Our Values | Notion

These values guide us in whom we hire and promote, how we tackle problems, and who we strive to be.

<aside> 💡

Noticing & Curiosity

We are annoyingly curious. We notice clues to issues or opportunities when others may not. We ask “why” and “how” many times in a row with the intention to get to the root of a problem or situation, because we really want to understand it deeply from first principles. We continually challenge our own understanding of our customers, our market, and our business. We avoid unexamined assumptions and think through our actions from first principles starting with the end goal in mind. We actively look for clues to disconfirm our deepest held beliefs and are continuously updating our mental model

of the world. What was the reason, and what may have been right yesterday, is no longer so today.

</aside>

<aside> 💪

Initiative & Persistence

We have a Bias for Action. We know many decisions are reversible, and take calculated risks daily to deliver results today rather than tomorrow (much less next week) because our customers are suffering today. We are scrappy & self reliant, stretching ourselves to

“get the MVP out the door today” rather than wade through meetings and coordination just to get a first version out. When we are a stakeholder, we

Don't just say no; say yes to something else; we try to push forward towards a solution rather than just push back against a proposal with “but what about…” sentences. We will never have all the information we want to make a decision, and analysis paralysis can kill us as a startup. We are proactive & deep: when something goes wrong we ask root cause it deeply and extract all the learnings we can personally and for our team. We learn by doing, not by discussion in a committee. Speed matters. We don’t worry about “stepping on toes” - we don’t have toes here, nobody has a monopoly on work they’re not doing.

</aside>

<aside> 🔑

Ownership

We take full responsibility and accountability for our domain areas and our results, and we own the outcome. We believe that we have agency over what we do, and that no one else is to blame. We own up to where things fall short, and we figure out how we can improve our world through our actions alone. We seek and fix problems beyond our immediate designated areas, so nothing falls “between the cracks.” We fix problems we see quickly, and put processes in place to make sure they stay fixed and don’t happen again. We are proactive - we 1) notice subtle clues that may portend more systematic

issues, 2) dig to find out the root issue, and 3) fix the root issue that improves our business for the long run.

FAQ: What happens when I need another team in the company to do work in order for my project to succeed, and they either say they can’t or don’t deliver on time or deliver something subpar?

Answer: Adjust your plan and broadcast your new plan widely, to at least your manager and all stakeholders, ideally more widely. You’ll say something, for example, such as “I originally planned [link to original SMART plan] that I needed the support team to build a separate Tier 2 team for this initiative by July 4th but it’s now June 15th and we’re not on pace to get there, so I’m now asking the Docs team to add this to their workflow by June 30th.” This is not “throwing someone under the bus” or “ratting someone out” - our customers don’t care about our internal niceties. This is merely you as the initiative owner broadcasting the tradeoff decisions our company is already making whether intentionally or unintentionally. Stakeholders have additional context on what else (in this example) the support team and docs team are working on, context on other teams that may be able to help, and sometimes will agree and say “yeah that makes sense” and sometimes will say “wait there’s another team that can help”. Do not let your initiative slow down or wither because a team you took a dependency on is slow or not delivering.

</aside>

<aside> ⚖️

Judgement & Decisiveness

We have strong judgement and good instincts. We are detail oriented, at the correct level of detail for the situation. We know when to be scrappy experimenters & when to build hardened scalable solutions; very few items are in between.

We are quick & decisive. We step up and make the call, knowing we’ll make mistakes but hey that’s better than than putting off the decision or asking yet another person for their opinion.

In summary: we make the right decision, quickly.

</aside>

<aside> 🧠

Think from First Principles

Anti-incremental thinking. We don’t believe in asking “how can we be 10% better” because the status quo is the wrong starting point. Instead, we imagine the ideal impossible customer experience from scratch and back our way into reality. We seek the fundamental truths, and reason up from there[1]. This applies to how we work as well: we re-imagine how product, operations, engineering and every part of the org should be; not what they’re like in other companies and how we can improve on that.

A great example of First Principles Thinking:

“Somebody could say, “Battery packs are really expensive and that’s just the way they will always be… Historically, it has cost $600 per kilowatt hour. It’s not going to be much better than that in the future.”

With first principles, you say, “What are the material constituents of the batteries? What is the stock market value of the material constituents?”

It’s got cobalt, nickel, aluminum, carbon, some polymers for separation and a seal can. Break that down on a material basis and say, “If we bought that on the London Metal Exchange what would each of those things cost?”

It’s like $80 per kilowatt hour. So clearly you just need to think of clever ways to take those materials and combine them into the shape of a battery cell and you can have batteries that are much, much cheaper than anyone realizes.”

-Elon Musk[2]

</aside>

Customer Centric

We feel each customer’s pain viscerally, even though we must fix things systematically. Talking to customers and fixing a particular customer’s job is everyone’s job. We obsess over how to improve customers' lives immediately and in the long term.

</aside>

<aside> 🙏

Humble

We’re low ego. We care about getting to the best results, not about who is right. We care about how much we learned, not how much we know. We care about doing what’s best for the team & mission, not what’s best for ourselves today. We are gracious to each other. We look for ways to encourage and help when possible, even if it doesn’t fall in our “designated” domain. We readily admit it when we don’t know something, and act swiftly to rectify. We want to become better versions of ourselves, so we actively search for our own faults. We cherish feedback, seeing it as the gift it is to help us improve, and acting on it as appropriate with haste & vigor.

</aside>

<aside> 🥇

Uncomfortably High Standards

We have uncomfortably high standards for ourselves, our teams, and our peers. We believe in quality and speed. We surprise and delight our customers and each other with outcomes that are far better than expected. We imagine what a magical outcome would be, and aim for that, executing with exceptional effort and creativity. We set the standard for our industry in Operational Excellence. We push ourselves & each other towards something that seemed impossible just weeks ago. We are proud of what we create and our reputation with our customers, our industry, and our community. When customers work with us, or when a new employee joins us, we want them to say: “wow, every part of their organization is excellent.”

</aside>

<aside> ⚡

Unreasonably Fast

We set our operational cadence to “run”, not walk. When someone asks us if they can get back to us about something next week, we reply ‘how about tomorrow morning’ even if it’s unreasonable, because you’ll never know until you try. We’re known as the place that reaches out to candidates within hours of them posting their profile, and always first. When we promise something to a customer, instead of saying “next week” we say “in two hours” because it is easy to differentiate ourselves by being faster, yet so few bother to do it because slow is comfortable. We constantly ask ourselves: “can I get this done faster?”

</aside>

<aside> ⚔️

Relish Discomfort

We have the courage to do what’s needed even if it’s uncomfortable; especially if it’s uncomfortable. Need to jump into analytics but know you’re weak at math? We put in the extra time to learn it and jump in with both feet. Need to tell someone their work wasn’t up to your high standards? We don’t look away or delay despite discomfort and instead act quickly & decisively without sugar coating it.

</aside>