Building Team Culture

"We had a very, very good set of complimentary domains and skillsets, so we had really clear decision making rights... the ability to be really truth seeking and take the most respectful interpretation when you're giving feedback to focus on trying to get to a smart good outcome that benefits the business."

"You got to have your teams look like the world, it just makes you so much faster. It's not perfect... But it helps a lot. To your second point about diversity and how to foster it... When you recognize that you get business value from it, then it all of a sudden becomes something that you look out for and you take care of."

"OpenAI is truly, truly bottoms up... because we don't exactly know what capabilities will even come up soon and we don't know what's going to work technically... it's much more important for us to be very humble and learn a lot more empirically and just try things quickly. And the org is set up in that way to be incredibly bottoms up."

"If you are managing a team and you want to sharpen the skills, make it a team goal, or have accountability and just say, "Hey guys, I know that I've been pushing back on things lately. I want to really try to embrace and grow off of ideas better, hold me accountable, call me out and be like, 'Adam, "Yes, and..." this please.'""

"They're trying now to be the leader who everyone loves, but what really needs to happen very often is, we need to drive towards results... High engagement workforce is great. I think what that comes from is winning culture, which means we're set up for success. We've got the structure for success, we have the culture for success, everyone understands their role, they know the impact of their role."

"What are your values? And I think it's really essential to do some sort of values clarification exercise. You can find a ton of them online. You can find a list of values and just pull out your core values and just compare them with each other because when you are aligned, it's great."

"You want to build a culture of empowerment, of augmenting AI into your own workflows so that you can 10X at what you're doing instead of saying that probably you'll be replaced if you don't adopt AI... You want to make your entire organization be in it together and make AI work for you instead of trying to guard their own jobs."

"If you want to get your team to do great work, there's no shortcut other than to have an extremely high-trust environment where people lean into their superpowers in a way that adds up to something greater than some of its parts. That takes time. It takes effort. It's very difficult to make legible up to the rest of the organization, but that is where great things come from."

"There are only three reasons why things do not happen the way you want them to happen as a leader. You can look at a person, and you would say either that person can't do, which is a capability issue, or they won't do, which is a motivation or an alignment issue, or they were not set up to do, which is really your problem that you didn't set up the ways of working now design properly."

"We work from the office most of the time... I think it's pretty nice. Then you can say like, 'Hey, I think we're thinking wrong about this thing,' or, 'Shouldn't we actually do this other thing?' And especially I think lunch, eating lunch together is a pretty productive hour where you're cross pollinating."

"It becomes even more important to have that editorial and taste making in a Frontier, one or a few at the heart of it because otherwise you just have Frankenstein product. That definitely doesn't change."

"I think when you are in a large organization, trying to do a actually new thing, I think small teams are better than big ones, period. And forcing the teams to be like super, sort of thoughtful about hitting milestones and actually adding value"

"I've learned that optimism is a renewable resource... his ability to generate energy and to use his optimism to renew everybody's dedication to the mission is unbelievable and I think it's such an important part of the culture."

"when all of that happens, the org chart starts to become the work chart. You just don't need as many layers. I think the whole organizational construct might start to look different in a few years."

"I like to think about this as well, because I think it's really important for product leaders, think about what is their leadership tree. Who have you helped to build up and help to grow and help to get to their next wall?"

"I think really integrating the values can help with that and also, of course, make the brand itself human and authentic and something that people really feel emotional connection to. The best way to incorporate your brand and how people are interacting with people that you are selling to, customers or whoever, partners, is to have those values incorporated because then it's every touchpoint isn't something that you have to train people, okay, these are all the touch points and this is how the brand needs to manifest. It already will because it's part of the DNA of the company."

"What I have done in the past with values is we just did an exercise with my leadership team, for example, where we did a workshop format. We actually used Miro where everybody just brain dumped their ideas around values, and then it was, okay, from there, let's group them into themes. And then from there, let's vote on the most important things. And then from there, how do we start to articulate and define these things?"

"When creating the growth group, we resolved this by ensuring that each of the growth teams were truly cross-functional in nature with everyone in each team aligned around common objectives and KPIs. Every team has engineers, an engineering manager, a product manager, a designer, a growth marketer, decision science support."

"Saying a company is design-led does not mean it's designer-led. I've never seen somebody graft it on after the fact. It's there at the beginning in the root DNA or doesn't exist."

"I think the people falling off of these jobs is the common use case. That is the common story. We have a bias towards survivors and we all talk about how it looks like they made it to the top, but everybody that makes it to the top, there's hundreds of people that don't."

"In the U.S. I think you have this inherently very liquid and dynamic market. I think... it leads to greater ownership and accountability for people and product at all levels... In France the market is much less liquid... PMs tend to have less autonomy and ownership, and a little bit more like micromanagement."

"Develop teams that revolve around this concept of ownership and accountability teams that are clearly owning a... slice of the business, not feature teams like shipping maybe guests, but teams that have clear accountability with consequences, but also clear ownership and leeway to do their best and to thrive."

"I should actually find my teammates that actually love to do the stuff I suck at or love the stuff that drains my energy. Because ultimately that's the diversity of a team that actually makes it really work. And so instead of trying to, most people try to hire people like themselves, and that actually is where it goes wrong because then you end up with a very large blind spot."

"The one that's non-obvious and is really the way in which Amazon created a set of leadership principles that were very real, and the way in which Amazon created a set of processes to reinforce them. I think I certainly haven't encountered anything quite like that. It was very intentional."

"Creating this really open information ecosystem is one of the ways that we do that... anytime they have the wrong information, or they don't have the information, you've now blocked one of the economically most valuable things that your company possesses, which is this person's time, attention, talent."

