Core Values

This was a speech I gave to Motion employees during a company all hands in November, 2024.

By this time, we had finalized our 2025 headcount plans, and I was increasingly worried about the impact on Motion’s culture if we hired so many people all at once. Thus, proactively, I re-did our company core values. This speech provides a useful framework for how to choose core values, and what core values really are.

Below are the raw slides.

If you prefer reading to watching a video, the ~raw text is below.

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Why Is Culture Important

From the outside, incumbent companies seem like vast empires - infallible institutions that will go on forever. These are nameless, faceless, forces of nature that are unending. But we know this isn’t true. Even the East India Company, the most powerful company to ever exist, fell apart.

History is filled with examples. eBay, which was supposed to be Amazon, is only valued at 29 billion at the time of this writing. Yahoo, which was supposed to be the online portal for all of China and all of search, was acquired for under 5 billion. Kodak, which was once worth 60 billion, is now barely 400 million.

Institutions rot. Empires decay. And companies that once seemed like behemoths wither and die. The average age of a company in the S&P 500 is only 21 years³. But why is this?

More companies die due to indigestion than starvation

— David Packard

In other words, companies die more often due to their own failings than the competition.

For startups, this is obvious because there is no competition. By their very nature, startups are taking a contrarian stance: the market has not yet addressed a need, and they want to prove it. Competitors are not going to swarm because they don’t believe the thesis; after all, they are the market, and there’s a reason they haven’t already built the product the startup is building.

But what about growth stage companies or established incumbents?

It’s tempting to think that as a company succeeds and becomes large, competition becomes the primary killer. Competition certainly makes for the best stories, but this is often a narrative fallacy: telling a simple tale to make sense of an infinitely complex world.

The data suggests that these later stage companies also die mostly of starvation. An entrepreneur’s death wipes out sixty percent of the company’s sales. These companies have a twenty percent lower survival rate¹ than companies in the same industry whose founders are still alive. What is so magical about the founder?

Of course, nobody can provide the single definitive explanation, but this case study by Bain is quite compelling: when the founder leaves, the culture is forever changed. The desperation of the early days is lost, and along with it, the willingness to be bold and take risks. People take for granted the success that got the company to where it is, and the subtle shift to incumbency mindset takes hold. Often, the very traits that got the company to success are vilified.

My favorite example of poor culture drowning a successful incumbent is eBay’s venture into China.

[A]fter a series of site outages that had damaged its reputation at home, eBay had become obsessed with the stability of its platform. eBay pushed ahead with the China migration anyway… [sic] Some senior executives within eBay already knew that migration would be a mistake—the company had already seen the damaging impact in Taiwan—but bizarrely eBay managers in Taipei were blocked by migration-obsessed managers in San Jose from sharing their experience with the team in Shanghai. As predicted, as soon as the China site was migrated and integrated into the global site, the impact on EachNet’s traffic was disastrous: It dropped off precipitously. Customers in China started to experience long delays and time-outs on the site. Why would they bother to wait for eBay in China—a site that charged fees—when Taobao was available instantly and for free? Migration was also costly for eBay because the company typically carried out maintenance of its servers every Thursday at midnight on the West Coast, ahead of the peak traffic of Friday. But this meant the disruption happened at the peak of China traffic, fifteen hours ahead of San Jose. EachNet tried to adjust the maintenance schedule but with no success. Meg Whitman had made China a key priority for eBay. But when migration caused traffic in China to plummet, no one told her. She found out only a month later on a visit to Shanghai, and she was furious at not having been kept informed.

— Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma Built

From the outside, eBay was a giant with infinite resources. People were harassing Jack Ma for even having the gall to try and compete. But is it any wonder eBay lost with such a broken culture? This single disaster, which could easily have been avoided by just listening to their own employees, cost them 70% of their marketshare, leaving the door open for Ma’s tiny team.

