What's It Like to Work at Revel?

It’s obvious that Revel is a unique company doing interesting work alongside some of the best hardware teams on the planet. But what is it like to work here? What is expected of me? How is it different from other startups?

One difference is that Revel’s software is higher-stakes than the software most startups build. If your AI notetaker has a problem it might be sort of annoying for someone, but if your testing software fails the consequences could be far worse. “Engineers who work on systems that can break hardware have zero tolerance for vaporware or inflated capabilities,” Grayson Gordon, a founding software engineer, said. “Scott doesn’t have any [tolerance for that] either, and it’s obvious within minutes of talking to him.”

Attention to detail is present in everything they do. “I had just left [a large startup in the hardware space] the day prior with thousands of people that would just ship code to the field without any sign-off whatsoever and almost no documentation,” one employee said. At Revel, “almost everything they did had a trade study back to it, and every single change went through stringent review that was littered with comments.” At first, he thought this was overkill (“why not just talk it out?”) but his view now is that “our hit rate on the design of important features has been extremely high.”

Jess Winssinger, who joined Revel from Palantir, calls the company’s culture a direct reflection of Morton’s background and personality. “Scott’s very much an optimist,” she says. “He wants to have a good time, and he wants to do right by people.” She sees an engineer’s mindset in the way Morton leads the company. “Just the empathy he has for customers and the creative way he thinks about solving problems,” she says. “He didn’t grow up wanting to be President, or the CEO of General Motors. He grew up wanting to build things of value.”