Rokt, the New York-based e-commerce technology company that will power more than 10 billion transactions in 2026, has spent years building a corporate culture where the stated philosophy is to hire people who challenge you to be better. That’s the story Dan Wright tells about working at Rokt for nearly a decade.
Dan Wright’s Decade at Rokt: Fourteen Teams, One Constant
Wright is currently VP of Operations and Solutions at Rokt, and his career there is an unusual case study in what internal mobility actually looks like when a company is scaling fast. Over nearly ten years, he has worked for, founded, or been part of fourteen different teams at Rokt, a breadth that gives him a different vantage point on the company than most employees develop. The thing that stands out to him isn’t the change. It’s what hasn’t changed.
“What I’m really proud of and always have been over the last ten years is what hasn’t changed,” Wright said. “That’s the culture and the people.”
The consistency he’s describing has a direct effect on how he hires. In a recent feature on Rokt’s blog, Wright explained the philosophy he has carried across every team he’s built: hire the person who is better than you. Build a team of people who are stronger than you in many aspects, and you end up with a great team.
The Jon Humphrey Story: A Hiring Philosophy Made Concrete
The clearest illustration of that philosophy is a story Wright has told about hiring Jon Humphrey about four years ago as a Director of Solutions. Six months into the role, Wright was sitting in a performance calibration meeting with Rokt’s executive leadership team. When it came time to start Humphrey’s review, he opened with what he described as a half-joke: “I think I’ve just hired my boss.” The room laughed. Wright didn’t walk it back.
“No, I’m serious,” he told the room. “I think Jon within the year is going to be my boss.”
He was right. Humphrey became VP of Operations and Solutions within a year. He is now SVP of Operations and Advertising. “He’s just absolutely skyrocketed,” Wright said. “For me, I think it’s one of the proudest things I’ve done at Rokt, being involved in Jon’s success.”
The story is a specific, verifiable example of something Rokt’s culture pages and award write-ups tend to describe more abstractly: that the company promotes quickly, measures leaders by the growth of their direct reports, and doesn’t treat internal advancement as a threat to the person who did the hiring.
Recognition as an Organizational System, Not a Program
Rokt’s approach to employee recognition goes beyond milestone gifts and shout-outs at all-hands meetings, though it has those too. According to Built In’s 2026 company culture profile, Rokt uses structured awards tied directly to its core values, including a Values Champion award and an Impact Award that highlight individuals and teams for demonstrating the company’s principles and delivering measurable results. Spot bonuses and milestone gifts mark onboarding, work anniversaries, and life events. Practices like gratitude rounds and “recent wins” segments are embedded into regular team meetings rather than treated as separate recognition activities.
What makes the system notable is the organizational logic behind it: recognition at Rokt is designed to make contributions visible beyond the immediate team. Cross-department shout-outs, company-wide acknowledgment from senior leaders, and recognition through digital platforms are all part of a deliberate effort to surface work that might otherwise remain invisible. For a company that has grown from roughly 313 employees in 2021 to more than 500 by 2024, keeping contribution visible across a scaling organization is an active management challenge, not a solved problem.
Third-Party Validation: What the Awards Actually Measure
The external recognition Rokt has received is meaningfully different from the kind companies self-report. Great Place To Work, which bases its certification on direct employee surveys rather than company submissions, reports that 91% of Rokt employees describe it as a great place to work, compared to 57% at a typical U.S. company. Rokt has held Great Place To Work certification for five consecutive years.
Fortune ranked Rokt #9 on its Best Workplaces in Advertising and Marketing list for 2025, drawing on confidential survey data from employees across the industry. In 2026, Rokt earned recognition across eight Built In Best Places to Work lists, including the #2 midsize employer ranking in Seattle, #14 in San Francisco, and #15 in New York City.
These aren’t rankings that companies can purchase or petition for. The Built In awards are based on employee data. The Fortune list relies on confidential surveys. When companies appear on lists like these repeatedly, the external validation is a signal of something consistent happening internally, not a one-time performance.
A High-Change Environment With a Stable Core
Rokt describes itself as a high-change environment, and that framing shows up in how employees talk about working there. A current employee with more than five years at the company described watching Rokt grow from 200 to 800 people, with advancement opportunities and the chance to grow alongside the business.
The tension between high standards and sustainable pace is one Rokt has addressed directly. Rokt’s 2026 Built In award write-up noted that the company’s July 2025 internal engagement survey showed 88% of employees said Rokt provides equal opportunity regardless of age, race, gender, or sexual orientation; a six-point increase from the prior year’s 82%. Internal promotion rates remain above 10% annually, well above industry averages, according to Built In’s workplace profile.
The company also invests $100 million annually in product innovation, according to Rokt’s own performance data. Over the past decade, it has maintained a compound annual growth rate above 40%. Between 2021 and 2024, revenue grew from $97 million to $418 million, a 330% increase. That growth rate earned Rokt the #87 overall ranking on the Financial Times list of The Americas’ Fastest Growing Companies 2026, a list compiled by the Financial Times and Statista that identifies companies with the strongest verified revenue growth between 2021 and 2024.
What “Builder DNA” Means in Practice
Rokt refers to its employees as “Rokt’stars” and uses the term “Builder DNA” to describe the mindset it hires for. According to Built In’s innovation and technology profile of the company, Rokt made a deliberate decision to give every employee access to the full suite of AI tools the company licenses rather than gating access by role or seniority. One employee described the shift as watching “a collective effort to democratize access to tooling and information” unlike anything they had seen in their career.
The company runs an annual company-wide hackathon, the Rokt’athon, which in 2025 focused on building AI-powered solutions to real business problems — not hypothetical proposals, but working products developed by cross-functional teams under time pressure. That’s a meaningful design choice. A culture that produces working products under time constraints in a 48-hour sprint is different from one that produces strategy documents and presentations.
The flat organizational structure Rokt describes, with wide spans of control and minimal hierarchy, is the structural counterpart to that approach. When leadership is accessible, and decision-making is fast, it’s possible for someone like Jon Humphrey to be hired as a director and become an SVP within a few years. That kind of trajectory requires an organization willing to move quickly on people, and a hiring philosophy that actively looks for talent above its own level.
Why the Culture Story Matters at Scale
Rokt now operates in 17 global markets and serves more than 33,000 active clients, including more than half of the largest global e-commerce companies by volume. At that scale, culture is an execution variable, not a branding exercise. The company’s ability to sustain 40%-plus growth over more than a decade depends on continuously bringing in and developing people capable of running parts of the business that didn’t exist two years earlier.
Dan Wright’s story is a small-scale version of that dynamic. He’s been part of fourteen teams because the company keeps building new ones. He has hired people who became his boss because the company keeps creating the senior roles that make that possible. He has stayed for nearly a decade, in part, because the culture that existed when he joined is still the culture he recognizes today.
That consistency, at a company growing as fast as Rokt, is not an accident. It’s the product of a deliberate organizational system; one built around promoting talent it recognizes, recognizing contributions it might otherwise miss, and rewarding the leaders who make it possible by measuring them on what the people they hired go on to do.
