DISQO was recently named one of the Best Places to Work in Los Angeles for the sixth year in a row, ranking #13 among the top 100 medium-sized companies recognized by the Los Angeles Business Journal. It’s a distinction we are proud of, but what makes this recognition especially meaningful is where it comes from: this ranking is based directly on our employees' own survey feedback,
The Best Places to Work program evaluates companies across leadership, communication, corporate culture, and the overall employee experience. In that sense, this recognition says something that is difficult to capture in a product launch, a revenue milestone or a growth announcement. It speaks to how people experience a company from the inside.
That matters because culture is not something an organization can manufacture. It can be articulated, supported, and strengthened, but it cannot simply be declared into existence. You can write values, establish principles, and design programs around them, but culture ultimately takes shape in the way people treat one another, solve problems, make decisions, and respond to change.
At DISQO, we describe culture as the shared values, beliefs, and behaviors that define who we are and shape how we interact, collaborate, solve problems, and succeed as a team. The emphasis on “shared” is important. It lives in the relationships between people and in the countless decisions that happen every day, often without an audience.
That's why we call ours The Code instead of a policy or a playbook. The values at the center of The Code are Win as One Team, Champion the Customer, Pursue Outsized Impact, and Be Relentlessly All In. They are supported by principles including Adapt to Thrive, Be Scrappy, Think Big, Start Small, and Keep Raising the Bar. Together, they offer a framework for how we want to work, but the framework only matters if people bring it to life.
That happens when someone steps in to support a colleague without being asked. It happens when teams choose collective success over individual credit. It happens when people challenge an old way of working, make room for a better idea, and keep moving even when the first answer is not the right one.
One line from The Code captures what may be the most enduring advantage of all: “People can mimic our products, but they can’t copy who we are, why we do what we do, and how we do it.”
The real test isn't the launch party or the funding announcement. It's the quarter that didn't go as planned. It's the pivot nobody saw coming. It's the late night before a deadline when the easy thing would be to disengage, and the harder, better thing is to lean in anyway.
That's when you actually find out who a company is. DISQO has lived through plenty of both, from a scrappy seed-stage startup to a company reshaping how brands understand the advertising and media landscape. Along the way, the moments we're proudest of were rarely the smooth ones. They were the ones where people chose to adapt, to get scrappy, to raise the bar for each other when it would have been easier to lower it.
That's the muscle memory this award is really measuring. Not whether things are good right now, but whether the people here show up fully, again and again, whatever "now" happens to look like.
DISQO has never grown in a straight line, and it never will. Every leap forward, from launching new products to entering new categories to embracing AI, has depended less on any single strategy and more on people willing to think big, start small, and figure it out together.
Champion the customer only means something when the person next to you has your back while you do it. Pursuing outsized impact only works when nobody's trying to win alone. That's the part an outside ranking can capture but never fully explain. Numbers tell you the what. People tell you the why.
This recognition isn't a finish line. If anything, it's a reminder to keep doing the unglamorous, everyday work of culture: showing up for each other, saying the hard thing kindly, celebrating the wins, and sitting honestly with the setbacks. The Code will keep evolving because we will, too. That's the point of a living document and a living culture.
To everyone at DISQO who brought this to life, thank you. Not for the ranking. For the reason we earned it.