Last week, we celebrated our 8th IX All Hands, an annual gathering of Indexers from across the globe to reflect on the year past and look forward to what’s to come in 2021.
A time-honoured tradition, IX All Hands is typically held in our founding city, Toronto. Being unable to join together in person this time brought with it a number of challenges, including the delivery of company-wide presentations, the management of individual breakout sessions, and the bringing of people together for social activities. Being no easy feat, we approached these challenges in stride and the end result was something we could all be proud of.
This year’s event theme was Step Into Tomorrow, with Indexers encouraged to celebrate success, inspire possibility, and build the future. This means looking beyond what is right in front of us and going further than we’ve ever gone before as we continue to build products that drive the ad tech industry forward.
How did we recreate a 500 strong in-person event? Two words: IX Crews.
To emulate the feeling of connecting with colleagues in person, every Indexer was placed in one of 34 IX Crews. IX Crews met throughout the days to discuss and reflect on this year’s programming and ultimately, to stay connected despite not being in the same physical space. IX Crews also served as watch parties for the mainstage programming, which included strategic vision updates from our Executive Leadership Team.
This year’s event also saw the announcement of our new partnership with non-profit Good Today. Good Today makes giving to charitable causes easy and meaningful through daily donations in small amounts. Via a simple Slack integration, Indexers are now presented every morning with two charitable causes for Index Exchange to donate to. The partnership with Good Today allows Indexers to give to causes that are important to us year-round, and we could not be prouder to work with such an innovative organisation.
To round out this year’s event, we welcomed Colonel Chris Hadfield, former Royal Canadian Air Force fighter pilot and commander of the International Space Station. Colonel Hadfield shared his inspiring journey with Indexers, growing up on a farm in rural Ontario to being the first Canadian to walk in space. His story is important and reflects what we as a company want to achieve – launching is fun but ultimately, it’s the landing that counts. He also generously answered questions from Indexers, sharing his thoughts about how life in space makes one profoundly recognise the shared human experience and some strong feelings on how being so far away from our planet is, in reality, anything but lonely.
Overall, we could not be prouder of what we achieved at this year’s IX All Hands. While we were separated physically, Indexers were joined together collectively in their shared goals to celebrate success, inspire possibility, and build the future.
Until next year.
Interested in joining our team? Visit our careers page to view our open opportunities.
