Our Mission, Values and Culture

First Principle: Be a good partner.

 

In good times and through rough patches, we want to be trusted partners.

 

(Note that partners can be business sellers, customers, colleagues, investors or other important counterparties)

 

• Integrity

  • Do the right thing, especially when it’s hard to do

  • Admit your mistakes openly and freely

  • Treat others the way you would want to be treated, even if they don’t do the same

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• Communication

  • Share negative news quickly and proactively, to build trust and empower solutions

  • Provide timely, actionable, respectful constructive feedback to colleagues

  • Speak truth to those senior to you, and seek truth from those to whom you are senior

  • Speak up if you don’t understand something or you disagree

  • Blend humble confidence with realistic optimism

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• Selflessness

  • Proactively put others before yourself, especially your partners and the company

  • Strive to understand others’ point of view, extend trust, maintain empathy during adversity, and endeavor to “take the high road”

  • Make time to help others, and find reward in doing so

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Second Principle: Act like an owner.

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Many people want to be an owner, far fewer are willing to make the requisite sacrifices to do it.

 

• Fiduciary

  • Act in the best interest of the company, always, treating the company’s resources with frugality as if they were your own

  • Prioritize your focus on the most important problems that are hardest or impossible to solve without you

  • Be skeptical of politics, create value for the company by destroying bottlenecks, instead of extracting value for yourself by being one

  • Question actions inconsistent with our values

 

• Judgement

  • Root decisions in empirical information and informed perspective

  • Understand that while everyone has an opinion, the ones informed by experience and evidence should be weighted more heavily in your decision making

  • Don’t be afraid to make and own a decision, and choose action over requiring consensus

 

• Synthesis

  • Embrace being contrarian to support better decisions and outcomes

  • Actively solicit and foster diversity of thought, perspective and background

  • Be open minded in search of great ideas, and know they can come from anywhere

 

 

Third Principle: Relentlessly pursue better.

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Strive for and enjoy the journey of continuous improvement. 

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• Evolution

  • Have the intellectual capacity, curiosity and desire to learn quickly and improve

  • Solve problems creatively, viewing adversity as the mother of invention

  • Harness these traits to help continuously improve yourself and the company

 

• Drive

  • Hold yourself accountable, first, before others

  • Have the work ethic to make it happen, deeply believe in “earning it”

  • Stay hungry and cultivate personal motivators

  • Own your own growth, seek feedback, and recognize failure as an inevitable part of your growth

 

• Impact

  • Do what you commit to, on time, every time

  • Focus on results over process, and embrace creativity to get you there

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It’s easy to write admirable values, it’s harder to live them. Our full Mission, Values and Culture document (download at top of page) describes vignettes of how we strive to live by these values through our culture.