Sam Atkins shut his laptop, slipped on his shoes, slid open the door of his customized Mercedes Sprinter van, and stepped into a meadow near Telluride--his office for the day. A chill crept in as the Colorado sky darkened, and the stars, unobscured by city lights, revealed themselves. He climbed up to the roof of the van to join his wife, Laura, and they spent the evening counting shooting stars. "It was an unforgettable moment," says Atkins, 38, a senior software engineer at cybersecurity firm Truffle Security. And it was all made possible by an employee benefit.
Atkins had always loved traveling. But after being stuck in his Phoenix home through two numbing pandemic years, at a job that had him in 20 to 30 hours of meetings a week, that love morphed into a wanderlust he couldn't ignore.
When he heard about an open position at Truffle, he was intrigued by the promise of a more flexible schedule and by this benefit: Every one of its 22 employees is given an annual "experimental stipend" of $2,400, to go toward anything they believe will help them work better. And because Truffle has no physical office space, its people can work from anywhere; Atkins interpreted that to mean on the road. "I get antsy when I'm home for months at a time," he says. "Travel gives me the stimulus I need to focus on my work."
So in February 2022, Atkins joined Truffle and knew just what to do with the stipend: buy a SpaceX-manufactured Starlink internet receiver dish, allowing him to pull high-speed internet from low-orbit satellites. No more reliability issues trying to use his phone as a hotspot, as he'd tried to do at previous jobs. Once he'd permanently installed the Starlink receiver to his Sprinter, the Atkinses hit the gas on a three-month odyssey from Phoenix to Florida.
Atkins is doing exactly what Truffle COO Julian Dunning and his co-founders, Dustin Decker and Dylan Ayrey, intended. They started the company in 2021 to support and improve TruffleHog, an open-source tool written by Ayrey to scan enterprises for sensitive information to ensure no secrets are at risk of being stolen. A former hacker-for-hire, Dunning says he was able to successfully make the transition to running a business only by acknowledging his own limits and asking his new employees--"all experts in their own fields," he says--for input on how he could help them improve their performance.
