This content was created by GHION.AI . This content was uploaded by GHION.AI . This is a YouTube interview titled "Mission Matters Later - Qasar Younis (Applied Intuition)" (recorded May 1, 2024). The excerpt is a two‑speaker interview/discussion—an interviewer and Qasar Younis—focused on company mission and values, hiring and culture, and priorities for early-stage companies. Younis emphasizes that startups should prioritize product‑market fit and building a working business before spending time on mission/values, describes values as operating principles that drive recruiting and behavior (e.g., in‑office policy, global offices, Bay Area AI focus), and suggests codifying values only after the product is accepted by the market.
Chapters
We've been working on mission, values, and all those things. And all of a sudden we came across, okay, what's next? And I wanted to know if you've come across that point. How do you get people behind? I've read a great book by Simon Sinek. He talks about a just cause. Do you have one for your company? How do you go about that?
Yeah, typically companies, again, gross generalizations, are mission-oriented or values-oriented. Our company historically has been a very values-oriented company. Values is another way of saying operating principles. This is how we run the company on a day-to-day basis. When the company was about 10 people, we had $10 million of business, which was kind of unbelievable to us. It's still unbelievable to me now. And we decided, hey, let's codify what's working so as the company, again, building an organization against human behaviors, we'll have a framework to work against. We codified those 10 values. If you know anybody who works at Applied, Like those are the operating principles that we run the company by. And those have created a type of person that is attracted. There's a self-selection. It's even in our recruiting process, which is like, this is the type of person that we want who wants these types of values in their day-to-day work. For example, this is not a value, but it's an output of values. We are a 5-day in-office company, which by the way, used to be norm pre-COVID, but now it's like, an exotic reality. We are a truly international company. We have 8 offices globally. We work truly globally. And so, you find people who self-select in and out of that. Obviously we're a Bay Area AI company, so there's people who are attracted to that technical problem. And so, the values help with that. I think when companies get really larger and you look at like Elon Musk and his companies, there's this, broader mission thing. What I would say to you as a small company, none of that shit matters. You know what matters? Making sure your product is accepted by the market. All this other stuff, this is like, it's like decorations, you know, on a, on a car. Your goal is to get the engine to turn on and to start, you know, moving the body. And so I would say spend zero minutes on your values and missions and try to get an operating business going, and when it does, then reflect on why it is and then codify those, because the values are different for each type of business. The consumer business values are different than enterprise business.
