The most insane ways you could ever imagine a workplace to work like has me living inside it for 365 days now. I planned not to get on it. I decided I’d rather tell whoever questions me and my sanity about my job that I work with a company moving at the speed of a Monday, just so I could gatekeep this place from being reached by randomers. But my mind has seen many episodes of it now. I am trying to process this maturely, but this needs some air.
Exactly on 3 Feb last year, I reached Frappe with my scheduled interview and a stomach full of anxiety. My anxiety needs a separate essay someday, so we will talk about things that made it worse. My first two online rounds went super clean, and the third round, naturally, was with Rushabh, the founder. We touched on different topics of my interest and all the things Frappe does differently, marketing-wise. But then, in one random event, Rushabh asked, “Why do you want to become a marketer?” I knew some stuff from the internet and some of my own interests, so I laid them. To which he said, “That’s not a good answer.” I was humbled. I got it from the aura itself that nothing generic or meant for the very obvious would fit here. So you might need to have a very strong intuition or at least an imagination about the role you want to play. An impromptu writing assignment and a small portfolio saved my day.
On 11 Feb, when I entered as an employee, my feet cold and the floor colder. I saw people curled up around coffee tables, hunched over their laptops. A little after, Palkan, who was the entire marketing team, handed me my laptop and showed me a little about the basics. Not me, wondering why the entire office just fits around those coffee tables, I realised there are two offices on two different floors, plus a few folks work from Pune, Kerala and Kolkata. The office has no cubicles, and today, I would not ask why. At first, unlike any other workplace I’ve been to before, people came all on by themselves to break the ice. I felt stone-cold at first, but the warmth had me smiling and talking to many people on day 0. By the time i had to leave in the evening, I knew almost 10 people by their names. Two months passed and i hated the speed with which i was losing the newness. And there came a series of events which you’d rather not believe to exist in an Indian corporate culture. This is April 2025, the annual appraisal time globally. Everyone knows everyone else’s salaries at Frappe. It’s literally on your system the moment you are on the payroll. And for our internal Frappe folks, this was no biggie; they’ve got even better, bigger bets. I could not, ofcourse, participate in the cycle for I was still on my probation. But what I saw was not what I was used to seeing or near to believing. Each member at Frappe picks their own pay (pyop)! I’ll have to be honest, I knew a policy like this existed before joining. But seeing this up so close, so early, tricked me with tons of questions. In 2025, the org-wide pay hike rose to around 22%, which, to my knowledge, was way above the usual margins in India. The fact was not limited to the office walls, but the community and anyone who followed us on socials knew this from our posts. It’s that rare kind of openness. My mind jumped to the highest possible number anyone could pick, before I knew better. Excellence is a no-brainer at Frappe. Regardless of whether you create a simple Figma card or write ten lines of code, there’s barely any room for half-baked work. Yes, the process and time to reach there might look different for everyone, but the end goal is Excellence. So, the number you pick comes with a bar you set for yourself. The employee in me had just begun to wrap her head around this when I saw a poll out of the blue. (Freedom here has a conscience, I see.)
Takes me to this oddly normal habit of Frappe, which is ‘Polls’. There is a group on Raven, one of our chat apps we use every day at work. If something needs a decision, it probably ends up on the polls channel. Of course, people talk it through everywhere else, but the conclusion usually settles with a vote in consensus. The way it has to be seen is as part of the constitution for a democratic workspace that Frappe embodies. The wild part to me was how even a food-for-thought can end up going through voting, just like the bigger calls. Not everything has to make it to polls, but the range of questions… is interesting.
Call me crazy but, pick your own work (PYOW) hit me like a truck. It goes like, you bring the skills, say “I want to do this”, then it’s your ride to take that project from 0 to 100. My 100 might look like 80 to someone, so open feedback tails you for the better and the best. And if you take my word for it, feedback here is unbiased and pretty tight. So in such an open-culture, the freedom might fall back as no hand-holding, but i can tell you, you’ll have people to guide you. It was rather for me to know what other see in me which I’m probably not able to see in myself. As a marketer, i had a mix of things to look at. Webinars, social postings, newsletters, event marketing and blogs. We’ll talk about them too, but here’s a piece of what you might probably want to know. Way back somewhere around in May, I wrote my first blog. I mostly leaned towards being a sequential narrator who needs to see the ending before putting pen to paper. But it was only when Rushabh told me that a strong plot makes a great story. It sank in. All Frappe folks are good storytellers, the way i see it. So when I get the chance to narrate someone else’s story here, i’m kinda borrowing their piece of mind and telling it from there. And it started to humble me how much love came through all the people blogs I’ve written so far. I say it less, but this is gratifying. I am aware I still have a lot more stories to tell from plenty of different genres, and this year i see it happening. It started from there where i was nudged to keep writing but ofcourse, my role has to cover more ground. Public webinars were a thing at Frappe and also up for grabs. Since I had no rigid to-do list back then, I went for it. We grew from 40 to around 200 attendees in just a few months for several webinars… though some sessions still dip back to 40. I figured it’s all about the topic of mass interest. I do around 4 webinars a month and i’ve come to see the community has so much to share and ask via these sessions. Then there’s my next favourite thing from every month to write, The Frappe Times. I was exactly 10 days in the company when i wrote my first edition of the newsletter. Ofcourse, so much information pouring from so many sources but Palkan and others made it easy as pie.
For I have only ever lived in Mumbai, and my roots from Kolkata had also thinned out, I had a chance to fly to a new place, the Garden city of India for Frappe Build. There was this graceful side to the city wrapped in pinteresty roads and the feather-light sun rays I woke up to for four days. I also got to be a part of the annual offsite, where the whole of Frappe shrinks into a single room for mature discussions by day, and later dissolves into pools and tennis courts as the sun goes down. If I had to pick a favorite frame from the year, it’d be from this with everyone around.
It would be unfair to try and squeeze the nitty-gritty of each passing beautiful and wild day from the past year into just a few words. The best I could sense for myself is the liberty to narrate through my words and sometimes through the things I post, which is where I plan to spread further. The day I struggle to write the second line of an essay might be the day I stop throwing my words in the void. But till then, there seems to be some canopy for me to walk under and even if someday, I hit a wall, there are great mentors at Frappe who’ll help my paper plane see more sky than I think I can.