Similar examples are present in nearly every failing incumbent. Kodak had the single largest patent infringement violation (nearly 2 billion dollars in 2024 money) — and even after the loss, Kodak management was scratching their heads wondering how this could happen². Ironically, nearly every Kodak engineer had predicted the outcome of the case and tried to dissuade management. It was the beginning of the end for Kodak’s relevance.

Culture is omnipresent throughout the organization. A bad culture seeps into every action, every decision, and every interaction. No matter how strong your market position is today, with a bad culture, you’re on the inevitable path to irrelevance.

Every great institution is the lengthened shadow of a single man. His character determines the character of the organization.

— Ralph Waldo Emerson, in Self Reliance

We’re here to make sure Motion is a generational company. The ultimate success of Motion lies not in any single product or feature, but the collective way of operating that we establish through our culture, and this culture kit is to help define how a seminal Motion employee acts. In order for Motion to survive, we must all become stewards of the culture.

What Are Core Values For

Core values serve two primary functions:

1. Give a clear picture to outsiders how Motion operates and what we stand for. This helps draw in like-minded individuals to our cause while turning away those strongly opposed to this way of operating

2. Clear away the fog of war from day to day decisions. By providing a clear north star on how to operate, it lets us make complicated decisions quickly and in a principled manner.

The essence of core values should capture how the most successful people at Motion behave, and in a way that’s unique to Motion. What are the wedge issues that differentiate Motion from other peer companies?

Accordingly, core values are not virtues. Honesty. Integrity. Empathy. These are not useful because nobody is there to take the other side (“I believe we should act without integrity”). These bland, spineless words are chosen by corporations who don’t believe in having any culture — where the act of defining a corporate culture was treated as a homework assignment to check off quickly so they could get back to doing ‘real work’. As such, they intentionally choose words nobody can disagree with.

We are not such a company.

Many people will not agree with our core values. That’s fine. Motion has been incredibly successful thus far, and it will continue to be successful without their input. This is not an aspect of our company in which we value diverse perspectives. The mission we are trying to solve, and the culture around that mission, are two areas in which we will not compromise.

Our core values are more akin to edicts. They describe a way of acting because entrepreneurship is a habit that must be cemented daily. Motion is growing rapidly, and every year we are a fundamentally different company.

A decade from now, I cannot tell you what products we may or may not have, what industries we’ll be in, or even where we’ll be located. But I can assure you that whatever pivots may come, we will always approach them with these core values in mind. We will continue to re-found Motion for many years, and most importantly, live out these core values in everything we do.

How Do We Decide Core Values

Life is a multi-solution problem. There is rarely one ‘right’ way to run a company, which is why there are as many sets of core values as there are companies. So why did we choose the ones below?

There are two constraints in choosing core values:

1. They must align with the founders’ personalities

2. They must align with the nature of the industry

The most powerful force in the Universe is compound interest.

— Albert Einstein

True life-changing success - the monumental outcomes that we are after in a venture scale business - takes a long time. As such, success almost always takes longer than we think it does. We may be able to stomach doing things in a manner we hate for a short period of time, but over a decade(s) long time horizon, we always revert to our true nature. We are in it for the long term, and Motion will be a generational company. Accordingly, we much choose core values that align with Motion’s founding team.

It’s undeniable that our professions shape our attitudes; sales people, who must steel themselves to people closing doors in their faces all day, have a different energy to engineers, who tend to move carefully and cautiously (for good reason). Bankers, who have a keen eye for detail, approach life differently to artists, who tend to focus on the big picture. Similarly, the industry in which we choose to make our life’s work must shape our core values and our approach.

You can call it survivorship bias, coincidence, or whatever you want, but Bezos, Waltman (Walmart and Sam’s Club), and Sinegal (Costco), and Sol Price (FedMart, PriceClub) all had extremely similar mindsets and attitudes. The lesson history gives us is rather simple: If you want to become a world class retailer, follow their example and adopt their core values. You don’t walk into the retail war and presume to be the first who doesn’t believe in frugality on a whim. If you deviate, you better have a damn good reason.

