The Past Year Through The Eyes of a Neuralaien

One year. It has been one year since our office manager herded the Neurala team to the all hands meeting that announced the beginning of the COVID measure. One year of pandemic, work from home, and developing a new product. Some may describe it as making a backflip on a slackline suspended between two skyscrapers. At Neurala we call it Monday. Our incredible team has redoubled effort to make our software relevant to the challenges that the pandemic brought on us. The first challenge was to empty our Boston office before the mandated municipal lockdown went into effect. While most of the company had already switched to working remotely, emptying our place of work marked the permanence of the measures. While the company policies always made a point of being flexible, allowing for time to care of your family, or days for working remotely, having the whole team permanently outside required a lot of deliberate changes. Communications need to be more deliberate. It is easy to forget how much communication happens every day when you share your space with your coworkers. Of course, Neurala had adopted instant messaging early in its life. It is not, however, a replacement for face to face meetings. And so every day starts with a Zoom meeting. As the days pass, the company changes. More features are added to the infant product which is then tested by prospect customers. More features are requested, bugs are filed. It has now been one year.

I joined Neurala in 2015 as an intern, I was one out of a dozen employees. Since then, I have seen the company grow in numbers and ambitions. I have seen the technology my team develops aimed at solving all kinds of problems. From the Neurala that empowers robots to explore Mars, to the Neurala that enhances drone usability, to the Neurala that now augments quality inspection in manufacturing. Talents have passed, each bringing their own brick to the edifice, some building a whole aisle. Friends have come and gone, and the pandemic has been a tremendous shake in the system. Neurala is still standing tall, our teams are still full of bright minds, ready to develop the best software to solve real world problems. And wherever we are now scattered, whether or not we will be able to use the new offices our CEO found for us, that fact, the fact that each Neuralaien will wake up every day to do their best work, that fact will not change.