Do not pretend to know what you do not know. Admit it when you are wrong. Do not be defensive. Ask for help if you need. Being intellectually honest requires you to have the courage to be wrong and vulnerable. This allows the team to move faster together, without all the bullshit of ego-navigation.

The best way to think better is to write better. We have a heavy writing culture, where all important meetings and thoughts are documented.

All important decisions (especially Type-1, 1-way-door decisions) are written down and heavily scrutinized in a decision document prior to the decision being made.

Think twice before saying or doing something. Oftentimes, a significant amount of time can be saved if one thinks through all the parameters of an action or a thought prior to doing/speaking. Don’t waste your teammate’s time by rushing into conclusions or rushing into actions. Further, we do not want to be running around like headless chickens. We want to be measured and in control.

A Company that does not have a default stance (direction) and movement (speed) even in the face of immense uncertainty is a Company that is dying or will die. Calculated movement gives one more information. Stasis means death. The alternative is to not take a stance until you get more adequate information. This results in loss of trust from your team members, analysis paralysis, and anxiety.

The Company’s craft is building AI systems. We are dedicating our careers to this craft. Engineering, design, product, sales, marketing - these are part of the craft you are building for yourself, as a profession, as a calling. If you just want a job, you do not belong here.

Ambitious startups are easier to build. We can attract more capital, attract better people, and stand for something much bigger than ourselves. When in doubt, have more ambition, not less.

Firstly, being fast is incredibly important in a startup. Speak quickly with concision. Walk fast. Ship code fast. Further, a false dichotomy is that speed requires sacrifice in quality. We must not fall into this trap. We must achieve speed AND quality. The way to do this is to always cut requirements down into their absolute core (reduce surface area).

Most product success happens because of focus, not because of the number of features. Any fucking idiot can add features. It is much harder to only have features that truly matter. Having a smaller surface area will also allow us to be more nimble and execute faster.

Talk and work directly with the people doing the work. We do not believe in middle managers, and believe in having folks whose primary job is to manage. If someone is being overly protective of their people and won’t let others talk to them without going through them first, this is a sign of empire-building, manipulation, and insecurity. We do not want these folks in the Company. You can get the fuck out.

The Company is built around the unique strengths of our Founders. This allows the Company to operate with high speed and quality of output. This means that oftentimes, we need to operate more top-down than bottom-up, which requires trust that the Founders have thought through the consequences of their actions. Our culture of truth-seeking, intellectual honesty, and measuring twice prior to cutting allows us to operate with high trust when it is necessary to act quickly with limited information. In almost all cases, less autonomy results in better product decisions than more autonomy to the rest of the team.

Solve for the company value (enterprise value, EV) over your team’s value (TV), over your own value. Always do the right thing for the company as a whole, not just for your team. If you cannot do this, you do not have enough maturity to be here.