Denver Startup: Full Contact Gives Employees $7500 For Paid Vacation,Vacation

Could you go completely off the grid and really enjoy vacation time with your friends and family? When we say off the grid we mean off the grid, no checking work emails, taking work phone calls, checking in on work gossip, no VPNing into your work network?

If you said yes, you might want to consider applying for a job at Denver startup FullContact.  They have a whole list of openings including Android developer,business development, iOS and Mac developer,Outlook and Exchange .NET developer,platform engineer and web app/front end engineer.

FullContact specializes in an API that keeps your contacts up to date and so much more.

Now for the part about the $7500.

Bart Lorang, co-founder and CEO of FullContact offers his employees $7500 of paid, paid vacation time. This means that when you take vacation time, you get $7500 but you have to totally unplug. Lorang wants his employees to have mind resting, enjoyable vacation time.

That’s not the only reason for the paid, paid vacation though. Lorang feels that knowing that you’re going to go totally off the grid (at least the work grid) employees will be more comfortable creating total redundancy in their positions.

Knowing that employees will go completely off the grid, Lorang wrote in a blog post that they may:

  • They might empower direct reports to make more decisions.
  • They might be less likely to create a special script that isn’t checked into GitHub and only lives on their machine.
  • They might document their code a bit better.
  • They might contribute to the Company Wiki and share knowledge.


Lorang talks on the FullContact blog about how this idea of his for paid,paid vacation kept invading his brain. For a final blessing on the idea he reached out to TechStars and Founry’s Brad Feld who said:
“I love the Paid Paid Vacation concept and totally agree with it. A lot of people won’t spend the money because they don’t have it or think they’ll be happier if they save it. But they miss the value of disconnecting.
This exchange about paid, paid vacation assured Lorang that Feld would make a great board member and as a result the Foundry Group led the startups Series B round.
At this day and age, from a worker’s perspective this is supposed to sound like a no-brainer but to some it really isn’t. Their brains aren’t programmed for a total disconnect. There’s that inherent feeling of missing something, and then at work there’s the feeling that if someone else can do their job than they aren’t indispensable. The reality is, is that in an employment situation everyone is dispensable and yes the world will be there when you get back from Vacation.
Working at FullContact means you’ll get the time off, and the money to take a good, quality vacation.
Linkage:
Here are their job openings
Here’s their blogpost about “paid,paid vacation”
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