"There's sort of an understanding of Shopify that everyone at the company from engineers to support, to sales, everyone's responsible for product thinking and it's not just the area for a small group of PMs."

"The thing that is actually moving the needle are the companies that are defining incredibly hard constraints... One company... set a benchmark that we will be one-fifth, each of our functions will be one-fifth the size. What that did is it created a constraint that you couldn't hire above that level, and it forced people to essentially find ways to adopt AI."

"When you reflect the stress onto your teams, everybody tenses up and tightens up. And so it counterintuitively doesn't produce better outcomes. And so I think the other reality to remind ourselves... is you're never as good as you think you are. You're never as bad as you think you are."

"We don't really have managers, but everyone at Canva has a coach. They're constantly working with you to look at your skills, but also when it might be time to move on to the next level."

"I think you can probably bring in the world's best person at X, Y, and Z, but if they're not fitting into your team and understanding your culture and have the same passion and vision that you do, they're not going to succeed. So it's super important that we have people along with us for the ride and that might mean everyone at Canva is awesome. They mightn't be the number one person in the world for that particular thing, but they get more done than the number one person could because they've built that trust and that safety with their team."

"We have a system we call coaching at Canva where you have a coach and they're constantly working with you to look at your skills, how you can improve each of those individual skills, but also what it is that you're actually doing and when it might be the time to move on to the next level."

"Overwork kind of lets you just sidestep doing the hard work of figuring out what's important in the first place... I just think... people should challenge themselves to be focused and get the important stuff done and always be asking themselves what is important to do?"

"Way too many founders apologize for how they want to run the company. They find some midpoint between how they want to run a company and how the people they lead want to run the company. That's a good way to make everyone miserable. Because what everyone really wants is clarity. And what everyone really wants is to be able to row in the same direction really quickly."

"Interpersonal competence is a determinant of both personal and professional success... people do business with people not ideas, not products, not machines."

"A leader who is willing to be appropriately vulnerable is a stronger leader... it makes you not less influential as a leader."

"people do not value celebrations enough. I've had CEOs who said, "Well, it was the middle of the quarter, so we didn't start OKRs, but we did start Friday celebrations and oh my God, things are already changing. Things are already getting better.""

"The first step is, get your shit together. They have strategy, they have empowered teams, they have psychological safety, and then the OKRs are that extra layer that supercharges them."

"Culture is what happens around here when the boss is not around. The more distributed a company, the more culture is important."

"I like to say culture add, because culture fit to me can actually be quite negative toward somebody who is the aberration... A culture add suggests that actually having some diversity on the team is helpful, because it actually adds to the culture."

"The employee model is really simple. It's money or compensation at the base, recognition in the middle, and meaning at the top."

"Dharmesh, our co-founder... published the HubSpot culture code externally... Humility, empathy, adaptability, remarkability, transparency are sort of all things that I think people take quite seriously."

"I think you have to define the bar. You have to be really specific, and that means you have to think about pretty deeply what are your leadership principles... and then articulate that and hold people accountable to it."

"They're doing weekly meetings where people share prompts and share use cases. They do a weekly email to their entire company, being like, 'Okay, here are our usage stats for ChatGPT. Here are the people that came up with a new prompt and contributed to it.'"

"We really have an approach of very radical transparency about everything... Instead of demoralizing people, I think that this is something that gives them a sense of deep partnership. We really want everyone's brains in the challenge, and not just one centralized brain and a lot of working hands."

"At the start, my main focus was to get block to think like a technology company. And for a long time we had had a little bit of, I'm going to call it identity drift, maybe. We were talking about ourselves as a financial services company. Some people called us FinTech, all of this stuff. But when I started working at what was then known as Square, we were always thought of as a technology company just like Google or Facebook or any of the others."

"We changed the organization. So all engineers report into one single team now, all designers report into one single team and there's single head of engineering, single head of design, et cetera. And so that was the big transformation that we made, and that meant we could really drive forward AI, we could drive forward platform and just technical depth generally."

"We had this thing where we all vote, but we vote offline in a document and we put a number in and then we put our comments in. And that way everyone has an equal voice in this document. And then when we talk about it, usually, of course the extroverts speak first, but everyone has a vote and we can actually see what people's point of views are."

"Product owners are central to the company and its growth. They are end-to-end responsible for the product, for this part of the business, and for their customers to be happy. And for that, they do really everything. They run the teams, they define which roadmap we need to build to improve certain business metrics, and they also contribute to high-level company strategy, but then most importantly, they execute on it relentlessly and they are ultimate responsible for the product to be shipped and achieve results."

"The way we operate, we have these fully cross-functional teams, meaning they're staffed with all necessary functions, engineers data, analysts, designers, operational managers and so on. And we also operate in metrics. So everyone has a line manager and a functional manager. So product owner is always the line manager for everyone on the team, meaning product owner defines what they need to do"

"culture actually already exists. We have a culture. It's like whatever it is, and it's working pretty well... what I'm really trying to do is kind of describe the culture that's there. So it's not creating culture, it's articulating the culture, so we know what it is"

"culture is a product, period, and that every company builds two products, one is the product they build for their customers, and the other is a product they build for their team. That's what culture is, it's the product you build for your team."

"the job is to preserve the culture. That is not the job because the needs of your customers change, the needs of the employees change... just like you would never freeze the lines of code of a product, you would never freeze the lines of code of a culture. Culture should be iterated on"

"One thing we did was a program we called Detach... it was just a way for us to say, 'Hey, look, maybe you joined and you thought you were joining Adobe, and surprise, you're at this hard charging startup.' Or, maybe after a long time of working at Figma you're tired. That's okay. If anyone wants to take three months of severance... you're free to do so and we're still in good terms."

