The Mendel team is still buzzing from our week-long retreat in Cairo. The theme of the retreat was “coming together” and it was the first time the American and other remote employees were united with their Egyptian counterparts. Although there were many adventures–missing flights, seeing the pyramids, haggling at Khan el-Khalili–the highlight of the trip was collaborating together, as one global organization.
The Egyptian employees went above and beyond to make the American and remote employees feel welcome in Mendel’s Cairo office. The level of hospitality and willingness to put everyone at ease set the tone for the week. Through company-wide meetings, breakout sessions, and long drives after work we gained the conversational abilities that create resilient teams.
One of the best parts of travel is learning how different environments impact the way people communicate and adapting to it. Speaking as an American employee, I loved immersing myself in Cairo’s culture–both work and social. Cairo is truly the city that never sleeps (some of our coworkers went to the eye doctor at 10 pm). The pulse of maze-like streets and the reflection of the bright neon billboards on the Nile creates a constant backward and forward movement in time. In Cairo, you can’t think of the future without thinking of the past and we were able to see that through the eyes of our coworkers. It’s such a special feeling to learn about a city through the amazing people who live there. It was a week that none of us will forget.
Mendel is an NLP pipeline and abstraction workspace that structures patient data at machine-level scale with human-level fidelity. We want to make medicine objective through analytics ready data. Interested in joining our mission? We’re Hiring. Yallah! Let’s go!
