This year, most of our team met in Chongqing, China — the multi-level cyberpunk city. In Chongqing, uptown and downtown describe altitude, not direction. We surrounded ourselves with neon lights one day and raging waterfalls in Wulong Karst the next.

At our offsite, we aligned on our mission: help our customers grow the best patent portfolios in the world. Then, we turned to the harder question: how we’ll get there.

Customer Experience Above All

Customer experience is priority number one. Not acquiring new customers—serving the ones we have. We feel a deep responsibility to everyone who's entrusted us with their portfolio. They expect results, and our job is to deliver those results and then some.

People have bespoke workflows. As long as a customer's request doesn't make the product more confusing for others, we'll build it. The constraint matters, but within it, we're flexible.

Building an S-Tier Engineering & AI-driven Culture

Execution starts with the people who build. In an AI world, the definition of an S-tier engineer has changed.

We’ve decided to let candidates use any AI tools they want during technical interviews. The goal is to see how thoughtfully they use it. Afterward, we push their reasoning in real-time discussions.

But hiring is just one side of the equation. The other is making sure everyone at ArcPrime uses AI to its full potential. At the offsite, we took a standard task and asked each person how they’d approach it using AI.

We rated the strategies from 1 to 10 — where 1 means using AI one autocomplete at a time, and 10 means trying to one-shot an entire feature (which never works). The sweet spot seems to be around level 5: break problems into components, write clear specs for each, then let AI execute them piece by piece.

The Arc of Execution

Serving customers well requires great execution.
Great execution requires great people.
Great people master their tools.