Last week, 86 GRIDers descended on Wrocław, Poland — home of GRID’s newly opened second office — for the company’s second annual internal all-hands conference: GRIDCon 2024.
Leadership, department heads, far-flung remote colleagues and new joiners came together for the two-day event — featuring leadership-led presentations on company innovations, priorities & opportunities; ample opportunities to collaborate over meals; department-bonding outings and the return of the best company party in esports: GRIDFest.
During the event, the team realized that this great internal meeting-of-the-minds had never been publicly shared, aside from a few tweets from Co-Founder & CTO Chris King. The Marketing team teamed up with the People team and put together this blog to share more about the event, its history and offer an exclusive peek inside the world and culture of GRID.
A Brief History of GRIDCon
Before there was GRIDCon, there was GRIDFest.
Back in the winter of 2021, the People team began kicking around the idea of celebrating the company, its employees and its culture at a GRIDers-only offline retreat. The team dreamed up a black-tie Oscars-inspired event to recognize each team for their contributions in-person and to, of course, party together in style on a Berlin rooftop.
There was music, there were refreshments, there was dancing, there was laughter. Memory is hazy but most counts put the attendance around 50 GRIDers. The satisfaction of safely bringing the mostly-remote teams together during COVID-induced isolation proved the strength of the company culture to everyone.
Turns out, the team really enjoyed spending time together offline as they did online.
Seeing the GRIDFest pilot as a great success, the People team and company leadership greenlit its sequel and sought to improve the benefit of gathering a company majority together and expanded its programming past just a party.
Thus, GRIDCon was born — an internal conference to align all GRIDers on business strategies, initiatives and results via presentations from company leadership and department heads in one great download — and then they would party.
In the summer of 2022, the People team fixed a coworking space near the GRID Berlin office to house the 60-some GRIDers in town and the format was tested. Over two-days, teams would sync on the company’s vision and bond over food and drink to ring it all in at an iconic Berlin venue for GRIDFest.
It worked. The coming-together was again a resounding success from all accounts and proved to be lasting sentiment to why everyone works at GRID — the people, the shared vision and company culture.
In the wake of the second edition, it was decided to move the annual event to January, enabling the company to kickstart every coming year with a fully aligned GRID mindset, bringing us to last week.
GRIDCon 2024
Continuing the established format, GRIDCon 2024 featured an array of business-focused presentations, employee highlights and product developments aimed for the coming year.
GRIDers were encouraged to engage with the content of each presentation and company leadership were readily available for discourse throughout the event. Below are selected summaries of the presentations and key takeaways we’re happy to share.
Year on the GRID 2023 Rewind
The conference opened with the premiere of the Year on the GRID 2023 Rewind video — a cross-department initiative recapping GRID’s last year of building on its foundation for the future of official game data, brought to life by the Marketing team.
Foundations and Frontiers
The best way to sum up GRID Co-Founder & CEO’s Moritz Mauer’s inspiring presentation is in his own words: “For the last five years we’ve been focused on building the game data infrastructure now used by the leading game publishers in the industry. I couldn’t have dreamed of better circumstances for GRID to unlock the potential of official game data for everyone.”
GRID by Numbers
Chief Financial Officer Matthias J. Büchs and VP of Operations Pierre Maraninchi presented an educational breakdown of the company purely by numbers. In an exercise of understanding the scale of the company, the two asked GRIDers to estimate a range of values in a trivia format from peak concurrency of Esports Solutions to maps distributed per year by Data Consumer Services the the quality percentage of services.
History of the GRID Data Platform
Co-Founder & Chief Technical Officer Chris King took the team down a fantastic deep dive into the storied five-year history and lore of the GRID Data Platform product development through the ages, from its first draft to ready product to now servicing official game data of League of Legends, VALORANT and Rainbow Six Siege. Chris’s presentation covered too much to do it justice in a short summary, but it would make a great full-blown blog post…
Games on the GRID
More than a dozen GRIDers took turns taking to the stage to offer the basics (and their passions) of each of the 6 game titles on the GRID. From VALORANT to CS2, Dota2 to LOL, R6 to PUBG — each title was championed by a GRIDer with a passionate (read: love-hate) and healthy (read: toxic) relationship with the titles.
After wrapping up with a live edition of GRID All Hands lead by Chief People Officer Brittany Patton, the collective of GRIDers returned to their hotel rooms to freshen up and put on their dancing shoes for the 70s vibes GRIDFest. As to be expected, much fun was had.
Thanks for joining our first ever GRIDCon recap, if you’d like to learn more about anything mentioned in this blog post — reach out to Kerry Waananen at [email protected] and follow GRID on LinkedIn. Want to join the next GRIDCon? Keep your eye on the Open Roles page.
