Just last week, nCino was recognized by Deloitte as the fastest growing company in North Carolina and number 189 among the 500 fastest growing tech companies in America. This fintech banking software company is not in Raleigh, Durham or Charlotte, but at the beach in Wilmington.

nCino has been recognized by Forbes Magazine as one of the Top 100 most promising companies in America – the only company on this list from North Carolina.

Between parent company Live Oak Bank and spinout nCino, they have hired over 300 UNC Wilmington graduates. They are consistently listed as the Best Place to Work in Wilmington.

How is this company growing so fast?

Call it “Hustle at the Beach.”

nCino has nine of the largest 30 banks in the US as clients and recently expanded to Europe to find additional clients. nCino has raised more than $81 million dollars from high profile investors such as Wellington Management, Salesforce Ventures, banking executive John Mack and Insight Venture Partners according to Crunchbase.

nCino engineers presented at the annual Cucalorus Connect conference on Friday. Dory Weiss and Mike Bonner did not talk about code but they talked about the process of of team building while building software. They titled their presentation as “Hustle on the Beach.”

nCino proudly listed their 2015 award as the top Software Company from the North Carolina Technology Association among the six award logos in their presentation on Friday in Wilmington. I remember being at that event at the Raleigh Convention Center and watching the crowd look at their event programs and each other and wondering how this little known company from the beach beat out much bigger companies for this award. This company competes for talent among other huge software companies within North Carolina and beyond.

Courage in software development?

Dory discussed the workplace environment for the PDE, Product Development Engineering Team, at nCino. She stressed that nCino is a place where her team has the cultural support to be courageous enough to risk failure and mistakes for the sake of personal growth while developing cutting edge software.

She continued to explain the craftsmanship of the software development team where quality is encouraged more than speed. This craftsmanship requires the support of internal team mentors who help younger programmers and that even more experienced programmers must seek out mentors for continual learning.

nCino has developed an internal company community inspired by the leadership by CEO Pierre Naude. This sense of community means that everyone is respected where even young employees are encouraged to speak up without fear. This community feeling of course includes fun as the young staff enjoys regularly scheduled beer and pizza parties with nerf gun fights.

Hustle in comfort?

Courage, craftsmanship, community and fun creates a sense of comfort. The sense from Dory’s remarks, was that nCino is surely a work hard and play hard work environment. Yes, every company talks about work culture but nCino seems to live their words.

  • VIDEO: Watch an nCino overview at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AyBKbGtt27I

Dory continued to portray how the workplace environment at nCino leads to a sense of safety that I have never heard described at a hard driving software company with real results. This is psychological safety or support for failure. “Programmers are given more at bats if they happen to strikeout” while taking risks to be better everyday.

She continued by saying that even she admits mistakes at regularly scheduled team meetings. She has to explain the big idea, what new techniques she tried to make the software better, an explanation of why it failed and what she learned in the process. This vulnerability allows younger employees to see that short term fast failures are okay while continually creating better products.

Team of misfits are #winning

So how does a fast growing company attract and more importantly retain talent to Wilmington, which does not have deep tech talent at the beach?

To make her point with a sly smile, Dory showed a quick section of the 1989 movie Major League where the Cleveland Indians are having tryout at Spring training and these “misfits” and “has been over the hill” baseball players keep showing up played by actors such as Tom Berenger, Charlie Sheen, Wesley Snipes, Corbin Bernsen and coach / manager James Gammon, with a voice only 30 years of smoking cigarettes can cause. The point was that nCino has found talent in a variety of places and the company emphasizes diversity among their employees.

So with the varied background of these programmers, what are the elements of a successful team?

Dory repeated the need to provide a psychologically safe place for risk taking. She expanded by saying that they put an emphasis on hiring the right people, putting them in the right conditions and to inspire and support. The ingrained nCino process is around the cycle of transparency, inspections and change for continuous improvement of the software for the banking industry.

What is next? Apiture and more

nCino and their employees are vital to the future of Wilmington. nCino is made up of people that economic developers need to wake up to as the future of their region while they learn tech and entrepreneurial skills. Someday soon, nCino will either have an IPO (Live Oak Bank is on NASDAQ) or be acquired and these employees will have the personal resources to become potential entrepreneurs and angel investors just like what has been going on in Raleigh / Durham for the last 30 years.

By the way, Live Oak Bank recently started another company with the First Data Corporation in Wilmington called Apiture.

Stay tuned for details about next year’s Cucalorus Connect so you can witness this economic progress first hand while visiting the coast of North Carolina.

Perhaps it is time for North Carolina to learn what the Wilmington innovation economy is doing the other four days of the week and not just Friday, Saturday and Sunday for the tourism industry.

Editor’s note: Jim Roberts is the founder of the Network for Entrepreneurs in Wilmington (NEWilm.com), the Manager of the Wilmington Angels for Local Entrepreneurs (WALE) and Community Development Manager for Bunker Labs RDU. Jim has been a regular contributor to WRALTechWire and others for the last 17 years while working in entrepreneur development in North Carolina. He can be found on twitter at @RedSpireUSNC