Compliance at Office Hours

At Office Hours, we work with many of the largest and most influential venture capital firms, consulting firms and technology companies in the world. Many of our employees have joined us from similar firms (like a16z, Bain & Company, EY-Parthenon, Affirm, AlphaSights, and others) to build a better expert network experience.

For these reasons and many more, compliance is in our DNA — it lies at the heart of everything we do.

We recognize that our clients have unique compliance needs, so we’ve built a robust compliance program that provides clients with customized control over their experience on Office Hours, and ultimately, peace of mind that consultations are being conducted in a safe and compliant manner.

Everything in our compliance program tracks back to our four core pillars:

Core Pillars of Compliance at Office Hours

Confidentiality

Confidentiality is a foundational element of safe and compliant conversations on Office Hours. Many of our clients come to Office Hours to analyze companies and industries, vet investment strategies and upcoming deals, or help address their own customers’ most pressing business challenges.

We are committed to protecting all of those conversations from any unauthorized disclosure, so we place firm confidentiality obligations across our entire network and our company.

Experts are subject to strict confidentiality obligations under our Terms of Service and we use regular training both with experts and internally to reinforce confidentiality obligations. Attestations help ensure strict adherence to those obligations prior to every conversation. And clients can also choose whether to utilize anonymous calls to ensure total confidentiality over their personal identifiable information.

Identity

In order to facilitate high-value conversations, it’s crucial to be able to trust that you know exactly who you are speaking to, and what they know. Office Hours verifies the work experiences, qualifications, knowledge areas and professional affiliations of every expert on our platform. Every expert also maintains a profile page that cross-references numerous online data sources as well as our own knowledge graph to ensure you know exactly who each expert truly is and what they are knowledgeable about.

We also continuously monitor call feedback, advisor reviews, usage and quality ratings and other platform data in order to ensure consistently high-quality and compliant consultations.

Protection from Prohibited Information

Protecting against any disclosure of material non-public information (MNPI) and other forms of prohibited information is fundamental to providing a safe and compliant experience before, during and after each interaction on Office Hours. We provide interactive training on MNPI, insider trading, protected third-party and employer information, and other categories of prohibited information. And our experts must provide multiple forms of approval and acceptance of their obligations not to disclose any such information.

A major part of our vetting and confirmation of experts’ identities involves multiple confirmatory steps of their employment, and both manual and automatic tools to raise flags around public-company affiliation, conflicts of interest or other potential areas that require close compliance review. We also offer extensive monitoring tools during Office Hours consultations, including the ability for clients’ compliance or authorized third-party partners to chaperone conversations in ‘incognito mode’. These real-time monitoring features also give clients the ability to intervene or even stop a call in flight, providing an extra safeguard against any disclosure of prohibited information. We also provide secure and private transcript services to our clients, giving both business and compliance teams their own private library of their conversations for continued use and review.

Critically, we never publish or share these private transcripts with any unauthorized parties, and each client has exclusive access and use of their own records — they belong to you.

Privacy and data security

Clients and experts both trust Office Hours to handle sensitive information securely, so we take that responsibility extremely seriously. We follow industry-leading security practices, and are certified SOC2 Type II compliant. We use threat monitoring and penetration testing to ensure our systems stay secure, and fully encrypt all data at rest and in transit. Most importantly, our personnel follow secure practices, including fully encrypted devices, multi-factor authentication and regular cybersecurity training.

Interested in learning more?

If you’d like to learn more about our compliance program or sign up for a trial of Office Hours, book a demo below.

Also - we’re hiring, so don’t hesitate to reach out to learn more about our team, approach and open roles! We look forward to hearing from you.