Principles as Tools

Me and my co founders, we're huge believers in principles. I think we see them a little bit differently than others maybe in that we actually see them more as tools than values. Right. And I think it's easy to dismiss these things as sort of like motivational posters that hang around the office, but we've really approached them as tools. And so we've created this system called the public principles, which is really, you can kind of see it as a little bit like rules of engagement of how the company wants people to act. And I think what's very interesting is that, I mean, I think we actually, this is one of the first thing we did when to build a company. We were like, hey, I think both being sort of second time founders here, we sort of had been through some things of like just, I think for the first time we just jumped both into product, the two of us. And then only later through the journey, you realize building a product is 1/10 of building a company and there's many other things that kind of go into it. And so we really wanted to get it right from the outset this time. And so really it was just this notion of, hey, building a company. At the end of the day, it's the product of making millions of decisions. The more consistency you can have between those decisions I think will correlate to how successful you are. And so really. But you don't want to make all the decisions yourself. Nothing. Like you cannot make millions of decisions, decisions over even a decade. Right. It's just not going to happen. So the principles were designed to give people sort of a framework for how to make those decisions and how to operate within the company. And so an example, principle one is honesty kills bullshit. Sorry for excuse my French, but that's, and like that's a principle that really comes up every day. And it's been something that when you're growing a company really quickly, I mean, to give you an idea, I think we were like 20 people when lockdown hit. Now we're over 100. So we've definitely had some interesting scaling challenges as well. But I think by and large the principles have actually helped us get through that in many ways. And so when you're sort of meeting someone that you never met before and like being really honest with people can be kind of difficult. Like it's not necessarily something that comes easy to most people. And so really these principles serve to give people the toolkit to just be honest. Right. So the way people will say things like, hey, quick, principle one, I think X, Y and Z. And in that moment, it's a little bit like, you know, that I'm not trying to be a jerk right now. I'm actually not trying to sort of like, I'm just trying to act in the way the company wants me to act, which at this moment means just being honest about something. A lot of the principles go hand in hand. Principle two is feedback comes from a place of care. So I think those two principles, for instance, is an interesting duo and a very powerful one, I would add. And that also just serves to keep in mind what feedback actually is, because a lot of people, I think the definition is suggestions for improvement, but a lot of people just take a vague translation to that and use it as an excuse to kind of say anything, I think. And so as you go down the list, there are more and more principles that really are tools that you can drop in conversation, on slack, in meetings, etc. That sort of helps you, helps other people on the receiving end as well, really understand where you're coming from when you're saying those things. And it's a living, living document. It's in its third version already. And so we actually have a quarterly review of these things and try to sort of keep it up to speed as the company grows and evolves.