The best company trivia questions are about your company: the year it shipped its first product, what it was called before, who employee number one was. Fill in 12 of the 30 slots below, confirm each answer where the template says to look, and run it in a 15-minute all-hands slot. Twenty tiebreakers with verified answers are at the bottom.
Ask what only your company can answer
Most lists of company trivia are general knowledge with a work theme: famous logos, office movies, which CEO founded what. That is fine for a team social. At an all-hands it misses the point, because the room already shares something no other room does, and a question about it gets a reaction no question about Steve Jobs will.
The rule for every slot: one answer, checkable, held somewhere inside the company. "What year were we founded?" passes. "What is our culture like?" is a survey, not a question.
Then mix the rounds. Pick two or three from each of the five below rather than ten from one. A quiz that is all origin stories is won by whoever has been there since the garage, and everyone who joined this year stops playing by question four. The numbers round is the leveller: an estimate rewards a good guess, not tenure.
30 fill-in company trivia questions, in five rounds
Swap [Company] and [product] for your own names. Each line underneath is where the answer lives. If you run it as multiple choice, the wrong options are where the fun is: use the names the founders nearly picked, the city where the second office almost opened, the real headcount from two years ago.
Round 1: Where we came from
Pick 2 or 3. The founder call covers most of these in one go.
- 1.
In which year was [Company] founded?
Where to find it: The about page, then the incorporation record. They often differ by a year, so decide which one counts and say so.
- 2.
What was [Company] called before it was [Company]?
Where to find it: A founder, or the oldest invoices and domain registrations finance still has.
- 3.
Where was the very first office: a flat, a garage, a coworking desk, or a café?
Where to find it: A founder. Ask for a photo; it makes a better reveal than the answer.
- 4.
Which year did [Company] ship its first product?
Where to find it: The first entry in the changelog, the first press release, or the app store version history.
- 5.
What was the first thing [Company] ever sold, and for how much?
Where to find it: The first invoice in the accounting system, sorted oldest first.
- 6.
Who was the first person hired who was not a founder?
Where to find it: The HR system, sorted by start date. Ask them first, then use their answer to 'what was day one like' as the reveal.
Round 2: What we make
Pick 2 or 3. Check with sales before naming any customer on screen.
- 1.
Who was [Company]'s first paying customer?
Where to find it: The CRM or billing system, sorted by created date.
- 2.
What was the internal codename for [product] before launch?
Where to find it: Slack or Teams search for 'codename', old project board names, or the engineering lead.
- 3.
Which feature do customers use more than any other?
Where to find it: The product analytics dashboard. Product managers will know it without looking.
- 4.
Which product or feature did [Company] retire, and in which year?
Where to find it: The changelog, or a chat search for 'sunset' and 'deprecate'.
- 5.
Outside our home market, which country has the most customers?
Where to find it: A billing or CRM report grouped by country.
- 6.
What do customers ask support about more than anything else?
Where to find it: The support tool's tag or category report for the last quarter.
Round 3: By the numbers
Pick 2 or 3. Closest guess wins, which is where new starters beat veterans.
- 1.
How many people work at [Company] today?
Where to find it: The HR system's headcount, on the morning of the quiz.
- 2.
How many countries do [Company] employees live in?
Where to find it: The HR system, grouped by work location.
- 3.
How many support tickets did we close last quarter?
Where to find it: The support tool's reporting page.
- 4.
How many repositories are in our code organisation?
Where to find it: The organisation's page on GitHub, GitLab or wherever the code lives.
- 5.
How many messages were posted in our chat workspace last month?
Where to find it: The admin analytics page in Slack or Teams. Ask whoever administers it.
- 6.
How much coffee, in kilos or pods, did the office get through last year?
Where to find it: The office manager's order history, or the expense category in the finance tool.
Round 4: The place we work
Pick 2 or 3. For a remote company, swap the office for the chat workspace.
- 1.
Which of these is not one of [Company]'s values?
Where to find it: The handbook. Write one convincing fake to sit beside three real ones.
- 2.
Apart from the general channel, which chat channel has the most members?
Where to find it: The channel browser, sorted by member count.
- 3.
What is the biggest meeting room called, and what was it named after?
Where to find it: The room booking system, then whoever named it.
- 4.
What was the theme of last year's party?
Where to find it: The events channel or the photo album from the night.
- 5.
What is the most ordered team lunch?
Where to find it: The office manager or the catering account's order history.
- 6.
In which year did [Company] open its second office, or go fully remote?
Where to find it: A founder, the lease records, or the announcement in the chat archive.
Round 5: The people
Pick 2 or 3. Opt-in only: collect these with a form a week before and use nothing that was not volunteered.
