New Year, New Do: InfluxData Donates to Charity and Chooses Founder/CTO's Hairstyle

By Lefan Chi / Company
Jan 20, 2021

<figcaption> Influxers choose their Founder/CTO’s 2021 hairstyle!</figcaption>

It’s always fun when you get to choose your Founder/CTO’s new hairdo! In December 2020, InfluxData’s Outreach Club (an internal group that promotes aspects of our culture through activities and volunteering) launched the New Year, New Do: December Donation Initiative. The idea was to combine charity and a little healthy competition to spread holiday cheer and support a few amazing nonprofit organizations!

While giving back is always the best part, we sprinkled in a little fun to excite and incentivize employees.

The goal: raise as much money as possible to donate to nonprofits focused on supporting children, food insecurity and disaster relief.

The prize: choose a new hair color for our fearless leader, Founder/CTO Paul Dix.

It worked like this – employees could select an organization from a list of nonprofits to direct their contribution, and for every $1 donated, employees received a vote for Paul’s next hair color (Rainbow, Half Purple/Half Blue, Dyed Mohawk, Neon Green). The option with the most points would determine Paul’s next hair color. To top that off, InfluxData agreed to match up to $5,000. Even better – Evan Kaplan, our awesome CEO, said he would personally donate $5,000 if we hit our goal – and of course, we achieved that!

As president of the Outreach Club, it was exciting for me to see all the donations come through and watch the engagement within the company as Influxers voted on the color for Paul’s hair! A ton of fun for a great cause!

The cherry on top for me was that as a nontechnical person, I was able to play around with our actual product, InfluxDB. With the help of Product Manager Samantha Wang, we created a dashboard that allowed us to capture the data in real time and share this with the whole company to track our progress.

<figcaption> InfluxDB dashboard tracking donations in real time!</figcaption>

In total, InfluxData raised over $20,000 from our New Year, New Do: December Donation Initiative. Thank you to our employees for their gracious donations and for making this happen, and to Paul for his participation (and for bleaching his hair multiple times to achieve the most vibrant rainbow hair ever), and a major shoutout to our Outreach Club admins who really put in the time and effort to promote our culture and engage with the communities in which we live.