We have written-out team values to help us make decisions, not codify platitudes. These reflect attainable, day-to-day behaviors that we expect from each other.
We should endeavor to bring our A game to everything we do, and hold a high bar for ourselves and others.
Will any of us ever be perfectly “stunning” every day? No. But it’s about the aspiration, and the journey, and never letting “good enough” be good enough.
This shows up in hiring, by holding a high bar for candidates, and only bringing in extraordinary **colleagues. This shows up in product development, by making sure we’re proud of everything we’re shipping. And it shows up in how we work with customers, by making sure we are treating every interaction with care and respect.
We share honest and open feedback when others aren’t holding the bar at the right level.
We’re a small, money-losing startup – so time is not our ally, and we need to move with urgency. Our ability to iterate, ship, and build the future faster is our license to existence. We have a bias toward urgency.
But just as important as speed is considering how we’re spending our time. This means focusing, doing a few things at a time with speed and quality. Sometimes, in fact, “slow is smooth, and smooth is fast”.
Are we doing tasks well, or just quickly? Are we taking extra time in the right places to make something great (stunning, even?) We should move with a sense of urgency – but with a sense of intentionality, too.
This value also applies to our product! Performance matters, and speed should be a selling point. We can’t tolerate things feeling slow – because our users won’t.
This could easily be titled “psychological safety” or “growth mindset”, but they’ve become such overwashed buzzwords as to have lost all their color, so instead we’re going with a Dune quote.
We have an ambitious vision. We’re taking on a big market, with large, well-established competitors. There are many unsolved problems ahead of us – and ample reasons for fear!
But to succeed, we’ll need to be bold, unafraid of bigger bets – and the associated prospect of failure. When we’re in a threat response, we’re cognitively impaired, and generally make terrible calls. All of our worst decisions have flowed from some moment of acute distress.
The ability to recognize and regulate fear – a supremely powerful emotion – is a true superpower, and something we all need to cultivate and encourage. Ambition and creativity are powerful allies; anxiety and insecurity are moral enemies.