Building a Playbook on Shared Beliefs

Putting members first, team second, shareholders third

When making a decision, we prioritize our members' experience. We keep close track of their engagement, satisfaction and happiness by discussing their needs, sharing their stories in our internal documentation, and asking for feedback.

We ensure that ethics are always upheld,even if it costs us business, people, or investors.

Limit: It doesn’t mean that “the customer is always right”: we acknowledge our mistakes and remain accountable, but we stand up to members who don’t treat us with respect.

Striving to delight our members

We strive to make every interaction with our members a delightful experience triggering great emotions such as pleasure, satisfaction, or happiness.

We’re friendly and empathetic, we give love to details (our emails always have a small joke or pun), and always provide more than what is expected. 

Making the privacy of our members a priority

We only collect personal data that is necessary to fulfill our mission, and if it cannot enhance the experience of our members, we avoid collecting it.

We are committed to preserving members' trust and have a dedicated team of experts to ensure data privacy is a core challenge in every product decision.

Shooting for the moon, then working backwards to achieve the goal

We build for the long-term: we imagine the outcome of our decisions, which helps us set our appetite, calibrate the level of investment, push for boldness and creativity in our daily missions.

We recognize that innovative ideas often fail but storing the learnings from those failures helps us grow.

Being mission-first & cultivate excellence

We strive to regularly "fire ourselves" from our current tasks, ensuring that we are automating, growing, and delegating enough.

We value impact over hours worked or presence in the office and trust our team to organize their work in the best way possible to maximize their concentration and efficiency.

We are mission-first, using the mission to decide on strategic directions, product or internal organization matters, and involving the whole team in the mission writing process. 

Hiring and developing the best people and setting them up for success

We share equity with all employees and have a transparent salary & equity grid based on levels.

We don't limit people to very rigid positions and trust them to focus on the area where they can have the most impact by offering internal mobility.

We use the Keeper Test (from Netflix) to assess if people are still a good fit for the company, and set very high hiring standards. If the decision to part ways is made, we offer generous severance and support on finding next steps.

Not fearing contrarian ideas

We fight the "wrong" expertise by asking for specificity, using data to make better decisions, fighting motivated reasoning, and thinking from first principles.

We challenge arguments from authority, avoid consensus-based decision-making, and push for creative contrarian thinking in order to have superior performance and deviate from the behaviors of the crowd, but we don’t force it.

‍Limit: We only embrace contrarian approaches when they are backed by sound reasoning, and also actively seek out ideas from other companies, industries, and academic fields to challenge our assumptions and learn from to avoid developing a "not-invented-here syndrome".  

Focusing on one A+ problem until this one problem is solved

We have a "never give up" standard and don't take no for an answer; we fight for hires we love, for regulation changes, and to demonstrate the value of our product.

Every week, we define our weekly objectives and our A+ problem, which is the one 'to-do' item that has the most impact on the company, and focus on it until it is conquered. 

‍Limit: Done is better than perfect. We strive for excellence without focusing on unnecessary details, and prioritize relentlessly.

Turning ‘employees’ into ‘owners’

We empower everyone to make decisions and act as shareholders, giving them the freedom to make decisions and share in the rewards of their success. We all act as enlightened despots, no matter the seniority, and the person who opened the discussion is accountable for the results. 

Rather than blindly following procedures and processes, we strive to grow with great frameworks (when needed) and judgment, but remain flexible and get rid of rules when needed, in order to adapt to market shifts and keep the best innovative people. 

Team playing

We believe that teamwork has a much better outcome than individual work, so we create a friendly and safe team atmosphere, invest in onboarding newcomers, share feelings, highs and lows, and have a clear code of conduct and whistleblowing policy to ensure respect and social cohesion.

Simplifying

We are concise and articulate in writing and in speech, going straight to the point without using superficial formulas or unnecessary acronyms.

We break down big problems into manageable and small pieces to avoid stress and procrastination.

Remaining frugal

We accomplish more with less, which breeds resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention. 

We’re scrappy and do not back down on taking the hard path however, we still spend money on efficiency when relevant.

Challenging positively

We create an environment where we figure out how to help the people around us to get great outcomes by setting the appropriate context, rather than by trying to control what they do. 

No-one has a "positional authority", and we strive to find the best way to get to the best decision quickly, by challenging each other, pushing for a “Yes and…” culture and leveraging the Ask vs. Tell framework.

When people are not yet convinced we want their success, we challenge them by adding a lot of context on why we are doing it.

‍Limit:We challenge only if it’s worth it.We refrain from challenging when it's a low impact decision. 

Bias to action

We have a very high tempo, setting weekly and quarterly personal objectives and striving to deliver results as fast as possible.

We prioritize assessing our appetite for external meeting requests, define the desired output before the meeting, and limit the duration to 40 minutes to maintain focus. 

We make provisional decisions based on our intuition and 70% of the data, and quickly revise them if new information invalidates them, understanding that not trying a good idea is more damaging than trying something that doesn't work. 

Public-first

We strive for transparency by making all information accessible,organizing and synthesizing it into structured knowledge, and sharing documents internally broadly and systematically. 

Publicly sharing the problems we run into encourages collaboration and opens up the conversation. Documenting and archiving all the steps we take in the company allows us to scale information and prevent repeating mistakes.

‍Limit: In some specific cases (e.g. departures), we can only be partially transparent for legal and personal reasons.

Written-first

We are a writing-first company where everything that is not written is not considered as "official'' to ensure that everyone, from those not in the room to future employees, can benefit from the information. 

We work asynchronously from anywhere with the timeline that is the most efficient for us, showing care and consideration for those who are structuring their day around different timelines.Consequently, we avoid meetings whenever possible or publicly share notes. 

Telling the truth even if it hurts

In case of bad news or bad performance, we face the consequences by stating the facts early publicly, explaining the reasons that led to that situation, assuming responsibility, and proposing the best solution for the company, no matter how hard it is (e.g. parting ways, stopping a project…). It requires courage and judgment, but allows us to anticipate and manage consequences collectively. 

Praising others

We start from people's strengths and praise them, ask them to share about their impact, recognize their help on a particular topic and we don't tolerate Brilliant Jerks.

Self-improving and helping others grow

We strive to learn new skills and push ourselves to acquire core competencies by covering books purchase; sharing book summaries; having monthly guest talks; and providing flexible time and resources for training. 

We give positive and constructive feedback continuously with specificity and empathy, have self-reviews in our review process, and provide resources and support for career growth.

No-ego

We compensate the team as a whole, not individuals, and do not negotiate on salaries which are set globally.

We also do not issue bonuses, instead offering secondaries to all employees after a certain period of time with the company.

Employees edit the company

We believe that our company is not a static entity and all should edit the company to make it better.