In the creative world, Walt Disney and Ed Catmull (Pixar) had nearly identical ways of running their company. No accident - they both recognized that creatives were the backbone of their respective companies, so everything from the work hours to the desk layout was designed to foster creativity. Li Liu and Charlie Munger have identical investment philosophies and run their firms the same way: patience, an extreme focus on value, and only working with people who focus on the ultra long term. Steve Jobs was almost an exact facsimile of Edwin Land (Polaroid) - they both prioritized the intersection of humanity and technology, and both created the iconic technology article of their time. The list goes on and on.

This isn’t to say that you simply choose whatever entrepreneur is admired in the same field and adopt their core values. Rather, recognize the entrepreneurs that excelled in the industry you’re working in. Figure out whether their temperaments match your own, and most importantly, whether their approaches would work today. If so, those core values are likely to be an excellent starting point for your own.

Pragmatism. Do what suits your temperament. Do what works better with experience. Do what works and keep doing it. That’s the fundamental algorithm of life — repeat what works for you.

— Charlie Munger

In a sense, we didn’t choose these core values. They presented themselves after a brief period of introspection because they are the obvious ways in which we operate. We don’t claim that these are the core values universal to all business. They are simply what has worked for Motion, and they suit our natures rather well. If you’re joining Motion and we’ve done our jobs in the hiring screen, then they likely suit yours, too.

Motion’s Core Values

There’s only one principle: Act like an owner of Motion. Because you are one.

There’s many aspects to acting like a true owner, and the “core values” are discrete manifestations of this single principle.

If you’ve worked closely with our founders, then this doesn’t need any elaboration. Unfortunately, as we grow, there are fewer and fewer such opportunities, so these eight principles should distill the essence of what makes Motion’s founders unique.

1. Work Extraordinarily Hard
2. Communicate Straightforwardly
3. Disagree and Commit
4. Never Be Satisfied
5. Mind the Details
6. Act with Urgency
7. Don’t Loot the Company Vault
8. Be Bold

Work Extraordinarily Hard

I can’t relate to lazy people. We don’t speak the same language. I don’t understand you. I don’t want to understand you.

— Kobe Bryant

The most universal trait among all successful entrepreneurs is hard work. Regardless of industry segment, stage of life, or type of company, they all seem to have a maniacal work ethic that drives them. Acknowledge that most companies don’t even reach the heights Motion to which has already climbed, let alone where we plan to go. Motion is an extraordinary company, and extraordinary results require extraordinary effort. Do not be shocked when working 35 hours a week and taking a 2 hour lunch break while resting and vesting like you did at Google does not get you to the promised land. But why is hard-work such a universal trait for successful individuals?

Twenty-years later, everything near the top is gone. So now one needed to go thirty thousand feet to acquire the same volume of oil at a cost of seven hundred fifty thousand dollars… “The trouble with this business is everyone expects to find oil on the surface. If it was near the top, it wouldn’t be any trick to it. You got to dig deep.”

— Wildcatters: A Story of Texans, Oil, and Money

When Monty Moncrief started out digging for oil in his youth, there was plenty in Texas and Oklahoma at just five thousand feet below the surface. A ‘wildcatter’ could find profitable oil with just twenty thousand dollars all in. Twenty years later, the cost had risen dramatically (37x). Many were quitting and complaining; Monty after all had just been lucky. He couldn’t possibly understand their difficulties.

This never bothered Monty, because he felt he truly was lucky — even when he struck out twenty nine times in a row before he bet his every last dollar to finance one last well dig. (The well he found was soon producing over 180,000 barrels of oil a day and the largest discovered in the US at the time.) As Monty himself said, “Optimism and industry are the personal qualities that nurture luck.”

As sectors mature, they tend to consolidate. This is precisely what happened to the “wildcatters”. At the time of Monty Moncrief, even Exxon Mobile was an independent (it went by the name of Humble Oil⁴, believe it or not). But over time, as the oil went deeper and deeper, and most wildcatters lost faith. What was once an easy buck became — gasp — hard. Time to sell and move on to a different industry, right?

