How To Scale While Staying True to Your Mission and Values with Max Lytvyn, Grammarly

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Do with seeking funding is pretending to share the values of their investors. They learn everything you can learn about people they're going to speak with, which is a good practice. Do your homework always. And then they adapt their pitch so much that it becomes basically reiteration of the values of somebody you're talking with. You have to keep in mind that if you do that and the deal go through, you'll have to keep pretending for next five to ten years. I need some traction. You need some traction. Let's get some traction.

Hey, what's up Innovators, entrepreneurs, visionaries and disruptors. This is your Traction podcast host Lloyd Lobo. We're a community of over a hundred thousand people just like yourself on a mission to help you get the methods, the money and the madness to explode your business growth. Featuring stories and tactical advice straight from those who've done it before, like Shopify, Twilio, Asana, and many more.

I'm a big fan of Grammarly. Part of our onboarding process as we bring on new salespeople and new team members is use a tool to fix your grammar. Don't project the wrong image by making spelling mistakes or grammatic errors and so on. So I'm a big fan. Max bootstrapped the company for 10 years, got it to tens of millions of users and they recently raised 110 million. They're on fire. One of the hottest companies on the web. Please give it up for Max Litwin, founder of Grammarly. Good morning everyone. Happy to be here. And today I'm gonna talk about mission values and how to use them to power growth of a company, how to use them to scale a company and grow it faster and not just forego this opportunity to use these valuable tools. So a little bit about myself. I'm Max Letch, co founder of Grammarly. Started Grammarly in 2009 after exit with previous company and for those who haven't used Grammarly, it's a communication system that makes your writing clear and effective everywhere you type. So it corrects mistakes. But in addition to that, it attempts to make your message clear and understood. And it also makes your communication more effective, helping you accomplish the goals that you set out to accomplish with whatever you write. Grammarly is about 200 people now, over 10 million daily active users. And we were bootstrapped for about nine years, and we raised 110 million of growth equity funding about a year ago. So how do we use mission values to scale the company and to grow the company effectively? First, I want to talk about some things that people do wrong or just some things that you should not be doing first. Just don't check the box. It's very easy to think of mission values as something that's not very useful, not very valuable, and just come up with something bland and move on. Don't do that. That's a missed opportunity. Start a cult. That's another thing that we see sometimes people come up with something grandiose plastered everywhere on the walls, and make everyone recite it whenever they come to the office. It may work for a very small, very dedicated initial group, but once you start scaling the company, nobody's gonna believe it. If somebody wants to join a cult, they will join a real cult. So, yeah, so don't do that. And not doing it at all. Seeing bad examples of company missions, company visions, values, it's just easy to fall into disbelief, like, oh, this is useless. I'm not just not gonna bother with it. And I was firmly in that camp until I dug in and tried to figure out how to do it. Along with my co founders, we dedicated some time and actually made it work. So how did we do it? First, I wanted to talk about what they are, to give some kind of definitions, what they are. In our mind, values is something that you accept as good and right by default. This is good, and I know this is good and right, and I'm. I appreciate it just because I think so. Mission is how we as a company impact the world. What are we changing? What are we making different? And vision is how we see world with us in it sometime in the future, maybe five years in the future, maybe 10 years in the future. It depends on what industry you're in, how fast it's changing, what's the level of consistency and level of entropy there. So with those definitions in mind, let's take a look at kind of this diagram. It may be a little complex, but in reality, it's simple. The two main points are that mission goes through your vision. It keeps going. Like vision is a snapshot in the future. But mission just keeps going. Ideally, it's evergreen. Ideally, it lasts forever. And values, they support it all. So these are two main messages I want you to take away from this. So moving on to Grammarly values and how we made them work, we have just five values. Very short, simple, ethical. Doing the right thing even when nobody's watching. Adaptable, taking change as an opportunity and not as a threat or a problem. Greedy. Doing what's needed even when it's difficult or boring. Empathetic, putting yourself in somebody else's shoes. Actively listening, anticipating reactions of people. And remarkable. Always growing, always learning. So here's how they work. Those values are innate. When we come up with this list, we didn't just make it up. We realized that organizational values are representation