- 1.
Apart from the founders, who has worked here longest?
Where to find it: The HR system, sorted by start date. Ask them before you put their name up.
- 2.
Which team has grown the most since January?
Where to find it: Headcount by department in the HR system, compared with the start of the year.
- 3.
Which colleague has [volunteered fact: run a marathon, been on TV, met a president]?
Where to find it: An opt-in form sent a week out. Three plausible colleagues as the wrong options.
- 4.
What was [executive]'s first ever job?
Where to find it: Ask them directly. It is usually the question that gets the biggest laugh.
- 5.
Whose pet is this?
Where to find it: The pets channel, with the owner's permission, and four owners as the options.
- 6.
Which team shipped [the launch everyone remembers this year]?
Where to find it: The launch announcement in the chat archive. Credit the whole team, not one name.
Leave these out, however tempting
Revenue, salaries, funding, valuation and layoffs. Nobody's age, health or relationships. And nothing the room would be learning for the first time: a quiz question is the worst possible way to announce that a product is being cut.
Collect the answers a week out
One person owns the quiz. They book 15 minutes with a founder or the longest-serving employee, ask for an HR export of start dates and headcount, and do the chat searches themselves. Most of the 30 slots come out of those three sources in an afternoon.
Confirm every answer in a second place. Founding stories drift: the founder remembers the year they started work, the incorporation record says the year after, and someone in the third row will know. If two sources disagree, pick one, and put "according to the incorporation record" in the question.
Message everyone named in a question before the day, not during it. Being the answer on a screen in front of 200 colleagues is fun if you saw it coming.
20 numeric tiebreakers, closest wins
With the timer on, the speed bonus usually separates the scores. With it off, every correct answer scores the same and ties are common. Either way, keep one back for the prize. Take a written number from each tied player or table, closest wins, no conferring. These are all about work, so they fit the theme, and every answer was checked.
Tiebreakers
Read one, take a number from each tied team, closest wins. Keep the rest for next quarter.
- 1.
How many employees did Instagram have when Facebook agreed to buy it in 2012?
Answer: 13
- 2.
How many employees did WhatsApp have when Facebook agreed to buy it in 2014?
Answer: 55
- 3.
Kongō Gumi, a Japanese builder often called the world's oldest company, was founded in which year?
Answer: 578
- 4.
In which year did Ford move its factory workers to a five-day, 40-hour week?
Answer: 1926
- 5.
In which year was the first Fortune 500 list published?
Answer: 1955
- 6.
In which year was the first version of Microsoft Excel released?
Answer: 1985, for the Macintosh
- 7.
In which year was PowerPoint first released?
Answer: 1987
- 8.
In which year did Ray Tomlinson send the first email between two computers?
Answer: 1971
- 9.
In which year was the first SMS text message sent?
Answer: 1992. It said "Merry Christmas".
- 10.
In which year did 3M launch Post-it Notes across the United States?
Answer: 1980
- 11.
In which year was the first barcode scanned at a supermarket checkout?
Answer: 1974, a pack of Wrigley's Juicy Fruit gum
- 12.
In which year did Amazon sell its first book?
Answer: 1995
- 13.
In which year was Apple founded?
Answer: 1976
- 14.
In which year did Tim Berners-Lee first propose the World Wide Web?
Answer: 1989
- 15.
How many sheets of paper are in a ream?
Answer: 500
- 16.
How long is the long side of a sheet of A4 paper, in millimetres?
Answer: 297
- 17.
How many keys are on a standard full-size US keyboard?
Answer: 104
- 18.
How many hours does someone working 40 hours a week for 52 weeks work in a year?
Answer: 2,080
- 19.
How many floors does the Burj Khalifa have?
Answer: 163
- 20.
How many floors does the Empire State Building have?
Answer: 102
Run it in a 15-minute slot
Twelve questions take about six minutes at 30 seconds each including the reveal, and getting everyone joined takes three. Budget 15 so the reveals are not rushed. Put it at the end of the all-hands, not the start: people arrive late, and a quiz is a better final item than Q&A that nobody asks a question in.
Paper does not work at this size. Somebody has to mark 30 sheets while the meeting moves on, and the remote half of the company cannot play at all. Run it live instead: the question goes on the shared screen, everyone answers on their phone, and the scoreboard builds itself. Build it in a free trivia maker, with your real answer and three near misses for each slot.
Two limits to know before you build it. A free game takes 15 players, so at a bigger all-hands play one phone per table or team, named after the team. And free games are public, so anything internal belongs in a private game, which is part of Plus along with games of up to 100 players. If the quiz is for the December party rather than a Tuesday all-hands, the office Christmas quiz questions are a ready-made four-round set.