reaching out to people they don't normally work with, just saying, hey, can you work with me on this? They make a decision on the spot and they go for it.
It allows us to break out of the normal collaborative routes that we have, and I think that's actually really powerful because it lets us discover new connections that we didn't have before.
I think a lot of it is just helping people make connections if they, if they haven't already on who might be interesting to bring along for something. Kind of finding a way to disconnect people is really the most valuable thing there.
I remember the feeling when you present. It's a large group of people that are just there. And you have such a small— like, the time that you have, whatever— I don't know what the time is, but it doesn't feel like that when you're presenting. You're like, oh no, I'm done. You hear the org respond to your work. And that's a— it's a cool feeling.
My proudest achievement for Hack Week is helping the people who have created great things, harness their achievements, and turning those into things that we actually deliver to customers, or make sure that we're distilling the learnings into things that we deliver to customers later on.
We're willing to prioritize spending 2 or 3 entire weeks for hundreds of people to work on whatever they'd like because it pays off. It pays off in the energy that people come away with. It pays off with the discovery that we do about new ideas. And it pays off with new features and new products that have been born out of this effort. So in every way, there's real return on investment for the business. But I think as a founder who's a creator, it's in the spirit of what we do, why Anthony keeps investing in this, and it just keeps paying dividends.
I think it ties back to the work. I— at some level, it makes me more energized about the work.
Hack Week is grassroots.
Hack Week is expression.
Hack Week is possibilities. It's the possibilities to explore something new. It's the possibility to try something new. It's the possibility to learn something. Hack Week truly is possibilities.
I think my proudest achievement with Hack Week is working on things that don't necessarily come to fruition in the immediate future, which end up instead setting us on a path for the future in a way that we didn't necessarily expect.
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