Cribl’s recent $319M Series E round marks a significant milestone in our journey to becoming a generational company. While this growth opens the door to new opportunities for our company, it also presents a challenge: how do we ensure our amazing culture scales alongside the business? At Cribl, we believe in Culture on Purpose—an intentional, values-led approach to evolving our culture as we grow.

What Does It Mean to Scale Culture on Purpose?

As Edgar Schein’s iceberg model of culture suggests, there are visible elements of our culture that make Cribl unique and special. We love a great goat joke! But beneath these fun artifacts are our core values like “Customers First, Always” and “Irreverent, but Serious,” guiding our shared behaviors and assumptions. As we scale, every new hire or new leader adds to the dynamic of our culture. This constant state of change is what makes Cribl special, but it also requires us to fortify the critical elements that made us successful in the first place. It’s a delicate balance of nurturing organic growth while being strategic and intentional about preserving what matters most.

In this next phase of Cribl’s journey, it’s crucial that we anchor ourselves in the foundational values that have guided us so far, while evolving them to fit our growing organization. This blog looks at how we’re operationalizing those values throughout Cribl—embedding them into our performance reviews, hiring processes, leadership development, and day-to-day decision-making in order to better serve our customers, partners, and employees.

Embedding Values into Performance Reviews

A key part of scaling our culture is operationalizing our values—turning them into actionable, measurable behaviors. One of the first places we’ve done this is through our performance review process.

Our Values Performance Rubric plays a critical role in ensuring that values like “Excel Together” are a core part of every Cribl employee’s review. We don’t just evaluate people based on what they deliver, but also on how they deliver in alignment with our values. This ensures that we support each other to greater levels of execution to create lasting impact.

Assessing Curiosity and Problem-Solving

Curiosity is at the heart of innovation, and at Cribl, we believe in rewarding those who bring a problem-solving mindset to their roles. Our Values Interview Rubric helps us assess employees’ curiosity and their approach to solving complex problems, both in the hiring process and during performance evaluations. This ensures that curiosity and creative problem-solving remain core to who we are, even as we grow. Our employees often cite the opportunity to solve complex problems and make an impact as one of their favorite elements of working at Cribl; by assessing for Insatiable Curiosity and providing opportunities to exercise it, we create a virtuous cycle to scale our culture.

We ask specific questions in performance reviews and interviews that help us gauge how employees think through challenges, explore new ideas, and approach ambiguity. This is crucial to keeping our culture of innovation alive as we expand.

The Role of Transparency and Feedback in Scaling Culture

Transparency has always been a key part of our culture. As we scale, maintaining open, honest communication is key to keeping our culture strong. At Cribl, we emphasize the importance of regular, ongoing feedback—so that when it comes time for formal reviews, there are no surprises. For a practical example, we encourage team conversations to happen in Slack channels instead of private direct messages so the information is searchable and viewable by everyone.

This culture of openness and authenticity is reinforced by peer feedback, which allows team members to offer constructive insights and recognize each other’s contributions. Regular feedback creates an environment of trust and ensures that our values are being upheld across the board.

We also often hear that Cribl feels like a place where people can be their authentic self and that their co-workers feel ‘real’ and approachable. Our Open & Authentic value helps us attract and retain members of our herd who value developing genuine working relationships.

Rewarding Collaborative Success

As we grow, it’s important that we continue to celebrate not just individual achievements but also contributions that help the entire team succeed. Recognition doesn’t just come from your manager. Our peer-nominated Values Awards provide a way to recognize our teammates who go beyond excelling individually by helping elevate their peers. On the day-to-day, our peer-recognition platform enables us to express our gratitude and appreciation for all things, big and small.

Our Values Performance Rubric ensures that this collaborative spirit is acknowledged during reviews, reinforcing that Cribl’s success is built on collective effort, not just individual successes.

Hiring for a Customer-First Culture

Hiring the right people is critical to ensuring our culture continues to thrive as we grow. Through our Values Interview Rubric, we carefully assess whether candidates embody a customer-first mentality, curiosity, and a collaborative spirit—all of which are key to thriving at Cribl.

During interviews, we ask questions like:

• How do you prioritize customer needs in your decision-making?
• Can you share an example of when you helped a colleague overcome a challenge?
• How do you approach solving complex problems under tight deadlines?

These questions help us understand whether a candidate aligns with our values and has the mindset needed to succeed at Cribl.

Growing Leaders Who Live Our Values

At Cribl, scaling culture means ensuring that our leaders embody and instill our values across their teams. Managers have an outsized impact on people’s ability to do their best work, so we prioritize manager development from day 1. Every manager gets access to Kona, an AI Leadership Coach designed to give managers instant support for difficult conversations, scripts for feedback, agendas for upcoming meetings, AI-generated coaching and more. Our annual in person Managers Summit is designed to help leaders build relationships cross-functionally and practice the skills that we believe create optimal environments for high performing teams.

Our Peer Manager Coaching Cohort program gives managers an opportunity to further develop and practice these skills with smaller peer groups, facilitated by an expert coach. Managers are trained not just in the “what” of our values, but the “how” – how to create a foundation of trust, the importance of context and transparency in communication, and how to support and challenge their teams to succeed together.

Through regular leadership development programs and best practices, we ensure our values remain a North Star as Cribl grows.

Driving Culture Forward: Evolving for the Future

One of the most important lessons we’ve learned is that what made us successful in the past won’t necessarily be what makes us successful in the future. As we scale, we need to continually adapt, refining and evolving our culture to meet the challenges and opportunities that come with growth.

However, this doesn’t mean abandoning our core values. Instead, it’s about anchoring ourselves in what makes Cribl unique while evolving in ways that support our long-term goals. We are committed to scaling our values-led culture on purpose, ensuring that Cribl remains the place where everyone can do their best work. TL;DR: Our values are our foundation even as our methods might evolve as we grow.

Wrap up: Scaling with Purpose and Intention

As we move forward after our $319M Series E, Cribl’s growth is exciting—but it’s also a responsibility to our customers, investors, partners, and employees. We’re not just scaling the business; we’re scaling our culture on purpose. By operationalizing our values through performance reviews, hiring processes, manager training, and continuous feedback, we’re building a culture that’s not only sustainable but thriving.

This is our moment to put in the plans to scale our culture, and we’re committed to doing it in a way that stays true to who we are—fortifying the bones of our culture so that Cribl remains a place where innovation, transparency, and collaboration flourish.