Not Monty. He doubled down and simply dug deeper than his competitors for a long, long time, and in 2004 he became a billionaire for his efforts. He was one of only three wildcatters in history to become a billionaire.⁵

When the iPhone first came out, it was a brand new market. The oil was near the top. At the time, a simple app that made fart noises was raking in ten thousand dollars a day⁶. Built by one person in one day. Those kind of numbers would get you a series A from nearly any top tier VC.

Seventeen years later, the market has changed. Consumer expectations have dramatically increased, and the oil near the top is gone. Today, you’d need to build a dramatically better experience because you have dramatically better competition, and just like the second generation wildcatters — despite all the fancy frameworks and open source libraries — we need more capital, more people, and more time to break through. For most people, that means it’s time to sell and move on to a different industry. Maybe crypto! Ah shucks, well it’s okay, I think AI will save us. On and on it goes like lemmings to the nearest cliff.

Paradoxically, “digging deep” is the easiest path. There is a nearly inexhaustible supply of people looking for the easy way out. The internet is filled with tips on the next great ‘growth hack’, or one ‘quick trick’ to get rich. But as you go deeper, you face less competition. Very few have the guts or the willpower to stick it out when the going gets tough. And since competition is for losers⁷, avoiding it is the single best thing you can do to increase your chances of success. It’s also the most valuable path. The bulk of the oil is deep, deep underground. None of the wildcatters who gave up at 5,000 feet made lasting, generational wealth. There is no Facebook of fart apps.

Make no mistake: we are competing against serious consolidated incumbents. Nearly every company we consider to be a competitor is a decacorn at least. Unseating them will require tremendous willpower and belief, even when the going gets tough.

But that is precisely why we will take them down. Most people do not believe, so they don’t even bother trying. Even fewer persevere through their first obstacle. This is partly because it is hard, but also because at a big tech company, there is no line of sight between your hard work and the company’s bottom line. Not so at Motion.

In January of 2024 when we had a growth emergency, Motion banded together and worked nights and weekends to get us out of it. Within three weeks, we were back on track, and without that effort we would not have closed our series C.

Whenever faced with obstacles, Motion employees don’t wilt; we redouble our efforts and rip down the walls in our way. We are owners; we see the fruits of our labor in directly helping the business, and as such we have incredibly high agency. Most importantly, we hold each other accountable.

Communicate Straightforwardly

A high agency owner of Motion does not communicate in roundabout, passive aggressive ways. We go directly to the heart of the matter. We do not vent⁸. Focus on what you can change because you are a high agency person, not a professional complainer.

Straightforward communication means that if anyone at Motion sees a problem, they should be free to speak up without having to go through various ‘safe’ channels. We do things out in the open. If Chander is wrong, then an engineer should call him out in engineering all hands in front of everyone. And if Chander is wrong enough times, then maybe it’s time for a new Head of Engineering. This is not a hypothetical example. I (Chander) have a deep disdain for companies that need to do pre-meetings to massage out disagreements. Occasionally this means that high level execs may disagree with each other in front of the entire company.

That’s fine. You are adults, and we will treat you as such. Does anyone think that at other companies execs never argue? What is this imaginary kumbaya circle that we’re supposed to uphold, and what purpose does it serve? The alternative is a game of secrecy and politics where we maneuver around each other while treating employees like they were fragile glass. Mom and Dad argue sometimes; it happens. Get over it.

Quite naturally, the leadership team should be held to the highest standard when it comes to company culture. The benefit of these arguments in public is that the entire company sees how execs talk and the type of behavior we expect. You can see the proof that we practice what we preach in the ways we communicate, and it sets a clear model for the more junior employees. Also, you can get a real sense of how you’re expected to behave if you’re ever promoted to being a manager or brought into the leadership team. There will never be a case of two different cultures — just one culture that gets increasingly concentrated the closer you get to the founders. If and when one of you are promoted to management or the exec team, there isn’t any surprise or shock. It’s exactly the culture you thought it would be.