"Make a Week is an example of that where like a week long company hackathon and the only prompt is, make Figma better in some way... many of our products and our most important features have come out of Make a Week setting, and the demos at the end are just so good."

"I used to work at a bunch of the big tech companies and I always felt that we could fire 90% of the people and we would move faster because the best people wouldn't have all these distractions. So when we start Surge, we wanted to build it completely differently with a super small, super elite team."

"I think one of the things that I didn't think about a couple years ago, but then someone said it to me, it's that companies in a sense are an embodiment of their CEO... when I think about certain big, hard decisions we have to make, I don't think what would the company do, I don't think what metrics are we trying to optimize, I just think, 'What do I personally care about? What are my values? And what do I want to see happen in the world?'"

"We actually wrote it to share with candidates. Because the idea was like, 'Look, we're kind of opinionated about how we do things here. Most companies struggle to describe what their culture is... our metric of success was that, more of the right people would apply to Stripe and fewer of the wrong people.'"

"Micro pessimists, macro optimists. It was just this idea that, 'In the long term, we expect the curve to go up. We very much believe in the upward trajectory of just about everything. But on the day-to-day decisions, on the minutiae, we're quite critical.'"

"Claire, who used to be the COO of Stripe, would always say, 'Are you willing to break the org for this person?'... some people are just that good that like, 'Yeah, of course you'll break the org for them.' They're going to break the org in the best way possible."

"We can't really have any of the other aspects of the culture, including candor, learning, seeking excellence in improvement, freedom and responsibility if you don't start with high talent density."

"In order to do that, you have to really hold yourself to a lot of stuff that doesn't feel like natural human behavior. What I mean by that is giving the feedback... being candid around your expectations when they're not being met... and be able to receive that type of feedback yourself in order to keep talent density high."

"I think the lack of process and prescriptiveness is all hinging on we've got amazing people who are smart, but even better have strong judgment."

"I rewrote the values designed to be a sharp knife to cut out the parts of the company that I just knew wouldn't be effective. So, I said that people must be resilient, that we had very high standards, that we'd work incredibly hard, that shareholder value was the most important thing that we'd optimize for."

"I designed these quarterly performance processes where not only would you get a mark or a grade for your performance against your goals that quarter, but you'd also get a score for your behavior against the values. And I hard coded a formula myself, and so I took it out of the manager's hands to say, if people got below a certain mark, respectfully and lovingly, we would say, thank you for your service."

"If you want your organization to be trustworthy... you have to embody those promises in the structure of the organization itself so that even if you weren't there the promise would be kept."

"Most importantly, it's been the people. It's rare to find startups where you have the core group of five, six, seven people that have been there for five years plus."

"The reason for that is, one, that you can have high levels of trust with anyone you're talking to, because you know that they have a lot of context. It's not like this person's completely in the dark, in some corner of the company that doesn't... The second thing, everyone has agency to actually get stuff done, front to back."

"It's critical to ask what kind of experience am I? Not how good am I at my job, how much do I know, how critical am I to this process, but am I a miserable experience? If the answer is yes, don't worry too much about the other pieces yet. You got to fix that first."

"I think of companies and teams, almost like little terrariums that we're inside of... you want to actually create a habitat or an environment that's predisposed to high-functioning thinking and high-functioning interaction between people."

"The biggest flaw in people's approach to culture... is to be performative... The other approach is to be deductive, logically deductive... Who is glad you exist? Why are they glad you exist?"

"I propose these six words, which are, 'An owner never says that's not my job.'... because Amazon has one and a half million employees who live by these leadership principles, it's probably the most impactful thing I've ever written."

"The design team was like 10, 12 people. Basically, pretty small, even at 5, 6,000 employees it was that small still... everything needed to be approved by Evan."

"Building a culture within the pod because oftentimes your managers are no longer in your team... PMs might report to different people. So actually building a team culture within the pod is really, really important."

"I look for folks who understand how important culture is, because culture helps people to understand the skills and behaviors that are wanted of everyone within the building, and they let you provide leadership in a highly leveraged way, instead of using evil processes and meetings and rules."

"Delay it as long as possible and try to avoid granting director and VP level titles as long as possible, in particular... those are the titles that lead to the most contention in the company, that lead to the most conflict."

"We had this mantra internally... 'Hire painfully slowly.'... We really focused on that first 10. That allows us to really have this sort of community of teammates that basically want to stick around. I think Brian Chesky talks about this. Your goal is you get that first 10 and you want to be able to then replicate the next 10 and then replicate the next 10, but that 10 needs to be all super cohesive."

"We have one of our internal operating principles as increasing exposure hours. Try to quantify how much time you expose yourself to watching how people use your products and you'll develop that muscle."

"I decided to do an internal podcast and I went around and I interviewed actually Daniel's direct reports... And the idea was to make them more approachable for employees because I felt listening to podcasts... I feel like I know them, I feel like I know how they think and I just like them much more."

"If you put autonomy very far towards the leaves of the organization... there's a fair chance that you're just going to produce heat. You're going to have a hundred squads with a hundred strategies running in a hundred directions."

"I really like it when there's transparency in reorgs... We rolled these whiteboards out and it had the team structure with everyone's names on it. It had the name of the team, the mission of the team, how many open slots for hiring across all of these different teams, and then people's names in their existing team positions. People were invited to look, give feedback."

"One activity I do like to do with teams that merge is called story of our team... each team makes a timeline of... when they joined their team, when people left, and significant events and things they created that they're excited about and that they're proud of."

"There's one team that was like, I guess they were delivering at this cadence that they loved... let's just spread the people from that team across the other ones and then we'll have that. And it didn't work... he essentially destroyed that when he split up that team."

"Airbnb did not feel like a normal job. It felt like more like a group of friends trying to just do something together and we were friends. At least in the beginning it did not feel like this was a job. It was sort of like an ongoing project and an assembly of amazing people."

