Samar Birwadker did the homework. He researched the employer, met the senior people and listened to encouraging accounts of the place. It was a prestigious agency. The move made sense. Within a month, he knew the role did not suit him. Anyone who has ever accepted an impressive job and then dreaded the actual work will recognize the awkwardness: the opportunity can be perfectly respectable while the experience is perfectly wrong.
He distinguished between an employer’s merits and his own experience of working there. That distinction gave Birwadker something more useful than a grievance. It gave him a question. How could a person learn about a working relationship before committing to it? Qualifications were visible. So were company names. The everyday experience of belonging to a team was harder to inspect.
The reputation problem
In his later account of the episode, Birwadker placed the turning point in late 2011. He had been considering offers from employers trying to recruit him away from a comfortable job. The available information gave him confidence about the organizations, but little understanding of the atmosphere he would enter or the manager he would work with.
A recruitment process gives both parties time to prepare their best performance. Candidates edit their histories into a convincing sequence. Employers introduce the version of themselves they would like strangers to remember. The difficulty comes on an ordinary working day, when preferences about decisions, initiative and communication stop being interview topics and become everybody’s business.
Birwadker’s response was Good&Co, founded in 2012. Its premise was personal without requiring everyone else to share his particular preferences. Different people could thrive in different environments. The interesting problem was how to make those differences easier to see.
“It was a great organization, but it wasn’t for me.”
Samar Birwadker · 2013
A strategist changes the question
He came to that problem through advertising and branding. His professional history includes WPP, Landor Associates and AKQA, with work spanning consumer insight, brand strategy and marketing. These were businesses concerned with how people understand organizations from the outside. Good&Co brought him toward the people experiencing an organization from within.
The connection is easy to appreciate. A company can spend considerable effort making itself intelligible to customers while leaving a prospective employee to decipher its working habits over a few conversations. A polished brand cannot tell you how your future manager handles disagreement. The logo has never attended the Monday meeting.
Good&Co’s early company biography described Birwadker’s interest in the meeting point between technology and consumer behavior. It even gave the desired alignment of personality, goals, lifestyle and work a name: WorkMatrix. The name had the cheerful confidence of an early startup. The underlying wish was familiar enough: find work that leaves you feeling that your abilities belong there.
Before the compatibility scores came a career in branding. Birwadker’s Good&Co-era press portrait. Image: Entrepreneur contributor biography.
The co-founder in the freelance inbox
One early version of the idea resembled a review service for managers. Birwadker reconsidered it because competing accounts of somebody’s behavior could easily turn into an argument. He wanted information that helped people understand a relationship, rather than merely collecting verdicts on it.
A posting on Elance, the freelance marketplace, brought a consequential reply. Kerry Schofield proposed an approach to the problem. Birwadker hired her; the collaboration developed into a chief scientist and co-founder role. With founding CTO Subbu Balakrishnan, the company brought together scientific, technical and commercial experience.
There is an appealing detail in that beginning. A company devoted to the question of who works well together found part of its own answer in a freelance inbox. Expertise arrived through an ordinary transaction and changed the shape of the enterprise. The founder’s initial idea had room to be revised by someone who understood another part of the problem.
A quiz with a working life attached
Good&Co approached individuals through assessments that felt accessible and playful. Its early pitch to younger workers centered on understanding their strengths and finding environments where those strengths might be useful. People could compare themselves with colleagues, managers and employers. Self-discovery supplied a reason to participate before a recruiter ever entered the picture.
That sequencing mattered. A person looking for work is already answering questions for other people. An assessment that offers something back has a different appeal. Birwadker talked about helping users make sense of their results and decide what to do next. A personality description sitting alone on a screen would leave the practical question unanswered.
By 2014, the experience was moving toward mobile, with more opportunities to take quizzes, share results and explore company profiles. The consumer version and the employer proposition had different jobs: one invited curiosity; the other needed to help organizations understand prospective hires and teams.
Working preferences
Team habits
The useful distinction is between starting a discussion and settling one. A compatibility score gives people something to ask about. It cannot conduct the working relationship for them. Birwadker’s product made an abstract subject more approachable; the people using it still had to exercise judgment.
When a job board buys a question
On January 22, 2016, StepStone acquired Good&Co in an all-cash transaction. Birwadker continued as CEO. The deal joined a young assessment business to an established recruitment operation, giving the idea a route into the places where employers and candidates were already meeting.
The transaction also changed the practical stakes. Personality-based matching could become part of a job-board experience alongside information about qualifications and previous employment. There was a distribution opportunity in the combination: a useful product still needs to reach someone at the moment they can use it.
In 2018, a totaljobs integration made assessments available through its hiring platform. The announcement reported more than 2.7 million profiles and 65 million answered questions. Recruiters could invite applicants to take a short assessment and receive information about working style, along with suggested interview questions.
For Birwadker, the progression ran from a private disappointment to a tool inside a recruitment system. Its purpose remained tied to an ordinary uncertainty: what would working with these people actually be like?
Seventy-five people, one January destination
Running Good&Co meant confronting that question within his own company. In early 2018, Birwadker described approximately 75 employees distributed across San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, London, Ukraine and Germany. Some had worked together for months or years without meeting.
The company sent its team to Berlin for a week each January. The program combined business planning, creative activities, sightseeing and dinners. Employees heard about other teams’ responsibilities and had time together beyond the exchanges that kept work moving remotely.
Birwadker acknowledged that putting a clean return figure on the expense was difficult. He argued for the relationships the gathering produced. The detail adds texture to a business built on measurement: its CEO also defended spending money on something whose value resisted a tidy calculation.
A colleague encountered only as a name beside a message can remain a remarkably flat character. Shared time adds the missing dimensions. For a company selling ways to understand people, Berlin offered a chance to practice understanding them without first opening a dashboard.
Culture without the photocopier
Birwadker’s published advice pushed against borrowing another organization’s culture wholesale. A company had to work out what suited its own people and purpose. The position follows naturally from his founding problem. If an admired employer could be wrong for one employee, an admired employer’s habits could also be wrong for another business.
He described daily standups, twice-monthly sessions for sharing work and using Good&Co’s own tools internally. In a separate essay, he advocated regular conversations between managers and employees, a willingness to hear criticism and a duty to challenge behavior that had become accepted through repetition.
Those arguments put responsibility on leadership. A silent team might simply be a team that has stopped expecting a useful answer. Understanding working preferences helps only if somebody is prepared to respond to what they learn. The founder selling assessments also had to contend with the unglamorous business of listening.
Another turn of the wheel
Birwadker’s professional profile dates his Good&Co leadership through 2020. His later work includes marketing at MetaMap and advising startups on growth. Join Talent lists him as a US board advisor, while his recent public professional activity includes Parleo and discussions of agentic commerce.
The subject has shifted toward what shopping systems can understand about products, prices and incentives. His public posts consider the information that survives when software helps someone choose a purchase. It is a different commercial setting from recruitment, with its own practical questions about what becomes visible at the point of a decision.
He has also written about the pressure to reinvent himself mid-career. His suggestions include learning from younger practitioners, trying ideas himself and teaching others to expose gaps in his understanding. A completed company chapter does not end the need to acquire new skills.
That leaves Birwadker’s story pleasantly unfinished. The job that failed to suit him led to a company about compatibility. Building it required collaborators, changes of approach and a distributed team learning to work together. His original question still travels well: before you decide that something fits, what do you need to understand about the experience you are choosing?