The Humans Behind Kolide: Antigoni Sinanis

The Humans Behind Kolide series features interview-style blog posts with the humans who build our product and make it work. Get a behind-the-scenes look at who we are and the culture at Kolide.

Meet Antigoni, our Director of Operations. She has been with Kolide since 2017!

You’ve been at Kolide for over 5 years now. What has changed the most over the last 5 years? What has stayed the same??

Goodness, has it been five years already? A lot has changed in five years, both in my personal life and at Kolide. Obviously, the team has grown and changed significantly throughout the years. We went from a hybrid workforce (I used to walk to the office in Davis Square every day) to a fully remote organization.

I’ve seen at least 4 iterations of our product, and I can proudly say that today’s product and vision has evolved into something far greater than our 2018 brains could even imagine. What remains constant is the fact that I get to work with an incredible team of smart, hard working individuals, and we’ve managed to maintain a wonderful culture. I’m still delighted to be here.

How do you spend your time outside of your job?

Circling back a little bit to the previous question, two of the biggest changes for me outside of Kolide was moving to Atlanta from Boston, and having my first child. Of course, a lot of my “free” time now consists of caring for said child.

While becoming a parent has been nothing short of transformative, I do try to find time and space for things that bring me joy as an individual as well. I’ve always loved growing things. I have a massive plant collection, and even spent a year of my life farming in New Zealand. Now that we have a home of our own, my partner and I spend a ton of time transforming our outdoor space into an edible oasis. We tore up a big section of overgrown side yard, and gave up a large portion of our parking pad in favor of a raised bed garden.

When I’m not working, you can find me futzing around the garden, harvesting veggies, grubbing weeds, sowing new seeds, picking flowers, and chasing my little one around between the beds. He likes to “help” by removing all of the markers and “planting” rocks. Watching my garden grow around and along with my child has brought me so much joy. I just hope he is a little more excited about the bounty next year.

What does your day to day look like?

One of the things I like about my job is that every day looks a bit different. I typically have a list of things I know I want to accomplish from the previous day, so I review that while I check in on Slack. I check my email, which usually has at least 10 things I need to respond to/action on pretty quickly. This can range from expense approvals to compliance tasks. Inevitably, I’ll get several pings and emails throughout the day with new tasks to take on, or questions to answer, etc. We have few meetings, which I like, so there is a lot of uninterrupted time to focus on tasks that require deep work.

What are some of your biggest learnings from working at Kolide for these last 5 years?

I barely know where to begin. I still laugh at myself when I think back how little I knew, to the point where I scarcely understood how to use Slack. I was new to the tech world, and the startup world. My favorite thing about working at Kolide is I had the opportunity to build out our internal policies and procedures, and create and later streamline some of our processes. Since then, my focus has shifted many times over, from sales and customer support, to compliance. I’ve learned a lot about navigating SOC 2 compliance, and, more generally, security best practices that apply to all aspects of my life.

What would you say to someone who was thinking about joining the team?

I’ve always been an open book when it comes to talking to people about joining a startup. I’ll quote myself from an email I sent to someone when I was trying to recruit her (spoiler, she took the job):

“Of course, as a startup, everyone has their hands in many aspects of the business; I certainly do. We’re all passionate, hard working individuals, and it can feel overwhelming with the mountain of challenges and projects at times. That being said, we also highly value work/life balance. I have personally written policies and procedures to ensure that this is put into practice…All this to say, we try to meet our team where they are, and recognize that happy employees are productive employees, and I hope to continue to invest in them. We’re building really cool software (this coming from someone with no technical or security background), and our growth is definitely fueling our passion and excitement even more.”