"We did something we call culture interviews that I think the founders have written about or there's probably content online about this. We did a lot of culture interviews early on to try to figure out we got the people that were there that mapped our core values and were really excited to work on Airbnb."

"I try to focus them less around how you litigate another person's impression of you and more on what is the action that you can take to counter program the narrative that you are afraid that this other person has of you. What are you going to do next to demonstrate that you are the person that you know yourself to be?"

"I try to make an effort every week. I don't always do it, but I try to send my team just a quick rundown in Slack of, 'Here are the most important conversations or the most interesting conversations I had this week. Here's what that person said verbatim.' ... 'And here's what I interpret that as. Here's why I think they say that. Here's where I think that's coming from and here's what I'm going to do differently as a result.'"

"I try to find ways that I really am impressed with my team, and the ways that they take care of themselves outside of work. Because I think people, bosses often inadvertently create reward loops for, 'Oh, this person, they had to stay up till two o'clock to get it done, but they got it done.' When you create those reward loops, that's the behavior that people start mimicking."

"GitHub is GitHub. I'll say we eat our own dog food, and that means that we are the first to try every feature, every capability that we're developing. And it's not just our engineering team, it spans across GitHub."

"It's a lot about creating that bandwidth for the team to innovate and experiment and carving that time out, but also being okay that not every experiment is going to be successful. So the shift to learn or to fail forward, these are the philosophies that I believe in."

"we now have these two separate parts of the company, and I actually think what's really cool is they actually compliment each other very well, right? Because the fast execution, the AI stuff, that creates the top of funnel excitement... but the slow thinking basically allows those initial seeds of adoption to Sprout and grow into much larger deployments."

"If you want to cancel all your meetings for like a day or for an entire week and just go play around with every AI product you think could be relevant to Airtable, go do it."

"The overhead is actually more from internal communication. It's really hard to get people's mind to be aligned on things, to see the world in the same way. And the part that you do need people, maybe you can solve better through systems, through better tools... we use the same mindset to build our company. And accidentally, that keep our headcount low, keep our company profitable."

"Internally we use the metaphor that Notion's a small bus. The bus, the smaller the bus, it's easier to turn corners, easier to accelerate, easier to maneuver. The bigger the bus it is, bigger the boat or bigger the bus, slow down. And as a leader in the company, you decide who sit around you on the bus seats. That dictates how fast our overall bus moves."

"Internally, our company philosophy called crafts and values. Craft is your skill set, your taste. Value is your personal value and how do you see the world. Craft is interesting word. It's like about apply your value to some technical know-how and to make more clever trade-offs to create something new and useful and just keep doing that."

"Whoever's the last person to go would count down 3, 2, 1, and then we'd all try to clap at the same time... Recently we've added, we all say yee-haw in unison afterwards... it sounds so minor, but they're such important elements of team culture and tradition."

"I think of culture as calcification. So calcification being the limestone that is built up as watered run over and that sort of thing. And in order to fix it, you can kind of chip it off over time. You can't just fix it all in one go. And so in order to fix it, you've got to chip away at it. You've got to find a small pocket somewhere."

"I was trying to compose almost like an organism of strengths and then minimize the conflicts. That management team for the most part... was the same management team from day one when we had nothing to $20 billion. And I just believed that the team, knowing each other's strengths and weaknesses and being able to compensate for each other was more important than the classic advice."

"We use words to establish a perspective in a way of thinking about the world. And if those are the words that are in your head, then you feel like it's this war... I like to think of words that are more additive and alternative. 'Let's exist. Let's make something great.' Not, 'Let's beat them, let's conquer them, let's make a killing.'"

"I think number one, nothing is above them. I've seen whether it's Brian caring about the full bleed image on the homepage, whether it's Jeff Bezos who famously would receive customer emails, read many of them, forward them... I think that that is a mistake in a lot of ways, especially from a standpoint of who people come to respect as well as efficacy at one's job."

"I think that the only way to maintain moral is to make progress. I think that no speech, no sort of extrinsic motivators... really works. I think people get really excited when they see progress."

"Study Group... Rule one is you do not work at Stripe and rule two is we're not here to solve any problems. This is just about practicing empathy for the customer. ... We show up four to eight people total pretend to be some company with some outcome problem."

"The question that I often ask is how have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don't want. The purpose of this question is actually to evoke your own agency... So if you want to create a high-functioning team, do your work, and it starts with the person who has the most power."

"Imagine sitting in a circle of people who just have your back, who really care about you as a person. And imagine then discussing some of the answers to those questions... Imagine sitting in a group of people who can just hold that space without fixing you, without telling you what you're doing right or wrong?"

"Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. Let's apply it here. Until you make conscious the unconscious patterns operating in the group, the group will continue to repeat those patterns and you will blame somebody in the group."

"For me, analytics is a business impact driving function and not purely a service function, not just answering the why, but answering the, 'What do we do now that we know this?'"

"I believe a central model, a center of excellence is superior... we have a central analytics team, but we are divided up into pods that map perfectly with how product engineering, operations marketing are structured as well."

"Yes, you are a data scientist, but your goal is to figure out what's happening. And if that means that you're going to pick up the phone and call customers, then that is what you're going to do to roll up your sleeves."

"I did sometimes tend to say, 'I really think this person's an asshole, I do not want to fund them.' ... it was sort of important early on in weeding out explicit assholes because that was the basis of our Y Combinator community... there was this culture of older batch mates helping newer ones, and this pay-it-forward mentality where everyone helped one another"

"We used to do these tiny pulses. As a VC, one of the strategies that was really effective that I saw very few VCs doing was I would want these pulse, I would like to read the pulse of teams with these short surveys and stuff. It was the most effective way of not very happy, didn't want to come to work on Monday. They weren't going to make their numbers. The likelihood of them making their numbers is going down."

