BetterUp’s Six Core Values

There are canonically at BetterUp— actually, this is one of the earliest things Eddie and I had the privilege of setting, and we haven't changed them. And it's not that we're not open to changing them, it just seems like they haven't need— they still seem timeless. And, you know, employees and our customers still rally around them. There's 6 of them. But before I do that, I'll say they really come from 3 kind of core aspirations we had in building the company that were, you know, I think kind of the holding context for the values. And the first is, you know, I had been in Silicon Valley, and remember, this is 2010-ish, a different era, right? The era of social, right? A lot of different technologies. You were here, Toby, were in vogue then. And, you know, we were starting to see the rise of the gig economy. And I had grown up originally in Dallas. And for me and for Eddie, who grew up in Peru, one of our first big aspirations about BetterUp is we really wanted to create something that would be able to be accessible for as many people as possible. right? And how do we create something that appeals to people from all different walks of life, both from a diversity standpoint, yes, across factors such as, you know, nationality, country, gender, creed, all that, but also cognitively, how people live and learn. And so that was the first core aspiration, is we really wanted to make something that would appeal to someone in Alabama as much as it could appeal to someone in New York City, right? And at the time, there wasn't a lot of the new technology we found that, you know, my friends in Dallas would have felt relevant to their life, maybe outside of Instagram. Honestly, right? And so that was a core inspiration and aspiration that informed our values. The second is, and this is a little audacious, but, you know, for us, I'm a big believer in like what I call the old Silicon Valley, like the Silicon Valley of Steve Jobs and before, where it was like the crazy ideas of how are we, you know, I think Elon Musk and a few other entrepreneurs kind of exclusively do this today, but where are the true moonshots, like literally get to the moon? Um, we went through a decade of great innovation, but a lot of it was around entertainment, and that's great. I started my career at Disney, love entertainment. But for us, there was this really aspiration of, you know, one aspect of the human experience we are not innovating around is maybe the most profound aspect of the human experience, which is how do we actually improve the human condition? And if we can actually help people access greatest levels of flourishing, then that would be like, that would be the zenith of technology. And that sounds real woo-woo and really crazy. But as we talk more, there's a whole science around this. This stuff has actually now been figured out how to do, just no one's doing it. right? And so that was a huge aspiration. We didn't want to just make something like coaching more accessible, more affordable. Sure, we actually wanted to make it better, where if you're a coach or a therapist in BetterUp, you are more effective, you are more impactful by using the technology than you would be in your private practice. And then the third component of that is the opportunity to create a huge brand, right, around making it cool and making it something that you identify with related to self-actualizing. And so the values that came out of that were really 6. They were courage, both moral and what we call managerial courage and taking big bets. Craftsmanship, right? We have to have a caliber experience bar. If people are going to trust us with their blind spots, their deep, dark fears, their hopes, dreams, aspirations, this stuff can't look like a scam, right? It's got to be really elegant. It's got to be really stately. I always tell the team, when I was at Disney, the amount of energy and effort we would put into a churro cart is incredible, but that's to sell churros. Like, if we're not putting 10 times that into an application where people are pouring out about their relationship with their spouse or manager, we've missed the mark. Um, then empathy is huge. As you all know it from the D School, innovation starts with empathy. Um, as coaches, we're really in the business of empathy. Uh, and then zest and playfulness. And so those values today continue to really guide— oh, and grit is the other one. Those 6 values continue to guide and shape the company.