of people within organization. Asked our team, what values do you share as people? And we come up with a pretty long list. And we trimmed it and trimmed it to what's truly important for our company to come up with. These five values are mandatory. And everybody on our team is required to share those values. It may sound drastic, but it is very important. Let me just explain with an example. Let's say you have two people. Both are absolutely good, successful people. And one believes that in every interaction, in every life situation, it's important to give more than take. And that's their value. They believe it's good and important by default. And there is another person, very smart, very successful person, who believes that in every situation they try to get the maximum advantage out of it, ethically, legally, but just take the maximum advantage of it because it's smart or it's strong or it's assertive. And I believe it's right and good. And these two people, again, both good and successful people, may not be able to work together at all because of their different values. They may not be able to explain to each other their decisions and may not be able to anticipate each other's actions. So it is very important for the team to share values. So that's why on our team, those five core values are mandatory for everybody to have as their intrinsic values. But also it's important to keep this list, a very short list. We only have five. Why? Because the values are mandatory. They're a filter. And if you put too many filters, nobody gets in. The team cannot grow. So keep only important ones. We keep capital as 5. Also, values have to be simple and Memorable. If you cannot remember it, you cannot use it. Actually, we started with list of 12, and we realized that even executive team was confusing them and couldn't memorize them and couldn't apply them in practice. So we trimmed it to five, and that was much more effective. Values have to be consistent with mission. What I mean by that is somebody who shares them, somebody who internally has them, has to be somehow better equipped to achieve the mission of the company. Of course, even if this is just random, if you pick a random list of values and you have a team that shares them, this team actually is gonna be productive, more productive and more effective just because of that, just because of shared values. But if those values support your mission, provide the foundation for it, make people more effective in achieving this mission, it's gonna be even better. And finally, have to remember that values are stable. We as people form values in our childhood in and we rarely change them or very slowly change them throughout our lifetime. And organization is a combination of values, of people inside it. So if people change values slowly, organization change values very slowly or don't change at all. So treat it as a given. Treat it as a constant. Speaking about Mission Grammarly's mission is improving lives by improving communication. Why does it work? How do we make it work? First, it's sufficiently specific. And it's tricky because improving lives, part of our mission, may sound almost like making the world a better place, very general. But in reality it is a qualifier. It makes it narrower. How do we improve communication? We improve communication in a way that matters to people, makes them more successful, makes them more connected, makes them accomplish their goals, and so on. Just using an example, we are not on a mission to remove curse words from your speech. Most of the time it doesn't matter. Use them, that's fine. But if you're writing an application to a daycare for your children, we would suggest removing curse words from it because it will materially improve your life if you do so. So that's the example how we apply our mission. And that's why we believe it's sufficiently specific. It's practical. We apply it for decision making. For example, when we decide on building a new feature, we ask, is it improving communication? Yes. Next stage, does it improve life by improving communication? Does it make somebody more successful? Does it make somebody more confident, more accomplished when they accept those improvements or suggestions? If yes, then move to next stage. And then next stage, we'll look by how much it improves lives for how many people. So it's very practical. We actually use it for decision making, for prioritization of features in the backlog, and so on and so forth. So it's not just this login on the wall, it's continuous. And that's a very important point. You don't want to have mission that's binary, that's not done and done and then done. Because it's impossible to measure the progress against such mission, it's impossible to have the sense of accomplishment. In our case, every tiny new suggestion improves success of our users a little bit more. And we can see it, we can track it, we can measure it through either user engagement or surveys, or in another way, any new genre we add, any new kind of use case we support adds more users to the platform, improving more lives and so on. So we can measure every tiny step towards accomplishing our mission. And as I mentioned before, Mission should be evergreen. When you're building company, let's say you build a 200, 500 people company, you don't want to be done with your mission. You don't say, oh, mission accomplished, great