"The first thing you notice is the companies that are very high performing have coherence between the structure of their company and their current strategy. This is a structural thing... Their funding approach, their incentives, the org structure, the architecture, even their technical architecture supports their strategy back and forth."

"Ownership defined in an individualistic culture is going to look very, very different than ownership defined in a collectivist culture. What I find with companies is that... they're just like, 'Well, this is our culture. We're into ownership.' It's not saying much, saying that you believe in ownership without the addition of... the behaviors that represented that level of ownership."

"There's also this idea of emotional contagion... the leader or the CEO has a disproportionate impact or their emotional state has a disproportionate impact on the people in their team. So something I'd like to say is the nervous system of an organization is a reflection of the nervous system of the CEO."

"The conscious piece then is becoming more aware, waking up. To me, it's like learning more about my interior world, what my background is, my biases. We all inherit certain belief systems from our parents or our church or our community, and a lot of times they kind of go unquestioned and then they end up in conflict. And so it's really just about becoming more aware and then taking responsibility for the influence that I have."

"To me there's wisdom in emotion and I can start to access noticing them more. Like where do I feel sadness in the body? I notice I feel fear in the kind of center of my chest, and then sadness is like a sinking feeling in my stomach. And I notice when I'm angry, my jaw gets tight and my eyes furrow a little bit."

"Culture at scale is the codification of what matters to a business and the ritualization of living those values. It starts with whoever the founders are and then it will emanate across as long as the founders are super consistent."

"I set out to create an integrated insights function where it's like, 'Let's do UX research, let's talk about the market and competitors when we have to. Let's integrate smartly with data science functions. Let's integrate all the stuff we're getting from customer service feedback.'"

"I showed up to a team offsite with a spool of rope and sticky notes... each note of the graph was an engineer and the rope was the edges of the graph to connect them. And then we worked through the new algorithm extremely slowly, step by step. And it was a way that you couldn't leave that exercise without knowing exactly what was going on because everyone had a role to play."

"Transparency wins. We're a really transparent company. We share our board decks. We have lots of communication and participation in all of our Slacks. We're writing culture. We have hard conversations in the open."

"I would say what I've learned from Anthropic is this real care and craft towards model behavior, model craft, model training... OpenAI's much more innovative and much more risk-takers in terms of product or research... It's more probably bottoms-up, I guess."

"Today management is really about this idea of be sturdy while being flexible. So I think about this metaphor a lot of the willow tree. It can survive a lot of storms, disasters, et cetera, but it's also very flexible."

"In retrospect, as hard as that was, I'm very grateful and very amazed that they could come together and share that with me. It can be hard to bring feedback forward like that. So it was an extremely valuable learning experience. I took from that to then immediately shift how I was operating. And really a key part in building trust was to listen, to hear out what the individuals on the team were setting out to do, what they cared about, what motivated them."

"It's like, well, what T-shirt do you wear? What team are you on?' And I was like, 'You have two T-shirts. You have the Design T-shirt and you have the Marketplace T-shirt, or whatever cross-disciplinary team that you work on. Because both are really important communities to build for slightly different reasons.'"

"Our operating principles include meticulous craft. It is one of the things that is really important to us as an organization is just having that meticulous care for all that you do, whether it's you're designing the space that we work within or that you're creating the API or that you're building the interface or that you're talking to people on support calls, the meticulous craft is something that is actually expected of everybody."

"Performance equals potential minus interference. And I really like this, it's pretty simple, but it's a good reminder that, as a leader, one of the things that you are of course driving towards is trying to get better performance so that your team feels more purpose and motivation and is excited about their work... the key pieces of that, of course, is potential, so thinking about how you increase potential, which would be, of course, hiring really well, developing the talent... And then paired to that though of course is decreasing the interferences, which could be that lead weight on top of great talent."

"We wanted to change the lack of ambition, the lack of creativity, the lack of customers feeling that the product had changed at all."

"The sacred cows are like their own roadmap. What are all the things that you think we're not allowed to change? Let's start there."

"I think one of the really important things about driving cultural change at the leadership level is you've got to identify whether someone's on the wagon or off the wagon and either quickly convince them to get on the wagon or if they're not on the wagon, they shouldn't be there."

"You need to staff projects with the team of people that are well equipped from a skillset standpoint, but more importantly have an obsession with the idea they want to pursue."

"It is the obligation of leaders to create that environment for people to be able to innovate... create the environment where people can step in and bring those types of ideas, and not play it safe or not be like, 'Ah, boy, that seems like a big one. If we bring that to the CEO, there's no way they'll take a chance.'"

"One of the things that Elon did when he bought the company was he basically asked people to self-select to stay... I think that was really important for the company because you want people to opt into that. You want the people to be saying, 'Yeah, that's what I want to do,' and the company's going to be a lot more successful."

"I've been amazed with just how much the team is able to accomplish with a small group and I think because of a small group... I've definitely come to appreciate just how lean something can be and not just get by but actually thrive because it's that lean."

"I think with the craft it always starts with people need to care about it. If it's not valued in the company, then it's very hard for anyone to do because people don't feel like it's valued."

"Since we are a fully remote and distributed company... we decided, 'Maybe we do something like that,' where basically, we would just pick a recipe... Then we just tell people, 'Go buy the ingredients, use the company card,' everyone has a company card, 'And then hop on Zoom on this day.'"

"Radical Respect is kind of the prequel to Radical Candor because if you don't respect the other person, it's impossible to care about them and you're not going to bother challenging them directly... everyone is responsible for creating a more respectful work environment."

