Company: Stride, New York, NY, USA
Company Description: Stride is an NYC's most sought after Agile development consultancy. We are proud to have 0% turnover and 75% women leadership.
Nomination Category: Company/Organization Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Startup of the Year - Business Services Industries

Nomination Title: Stride

Describe for the judges the activities and accomplishments of the nominated organization since the beginning of July last year (up to 525 words). Begin this section with the date since July 1 2013 on which this organization began operations:

Stride Consulting, LLC, was founded in April of 2014, by CEO Debbie Madden and CTO Rex Madden. With no outside funding, they bootstrapped Stride. In 2015, Stride’s first full year in business, it is a $5M, profitable firm.

Through strategic hiring, down to earth sales and passion-driven leadership, Stride is on the map. The Stride brand stands for quality and integrity. As such, we are proud to call SaksFifth Avenue, Simon&Schuster, AXA, The Daily Beast, Plated, Gust, The Hollywood Reporter, Blackrock, Constant Contact, CUNY, The Ladders and more, among our clients in our first year in business.

At the heart of Stride, is a leadership team comprised of 75% women. But perhaps more importantly, Stride is run like a family. Integrity and passion drive all decisions. Individuals are empowered to be autonomous. Stride has fired 2 clients this year, and believes employee happiness come first above all else, even in a consulting company. In an industry where average turnover is 44%, Stride’s turnover is 0%. That’s right. Not a single full time employee has left the firm.

On top of being one of NYC’s most sought after Agile consultancies in our first full year of business, Stride has created 2 software products. The first is Sonar, a hiring forecasting tool that does what no other CRM tool on the market does well - accurately forecasting close percentages using sophisticated Monte Carlo simulations rather than straight addition for true and reliable sales forecasting.

Stride also created a product called Ballpark (which was featured in Harvard Business Review). Ballpark runs top down budgeting in 20% of the time it takes a team to do Agile estimating. And, the results are broken into 90% confidence ranges with accurate histograms.

Stride is proud to have a 5-star Glassdoor rating, which speaks to the company culture that we maintain despite our rapid growth. The opinion and voice of every Strider is heard, respected, and taken into consideration for important company changes or policies. Every quarter, Company Meetings are held in an Open Space format, where team members create the items on the agenda and participate in discussions that are of interest to them. In addition, Roundtables are held bimonthly, where a topic concerning any aspect of Stride (examples include the hiring process, consultant training, and promotions) is voted on and discussed by whoever is interested, and where a Junior Developer can have the same weight as a Lead Developer in any action item created from these meetings. The openness and honesty at Stride are values that are personally held by our CEO and are upheld by every member that joins the team.

Stride is not only focused on its own success, but is also an agent in the success of others through the sharing of knowledge from everyone on the team. Via its Tech Talks, blog posts, and talks given at local tech meetups and events, our developers, VP of Engineering and CEO share their experiences and best practices for topics ranging from the most technical (microservices, caching, continuous integration, etc.) to building teams and innovating enterprises.

Provide a brief biography of the person or persons who lead the nominated company (up to 125 words):

Debbie has built 5 companies from the ground up and has been CEO of three of them. As CEO of Stride, Debbie brings 20 years of tech leadership, and a daily passion for helping businesses improve through software. Due to her reputation as a passionate woman executive in technology, Debbie is a sought after speaker and writer, having appeared in Harvard Business Review, Fox TV, Huffington Post, Forbes, The Wall Street Journal, InfoQ and more. Prior to Stride, she was the CEO of Cyrus Innovation, which she ran for 10 years, grew into a 5-time Inc 5000 winner, and Crain's NY Best Place to Work.

Choose one (even if both apply):

The CEO (or other principal manager) of this company is a woman, and at least 40% of the management team is comprised of women.