success. It wouldn't be a success, it would be actually a failure. Because those 500 people would have to look for a new purpose. You don't want to end up in that situation. So pick a mission, create a mission that's evergreen, that's gonna last beyond this 5 year, 10 year, 20 year, even vision that you might initially have. And finally, it has to be inspiring. It's probably common sense, but it's worth saying that the mission has to be inspiring for your team, but also for other stakeholders, your customers, your partners, and even your investors. So how we use it in practice, we use it in many different ways. And I just wanna give some examples. First one is about making decisions and plans. And values are very effective for that. Values are perfect. Filter. Essentially, if something doesn't meet our values, it's automatically vetoed. We don't do it. That's it. No discussion, no debate, no feelings hurt if it doesn't. If it's against our values, we don't do it. It's also shortcut in much of a decision making. We don't have to prove every time, we don't have to do an ROI calculation every time. When we say that being adaptable is good, we don't have to redo this process. So it's almost like axioms in math. It's a shortcut to getting to your decision to your solution. Also, mission provides a North Star and scale for evaluation of our progress. What we've done in the last quarter we've done in the last six months. How far did it move us on the dimensions that are outlined in our mission? How much we improved our communication in a way that improves our lives and for how many people? Team building and hiring is a big one, big application for values and mission. Just like with decisions, values are a perfect filter. And we use it not as a hard filter, but mostly as a soft filter that allows people to self select. And it's amazing how effectively it works. During interviews, let's say we talk about how we excited about doing something because it's difficult or because it is a challenge speaking to our great value. And. And some people are like, yes, I ran or I did the ironman and I almost died and made me so happy. So they get it, they share this value. And some people are like, are you saying that I should be happy to work on something that's difficult or boring? How does this make sense? And if it doesn't make sense for them, they may be successful person but not in our team and we let them kind of self select out. Similarly with mission, like somebody, when somebody hears our excitement about improving communication, how communication is next frontier of human productivity and human success, and they believe it, they get just as excited. It tells me that they gonna be happy working on that happy and making that mission happen. But if they say, oh, but this is not curing cancer, why is it important? It's not a big deal. They would also likely self select out of interview process just because they're not excited about our mission. They also provide a valuable framework for professional development. Our team shares values by default, so everybody kind of shares them. But ability to express them, ability to put them into practice varies across people. You can think that being adaptable is good, but your skill of adapting to changes and your skill of making changes and opportunities is not a constant. It's something that you can actually build and develop. And we use those values as dimensions on which our team members work on themselves, work on their professional development. And finally, that's something I got asked quite often. How do you stay true to your values while fundraising? How do you make sure that your investors are not your enemies, how they don't take you off your path? And it's very simple actually, just, just like with interviews, just like with decision making, be very upfront, be very vocal about your mission values. Then that's what we did. Basically we almost interviewed the investors when we did a raise. We talked about our values, talked about our mission in a very excited way. And we looked for this excitement to be reciprocated. If they were just as excited as we were, that indicated to us that there was a fit. And as a result of that, we ended up with a team of investors with a board that allows us to basically start conversation in the middle. We don't have to justify things, we don't have to prove things. We almost always start conversation in the middle. And one mistake people do with seeking funding is pretending to share the values of their investors. They learn everything you can learn about people they're going to speak with, which is a good practice. Do your homework always. And then they adapt their pitch so much that it becomes basically reiteration of the values of somebody you're talking with. You have to keep in mind that if you do that and the deal go through, you'll have to keep pretending for next five to 10 years. Do you want to do that? Think about it. So I hope I helped some of you understand and see how values and mission can be valuable tools and how you can use them for scaling, growing your companies. And for us at Grammarly, they're invaluable. We use them to get so far and we're going to use them as a foundation for our growth and for building a comprehensive communication assistant that helps people to say what they mean and be understood.

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