"We basically have five levels and we call them role stages and they go from apprentice to principal. So apprentice is ... Rope analogy here is learns about rope. Practitioner is can tie basic knots, shown complex knots. Given a problem, they can do it. Career is you can calculate rope strength. You know a lot about knots. Principal is basically invented nylon."

"The most obvious kind of cliched one is culture. It is bread and butter to everything you do, from the people you hire to how you build the right mindset to just keeping the energy. I mean, energy at Airbnb was the currency."

"For example, we make sure that we take time to have personal and professional check-ins. And cross-functional people in the org who maybe have no idea someone else as a kid or what they're doing in their lives. Because those personal connections, I mean, again, it's your second family, you're waking up every day to spend time with them."

"I really, really do believe the power of branding the mundane is so successful. I mean, we brand, to be fair, I actually feel like that this was a page out of the Airbnb book... how much better is Air Dive than a customer service analysis? So much better. So I think a lot of learnings on just the power of branding and storytelling your workflows and your frameworks and what it means to do your job, often keeps people motivated, too."

"The only way to escape the trap of experimenting everything is to have a very intentional culture about doing right by customers and doing the right thing for the business... there shouldn't be, especially in engineering within the world of growth, a culture around having to point to numbers to demonstrate your impact because if there is, then the team will biased experiments all the time, and that's not necessarily the right thing for the business."

"It's because they focus exclusively on that magic word, which is impact. And that was kind of my first introduction to working with Mark and just that laser focus on, 'All right, got it. Now when are we going to start seeing impact and kind of moving from there?' So it's something that is very much in the culture there and something that is so important."

"Finding people who are high agency and work with urgency is one of the most... if I was hiring five people today, those are some of the top two characteristics that I would look for... People just go and do it and solve the problem, and I love that."

"I look at myself as a startup. I am a startup CEO. I'm a startup entrepreneur. I'm still at the beginning of Salesforce. No matter what I'm doing at Salesforce... we're a 25-year-old, 75,000-person, $38 billion, $300 something billion market cap startup, but we're a startup nonetheless."

"During my startup, when we were going through that, in order to motivate the team, one of the best tricks that I came up with, and I learned this from a bunch of other people also, is you just give a team a win. Winning really, really drives a lot of energy. We had a choice to make between launching something which will take six months, versus launching something that we can launch in a very small-ish kind of way, but launch it in a month. And we chose the latter, because when we did that, I remember people were giving high five to each other, people were saying, 'Hey, you know what? This is great. We put something in front of customers.'"

"As a PM, for better or for worse... you're oftentimes the emotional center of the team and it's your job to keep people motivated, keep people excited, keep them bought into the project."

"Scaling is hard... fundamentally, there's two ways to scale. You can scale with process or you can scale with leaders. The only way I know that leads to good outcomes is scaling with leaders. ... be careful of the disease of process people. They will destroy your company."

"It is really important to me that we feel that we've deliberately understaffed every project at the company. If you overstaff, you get politics, you get people working on things that are further down the priority list than necessary. That is poison. It's wasteful. It slows you down. It creates cruft."

"If you want to be in the 99th percentile in terms of outcomes, it's going to be really difficult. You got to sort of remind people that if they ever find themselves in the comfort zone at work, they are definitely making a mistake. It's supposed to be really fricking exhausting."

"Teams will always optimize for local comfort over company outcomes. The purest form of ambition and most intense source of energy in the business is the founder CEO. Every next concentric circle of management beyond the founder CEO has the potential to be an order of magnitude drop off in intensity. That is fucking dangerous."

"Really the only answer is... to keep the team super small. That's what WhatsApp did, that's what Instagram did, that's what Linear is doing right now. That's what Notion has been doing for a while. Those, to me, are the real success stories."

"He tells the story about his son, and he says, 'Listen, there's nothing wrong with being sad, being upset with failure, but we cannot allow it to slow us down as much as we are right now.'... That becomes a really important moment in his company. It's much better than him standing up in front of his people and saying, 'Listen, every time you guys fail to land a big sale, you wander around this office like you're dead... It ends today.'"

"So that was 19 years ago, so that's now grown to be over 1700 people in actually 90 countries so we've actually been fully distributed and remote and asynchronous from the start, which I think is one of our superpowers."

"When we were a startup, one of the first things we did when we were only a few people, we decided what our core values were going to be. And I think they maybe very trivially have changed over the years, but we essentially still have the same four core values that we decided on seven or eight years ago now."

"When we have these Crazy Big Goals, we also have couple them with really fun celebrations... we have smashed great plates and released doves and had a La Tomatina festival. All sorts of fun things just to take a moment with the team to celebrate that huge achievement."

"Our version of velocity is something that we call 'Deel speed', is that we want to make sure that we act with urgency. It doesn't matter how big the team has grown, we want to act with urgency on behalf of our customers... We also care that we remain positive. We have default optimism because we are in a new space, so if someone's going to come into Deel and they're going to be pessimistic... they're going to just slow things down."

"The type of culture I try to set for the team is one around being really results oriented... Also, a team that's very team first and collaborative... The third thing is really this ownership mentality."

"One of the best things, honestly, that the early founding team at Slack did and were able to give to those of us who followed them was the understanding that this is a tool for work. And that made thousands of small decisions instant and obvious."

"It's one thing to have a team of all white men, but if you have two African American people in your first 20 people, you could have a lot more diversity and not even amongst just that one group. Women want to work with other women, but men of all races I think look at an organization, but let's say it's all white people, but there's a few women, they may look at it as just a more diverse, more friendly place and be less intimidated to be, for instance, the first person of color who works there."

"Hot seat is this game where you go around the table and each person gets two minutes on the clock and everyone else at the table can ask them anything... I think that being able to understand what motivates a person is so important when you're working with them."

