Naumann wants Calico to be the last place where his employees work. He is adamant about preserving the qualities that attract employees to Calico in the first place. Cardinal frames the Calico approach this way: "Recruit your people every single day, because they have their pick of 50 jobs elsewhere." The company strives to offer its employees what its e-commerce applications offer its clients: customized solutions. As a result, employees feel that they can do their best work at Calico -- that the company enables them to develop not just professionally but also personally. "Wherever possible, we try to get wildly creative," says Lynn Corsiglia. "That way, employees feel like the company is tailored somewhat to their needs."

If Calico is to continue attracting and retaining top performers, it needs to be flexible about telecommuting and other work arrangements. That's why it allows one top developer to work from his home in Oregon, and why, for engineers based in downtown San Jose, Tuesday and Thursday are telecommuting days. Unlike the stereotypical startup, Calico doesn't have a staff of single twentysomethings who are eager to pull all-nighters. Most employees are in their thirties, with spouses, children, and other obligations outside the office, so they want to work for a company that gives them lots of options. "Bright, educated, experienced people who want balance in their lives are the kind of people we don't want to be excluding," Corsiglia says.

For Calico, one key to accommodating alternative work arrangements is providing staffers with state-of-the-art technology. Employees stay connected through the iWeb, an intranet that contains material such as hr forms, lists of key objectives for the quarter, and product notebooks that trace the development of each application. The iWeb began with little structure and grew organically, says Doug Stein, 36, IT manager. Various departments simply posted content that was important to them. To drum up traffic on their sites, some departments even awarded prizes. The result is an intranet that reflects the professional and personal sides of company life. Employees can view digital photos taken last year during the company's IPO road show, or listen to a sound file of a colleague's piano recital. To facilitate navigation of the service, Stein is working to standardize its various sections, and he also plans to add a customization feature. Other technology-enabled solutions have emerged as well: Using Calico Loyalty Builder, for example, employees can arrange to receive content of their choosing, including price-change alerts and schedule updates.

When a startup doubles in size in one year, as Calico did last year, communication becomes an ongoing challenge. At a recent executive staff meeting, Naumann went to a whiteboard and mapped out his latest view of the industry. When someone said that he had never seen the sketch before, Naumann was floored: Hadn't everyone seen it by now? Naumann was already doing a lot to promote communication -- through email, voice mail, bimonthly companywide meetings, and iWeb postings. But he now sees that he needs to do more. "I can't say that I know everyone by name anymore, and that bugs me," says Naumann. Taking a cue from executives at Cisco, he has begun hosting monthly breakfasts with employees whose birthdays fall in that month. These informal gatherings put him in contact with a cross section of the company. Instead of making a standard presentation, he listens to what is on people's minds. At the February breakfast, someone suggested a new approach to mergers and acquisitions. "It's a very cool idea," Naumann says. "And it reminded me that we may think that we have our ears to the ground, but we have to keep tapping into our employees' ideas."

One sign of Calico's maturity as a company is that its people aren't likely to forget that lesson. "It's not like we have the attitude 'We're so smart that we don't have to worry,' " says Bill Unger. "We're on a journey, and we have a long way to go. We recognize that sometimes it'll rain, sometimes it'll snow, and sometimes the road conditions will be against us. But we've planned for those things. We've built this company to travel a long way."

Chuck Salter (csalter@fastcompany.com), a Fast Company senior writer, is based in Baltimore. Contact Alan Naumann by email (anaumann@calico.com), or visit Calico Commerce Inc. on the Web (www.calico.com).

Sidebar: Starter Kit

Maybe you work for a startup that's trying to grow up fast. Or maybe you work for a grown-up company that's trying to move as fast as a startup. Either way, Calico Commerce offers valuable lessons on how to build an enduring business.

Get off to a fast start.

New Calico employees enroll in "Fast Track," a crash course on the company: its industry, its products, its competitors. They are also assigned to a colleague who helps them get acclimated to the company on an informal basis.