About High Fives
A company directory, peer recognition tool, and face-learning game for Google Workspace teams. Recognition that follows the person, not the vendor. Built in Austin, Texas.
The origin story
Capital Factory ran on a third-party recognition tool — Pingboard — for the better part of a decade. 94 employees, 1,602 recognitions, six company values, every kudo in one place. The product worked well enough until the company was acquired and our experience changed: roadmap drift, pricing pressure, and kudos that lived in someone else’s database with no clean way out.
We couldn’t find a replacement we liked. Everything on the market was either a $30-per-seat HRIS pretending to do recognition, or a standalone recognition app that would put us right back where we started — renting the social fabric of our company from a vendor whose interests would diverge from ours the moment they raised a Series B.
So we built the thing we needed: directory + recognition + game, connected to Google Workspace, deployed in an afternoon — with one architectural commitment the incumbents can’t match. Every high five is a signed verifiable credential. The kudos belong to the employee, not us. If we get acquired, repriced, or shut down, the credentials still verify.
Capital Factory is customer zero. If it’s useful to our team, we think it’ll be useful to yours.
What we believe
The kind words a coworker writes about you should belong to you. When somebody takes the time to name what you did and why it mattered, that sentence is a small piece of your career. It shouldn’t evaporate because a vendor got acquired, repriced, or sunset. It shouldn’t live in a database your employer leases by the seat. It should be yours.
Every high five in the system is issued as a signed verifiable credential (DID:web). Employees can export their recognition, prove it to a future employer, and carry it across jobs the same way they carry a diploma. That’s the load-bearing wall the rest of the product is built on.
Who it’s for
Companies that run on Google Workspace and want a self-service alternative to bloated HR tech. Startups with 20 people. Accelerators with 150. Mid-market teams with 500. Anyone whose directory lives in a spreadsheet, whose recognition lives in Slack DMs that scroll into oblivion, and whose People function does not have time to babysit a procurement cycle.
Anonymous reporting
We also ship a private channel for employees to flag harassment, ethics, or safety concerns — encrypted at submission, no IPs or emails logged, routed to the people who need to know. A workplace where it’s safe to celebrate the good somebody did is the same workplace where it’s safe to name the harm somebody caused. Both require the same precondition: the belief that speaking up won’t cost you.
Contact
Questions, feature requests, or want to bring High Fives to your company?