"I think culture is important in that it establishes trust between groups of people... I think that roadmaps change, products change, but feeling a connection to the folks that you're working with make you much more durable as a team."

"80% of the culture of a company is literally defined by the personality of the founder. Our job as operators or as leaders is to help articulate the culture that they're creating."

"80% of problems on teams actually happen because of structural issues or dynamics issues. So, when there are problems on your team, where you start is at the top, you start structural issues."

"Thiel thinks that a lot of the best recruiters in the world or the companies that attract talent, they put out this distinctive bad signal and it has to turn some people off. That's the key of a good, bad signal."

"Titles are not going to be this memetic totem that everybody competes for. Instead, everyone is just going to have the same slightly meaningless title... I think they wanted to avoid this intel competition. There are downsides to doing this... but I think what it did do is that it basically said if you are in... a role of you're leading a very important project... it's a meritocratic thing."

"I always felt like part of my role here, obviously, was to think about the direction of the product, but also to just set the pace and the resting heartbeat for our teams."

"Indistractable companies provide employees with what's called psychological safety... if you can't talk about a problem, if you can't raise your hand and say, 'Hey, you know what? I'm just not able to do my best work when I'm constantly expected to reply to every email, to every notification, every 30 seconds. I can't do my best work.' If you can't talk about this problem, that is the problem."

"For us, we've got five, four principles. They've largely stayed the same... The first is be a great host, which is all about that level of craft, the relentlessly saving people's steps... There's a famous user design book called Don't Make Me Think, which we sold the title of for our next principle. That's really just about... how do we actually make people not have to think, how do we not reinvent the wheel if there's existing design patterns to use."

"If you're a large organization and you do some performance management process like twice a year and that's how you're going to evaluate and incentivize people in your 0 to 1 incubator, you've already killed it. It's the wrong incentive, it's the wrong timeframe."

"Values aren't values unless there's an actual trade-off. And so we had things like optimize for the long-term. There's a clear trade-off when we optimize for the long-term, you probably give up short-term revenue."

"We have, create delight, create something that is so joyful that really truly brings people delight. We have deliver remarkable quality, something that is so striking, so compelling and worthy of attention that people can't but help tell others about it. Then we have build the extraordinary, which is a measure of the efficacy or the innovativeness of what we want to build. That's another trick, which is literally baking these raw ingredients for growth into your company values."

"We always have this mentality we are a startup, we're a young company, we're always hungry for growth. And a very wacky way is like, 'How can I run my second half of my marathon faster than the first half?'"

"I have never seen a company, the engineering team and the product team and the sales team are so close... our sellers and our engineering team and our product team and also data scientist team, we're all collaborating really, really closely and that's very much, I would say a such big advantage for us compared to when a company becomes too big and nobody talks to each other."

"Find a place, find a team where experimentation is easy to run. And by that, I mean they're launching often, right? Don't go with the team that launches every six months... Go with the team that launches frequently. They're running on sprints, they launch every week or two. ... And then make sure that you understand the question of the OEC."

"the teams aren't oriented around product surfaces. We don't have a team that's like the app team or a team that's like the dashboard team or the podcasting team. We have teams that are oriented around customers and solving bit of a timeless customer problem. We'll never be done serving writers."

"Dharmesh talked about how when we're building companies, we actually build two products. We build one for our customers and we build another one for our employees. That's actually how we work part of it. That's the term he uses for that, is culture. That's the product we build for our employees."

"I learned the importance of setting the culture you want, simply by consistently being an example of the behaviors you want to replicate in the organization. So instead of talking about values, I saw both of them just live the values that they wanted the company to replicate."

"It's day 1,529 at Ramp. He has that number of days at every board meeting, at every all hands. It's just to remind people that we don't work in years, quarters, weeks, we work in days. Each day matters and so never put out something tomorrow that you know can get done today."

"I strongly, strongly believe that small teams of successful people can drive a lot more impact than larger teams of mediocre people. And so I strongly believe you have to design a system where you're able to reward 10X operators with 10X the comp."

"At more than one company all hands, I made everyone in the company repeat this as a chant. In the long run, the measure of our success will be the amount of value that we create for customers, and you can put effort into demonstrating that you have created this value and stuff like that, but there's no substitute for actually having created it."

"It became a game like we were guessing is this person going to tilt their umbrella out of the way so we can pass or not? ... Tilt your umbrella was a very common saying on company swag and stuff like that."

"If you can get to the point where like, 'Hey, we are trying to find improvements. We're trying to be critical because you're trying to make this as great as it can possibly be.' And not always, not with every person, but most of the time with most people, you can get them to the point where that really direct criticism is actually motivational."

"Integrations are mostly about people. They're not about technology as much or product vision. All of that stuff is the easy stuff. The hard part is the people... they basically are joining a different company with different sets of rituals, with a different culture. All of that is very different, basically."

"From growth mindset there's a motto that I really like. It's called becoming is better than being. It's like the moment you think you achieved something is the moment you start to deteriorate down. It's like we're really trying to grow as human beings."

"Change management here is going to be a critical part, but it's not enough to give them the tools. You have to build the incentives programs, the motivation, the examples to how you do it. I see a lot of companies roll out their agents and just expecting companies to adopt. It doesn't work this way."

"When we launched the [email protected] was an alias for [email protected]. So if you sent a customer service request to Pandora, every single person in the company received it. And because we made a decision to have no customer support team in the first year, the expectation was that whoever sees the request first should respond to it."

"I just wasn't interested in performative contribution, that it's the work that matters and what I want to celebrate is if you can show up and do it and go home and have other things in your life, because I think that's a recipe for being able to do it on a sustained basis rather than burning yourself out."

