I want to have a concrete piece of writing I can look back on that details the business values that resonate with me, and that I would be proud to have my name attached to an organization that follows them.
Core Values 🔗︎
Killer hospitality 🔗︎
Borrow from the ideas of “Unreasonable Hospitality” and make our customers feel like wealthy people do at fine establishments.
- “Manage 95 percent of your business down to the penny; spend the last 5 percent ‘foolishly.’” The last 5% is where we create the best guest experience & take care of our customers like no one else does.
- customer service with super fast response times & they are empowered to really help the customer, not just pass them around like a fish. This goes in hand with “Accountability sinks are our enemy”.
- Would need controls in place to enable this and well-built auditability of actions in systems, but I think that’s a worthwhile price. Also a lot of trust in your people.
Simplicity-first 🔗︎
- Pricing for customers shouldn’t take a lot of thought to understand before pulling out their credit card.
- Our systems should be straightforward to maintain & easy for team members to contribute changes to, or make big refactors if that’s what is needed. This is not just for software, but the entire business is made up of inter-connected systems.
- Complexity is one of our enemies, because by the time you notice it’s a problem, it’s too late.
Under-engineered 🔗︎
- The simplest automation to change is a documented list of manual tasks with clear instructions.
- Automating stuff sounds attractive, but is a danger because of complexity and reducing maintainability. We should start with the simplest form (manual steps) first, and only step to the next level once we can’t handle the pain.
- The whole team understands if we are “tech-enabled” business, or if the tech is the business. If it’s just tech-enabled, investing way more energy into using cutting-edge stuff won’t give us any advantage, and more than likely will make our lives more complex.
Nimble & beholden to no-one 🔗︎
- We are adaptable & nimble - we don’t let ourselves get encumbered with excess baggage - be it tech debt, emotional, bad hires, etc. We want to be able to move quickly and not end up in molasses. “Simplicity-first” & “Underengineered” contribute to this quality.
- We will not get over-extended and become beholden to external forces - whether that is VCs who gave us money, economic troubles, or a choice that requires strong morals. We should be able to weather difficult circumstances or choices and stomach a hit to our profits without the ship sinking.
Sustainable & fair business model 🔗︎
- Pricing is high, but fair - I want high-end customers to get way more value than they put in and misers to avoid us because we aren’t cheap.
- I want to charge a price that is sustainable for the business to continue.
- I want to create WAY more value than we capture, so that customers find it a no brainer to use us.
- I want to offer a generous free trial/tier and refunds - products should be sticky because they’re great, not because customers feel trapped.
Anti-bikeshedding 🔗︎
Bikeshedding is “our tendency to devote a disproportionate amount of our time to menial and trivial matters while leaving important matters unattended”.
- We will tackle the important things, even if it’s uncomfortable.
- Our team can leverage the Pareto 80/20 rule to help us focus the majority of our time on the big shifts that actually move the needle. Much better than obsessing over tiny optimizations that get amortized if you just make a larger change.
Security & privacy conscious 🔗︎
We treat our customers & their data the way we’d want ours treated, and do better than what the regulators require. We will follow the “spirit” of the regulation to secure data, rather than just “oh, we installed Crowdstrike, check the box”.
Thoughts that didn’t quite fit yet 🔗︎
It goes against “Simplicity-first” if I write a million core values, but it turns out I have more feelings on this topic than I originally guessed. Onward!
- Accountability sinks are our enemy. Also known as “Not MY job”
.
- Every team member is empowered to either fix an issue they see, or knows where to raise it to others if they don’t have time. If things are falling through the cracks, especially customer-facing, our processes are failing.
- Meetings - oh gosh, meetings. So much collective human time is wasted in meetings that go nowhere except to open up a reason for another meeting. I value your time as a human too much to waste the precious minutes of your life.
- Default to async communication - give people time to actually process ideas. Meetings are a last resort.
- In the limited cases you need a meeting, they must be time-boxed, and have a clear purpose & clear outcome.
- We will never IPO for the sake of a payday, and ideally not ever (leaving a tiny crack in the door instead of a blanket “NEVER”, in case I’m not wise enough to see positive benefits). The stock market has become severely disconnected from the actual value that a company provides, and it’s unclear to me how a company really benefits from it vs just raising money privately. You see so many companies driven into the ground by optimizing around short-term changes in the stock price, and I don’t want to see something I’ve worked on become a 2024 Boeing or one of the companies that private equity firms hollowed out. I’m leaving a tiny opening instead of saying a blanket “NEVER”, in case I’m not wise enough to see positive benefits yet. I wouldn’t switch until it’s the last possible recourse, though.