"We had had a pretty entrenched consensus-based culture, where we would really debate a lot of decisions and a lot of features... On the other hand, not fast. When you have your identity tied up in the company and what you do, and then you're kind of being asked or you realize that you need to change how you're working, it can feel pretty existential."

"We call them guiding principles at Etsy... one of them is around digging deeper, and that really speaks to aiming to really understand the why behind a change... Another example of a principle is minimizing waste. It aligns with how we think about product development, which is, we want to know, is the work we're doing adding value to the customer and the business?"

"During crisis, people will appreciate more than anything else transparency. And if you hide information from them, then they would leave, they don't trust you anymore. But if there is a crisis, and look, if there is a crisis then everyone knows that there is a crisis, it's not surprising for anyone. And this is where they expect your leadership the most."

"The first one is having a can-do attitude... we've always set these ridiculously ambitious goals, and then somehow the trajectory of the company forms around those goals. ... The second thing is really high standards... The third one that we really lean on significantly is intensity."

"We focus much more on how we can leverage people's strengths rather than helping to improve weaknesses, because there's some things that I'm not great at and I'll never be the best in the world at, and there's others that I can hopefully refine and strive to be."

"We were also way more upfront around this is going to be chaotic. Just owning that narrative in front of all hands at the core company, owning it directly with the team. We have a separate all hands, we have separate onboarding, we have a separate recruiting team."

"We have this motto to leave nothing to chance. For a while there we drew the number of days in the year on the whiteboard and it was like, there will never be a time like this... How do you make sure that three months from now, six months, you have no regrets? Get on the plane to go talk to a customer, make the late night push, check the data six times over again."

"I do not believe in being liked. I believe in being loved, right? And that's a very, very different thing... love is the choice to extend yourself for the spiritual growth of oneself or another... when you are extending yourself, you're not nice. It's not always nice or like, it sometimes is having hard conversations."

"The other place to start that's less common, but I also think it happening in reality, is maybe they will start a cross-functional, almost like a tiger team. Because if the initial focus area is, let's say, they want to do a product qualified lead... That involves not only product team, that will involve data team... You also need to bring sales team in."

"Not everyone can look stupid in public over and over, but I believe it's my superpower and I try to make it my whole team's superpower too. ... My goal there is not to annoy the person, but it's to understand the content."

"We want people that show up to our company with some fire in their belly, something that they are out to do... heartfelt intensity. And I think even relative to everything else, I'm going to say, that's it. If you have a team that has heartfelt intensity and is there for a purpose and something to prove, you give them a very exciting, ambitious product and get out of their way and they will do remarkable work."

"instead of having a corporate landing page with five value titles and subtitles, let's write a manual for how to take a road trip. So we wrote an essay called 'Notes on Road Trips' that use this semi-biographical, but mostly fictional, story about a person and their father taking a road trip when they're a teenager, to tell the story of how we do things at The Browser Company."

"whenever we ship something, we go out of our way to celebrate the people that worked on it publicly. I think there's a CEO-hero worship sometimes in Silicon Valley... I do very little as it relates to the thing people fall in love with Arc... we go out of our way to celebrate the people that worked on it publicly."

"One thing I've learned is it's super hard to scale culture, especially when you're growing as fast as DoorDash has since I joined... one thing that scales really well is written work."

"We have a program called WeDash, where, four times, a year all employees are required to go do deliveries."

"We divided the team into these smaller groups for peer feedback groups and the idea is that they meet every two weeks or so, somebody brings something that's in a pretty rough draft that they want to get reviewed and then everyone's expected to give feedback."

"The most precious person in an organization is the disagreeable giver. Those are the people who are really motivated to do what's best for the company, but they can be a little bit disagreeable in the sense that they may not say what you want to hear. They may push back on things, they may fight for things."

"The teams that I've helped build are... a team of Avengers that are just very different, have very different superpowers, but together you as the leader are the one who's helping adjudicate any differences or any disagreements but you know you're getting the best outcome when everyone's pulling and obsessing over a different thing."

"I spent probably as much time, if not more time on recruiting and building the team as I did thinking about the product... you got to bring the right people together to have a huge impact. It's the best investment you can make."

"We had to get people from feature obsession, revenue obsession, to belief obsession. What is belief obsession? When we all believe that when coronavirus is over, people will want to travel. We all believe that coronavirus will be over. You start going into first principles belief-based thinking, and you'll bring stories that will make people believe that the future that we are working toward is actually possible."

"Every product in the world, the quality at the end of the day is simply a reflection of how much the people who created it gave a shit about the product. And it is not possible to make great products if the people work on it do not give a shit about the product. And I actually think this is a very important role for product leaders to make sure that the team gives a shit."

"The first one is practicing empathy to gain insights. It's not just practicing empathy in terms of customers... but given our distributed nature... we have to make sure that we actually practice that internally."

"We have something called as Miro Connect, which happens every other Friday... you've got a bunch of product teams sitting around tables... and you're going from table to table and you have teams that are actually showing all the amazing work... it's magical in terms of the outcomes that you can get."

"I think that we often treat engineers a little bit like children instead of giving them the responsibilities and ability to actually thrive as adults. And so like, 'Oh, the engineers won't want to do that work.' Well, that's actually not good for the engineers to be sheltered from what is important. And so actually one of the, I think, highlights is that I think we're coming back this moment where we can actually treat engineers like our peers and put them into really senior leadership roles and not have this kind of baseline assumption of like, 'Oh, we have to coddle them or hide them from the real problems.'"

"I think of these as identity values. These are really just you describing who you want to be... Is it honest? Is it applicable? And can you reverse it? And if not, it's probably actually not helping the team make decisions."

"At Stripe we have operating principles... we really care about them."

"You want a development operating model. That's not actually going to help you with product management."