When people think of the phrase “Sunlight is the best disinfectant”, it’s usually only in the context of visibility. We certainly agree with that, which is why our communication guidelines⁹ advocate for talking in public channels instead of DMs, huddling instead of zooms / google meet, etc. But straightforward communication is also a part of this disinfectant approach. When everything is out in the open and people mean what they say as opposed to political back-speak or passive aggressive subcontext, the motivations are clear and a benefit to all watching.

A straightforward disagreement between Harry and Ethan, for example, leaves all who read it more educated. How does Harry think about modeling certain risks, and why does Ethan disagree and prioritize something else above? When should we apply Harry’s framework and when Ethan’s, and which framework does this situation call for? All of this learning is lost when people feel they can’t communicate straightforwardly. Every decision takes longer because we have to spend time cajoling instead of getting to the heart of the matter quickly, and as a result the entire organization is left worse off.

One final point on this: disagreeing and conflict is good.

If I have to choose between agreement and conflict, I will take conflict every time, it always yields a better result.

— Jeff Bezos, in Amazon Unbound

There is a certain tyranny of kindness that pervades most of corporate America. Getting the job done well has taken a backseat to prioritizing coworkers’ feelings and maintaining an air of getting along. In my personal experience, I’ve found these types of environments always lead to the worst form of politics. When nobody can say what they truly feel, everyone becomes suspicious and mistrustful. I vow this will never happen at Motion.

Managers at Motion are instructed to point out whenever they see something gone wrong, with anyone’s reports, immediately, and preferably directly to the report. Often times these are false alarms because there’s context missing or a situational exception; that’s okay. Employees at Motion (managers and leadership included) are used to getting feedback all the time. Sometimes that feedback isn’t valid, and other times it is.

We expect employees to be able to separate themselves form their work. A criticism of your work is not a criticism of you. Besides, expectations at Motion are rapidly rising; what was exceptional a year ago might be unacceptable today, so even someone’s previous best work can be pointed to as an example of ‘not good enough’. Embrace it.

In return, you will never have to wonder “what does my manager really think?” You should always know how you stand and how you can improve.¹⁰ As basic as this sounds, this is not the case at most companies.

This is not to say that Motion employees are rude. We expect feedback to be impersonal and about the work first and foremost, and we have a strict no asshole filter. But recognize that it takes people energy and effort to disagree. Humans are social by nature, and the desire to fit in is hardwired in our DNA. That is why it’s so valuable for companies to listen to their frontline employees who disagree. A Motion employee will never be fired for saying anything controversial while acting in good faith.

Working at a startup means we’re going a thousand miles an hour; it’s inevitable that blindspots develop. Disagreements are how we reveal those truths ignored by our blindspots, and they’re essential to the company’s health.

Disagree and Commit

Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have conviction and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly.

— Brad Stone’s The Everything Store

It’s important to note that ‘disagree and commit’ are two separate actions, and they’re both equally important. If you do not think an idea will work, you are obligated to speak up. Good Motion employees are often outspoken and have a thousand reasons why something won’t work. That’s by design. It’s also why we have the 🚜 emoji aka farming for dissent in our communication guidelines¹¹. It’s extremely likely that any idea someone presents will need minor modifications for it to work, and while it may seem frustrating that there is a mountain of objections, this pushback is a forcing function to enable refinement. If you are the primary advocate for an idea, your job is to seek out all the reasons why it wouldn’t work first.

Everyone is encouraged to have ideas and share them, but when you do have an idea, you should try to get your coworkers to tell you what is wrong with your idea - farm for dissent. For this to work, employees have to be candid about it.

In trying to get as much negative feedback as possible you foreshadow potential failure. You are still allowed to pursue your idea even if met with skepticism, but this prevention step is essential.

— Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix

Whenever someone disagrees with a plan of action, there are usually only a handful of reasons:

• They know something you do not

• They value something more and evaluate the tradeoff inherent to the plan differently

• They have a better plan in mind

Any of these cases bear hearing out; this is why disagreements are so useful. Find out what they know, evaluate their counter-plan, and reexamine if the tradeoff that is being made is truly the right one. By optimizing for social cohesion we miss out on the opportunities to become more rigorous in our thinking.

What happens next — the commitment — is equally important. With many big companies, efforts people don’t believe in are given a half-hearted attempt just so the detractors can say “I told you so.” Of course, this never satisfies anyone. The true believers complain (quite rightly) that it wasn’t given a fair attempt and can point to numerous areas where dependencies dragged their feet. Intuitively we all know this: even the best ideas can fail if improperly executed, so it is vitally important to give maximal effort to the hypothesis under consideration. At that point, if it fails, we can concretely say there is nothing left to explore here.

Fear of failure is often the main reason why critics are reticent to commit to an idea they don’t agree with. I can promise you one thing: nobody at Motion will ever be fired for taking a calculated risk. In fact, failures are a feature, not a bug. We will discuss more on why it is a feature in the final core value: “Be Bold.”

Mind the Details

Owners have a maniacal need to understand all aspects of their business, down to the smallest detail.

The importance of gathering unfiltered intel from the front lines cannot be overstated. We call this the “Owner’s Dawn Raids.” He will literally appear unexpectedly at the store, without warning, sometimes at 5:30 in the morning, just to talk with the men delivering goods into the store. He wants to know what the security is like, what annoyed them the most, were they given morning coffee.

— Leading by Design: The IKEA Story about Ingvar’s obsession with the details

Staying in tune with the front lines is the lifeblood of the business. The further you get from the actual day to day running of the business, the more you lose touch with reality. The principle is repeated in many different ways across numerous companies.

Sam Walton calls this walking the store, and he insisted on visiting various Walmart locations throughout the year¹⁸. Steve Jobs was famous for reviewing every marketing copy and going through all ideas; there were no intermediaries between the ICs and him¹⁵. In her autobiography, Estee Lauder is seventy seven years old and is still going into shops and correcting the way they tie bows on the perfume boxes¹⁶. Bezos insisted that every single employee always refer to the company as Amazon.com, not just Amazon - to the point of suing someone¹⁷.

Toyota was the first to formalize the value of this frontline knowledge as part of their legendary 12 pillars of the Toyota Production System:

Every Toyota member is viewed as an expert in their field and each and every one is permitted to stop the production line if they spot something they perceive to be a threat to vehicle quality – and they do so by using the Andon cable.

— The Toyota Production System

Toyota has an inherent understanding that every detail matters; each imperfection could be the first sign of a larger problem that’s been obscured due to organizational blind spots. At Motion, we subscribe to this philosophy as well. Any employee can throw up a launch blocker and stop the release train.

Employees of Motion are not code monkeys simply converting Figma designs into code. We expect each of you to be owners who ask deeper questions and understand the true requirements. Do not follow process blindly, but rather question why each step exists and the motivation for it. Every organization outgrows processes, and if we do not mind the details of each step, every click, every meeting required along the way, then we soon begin following process for the sake of process and stop driving meaningful outcomes.

“Every anecdote from a customer matters,” Jeff Wilke answered. “We research each of them because they tell us something about our metrics and processes. It’s an audit that is done for us by our customers. We treat them as precious sources of information.”

— Brad Stone’s The Everything Store

As a startup, we have to do things that don’t scale¹² because we’re often doing things that have never been done before at Motion, and sometimes, in the entire industry. You don’t start a new initiative by setting up a process for it (unless you’re the CIA trying to undermine an organization¹³). You just do it, and if it works, and we have to repeat it enough times, we start setting up a process and only then automating. But in these early days, doing it right is crucial. When you test a hypothesis, you don’t want poor execution to confound the results. At Motion, you will frequently have to do things “for the first time”.

Recognize when this is happening and have a keen eye to detail. Your work will have an outsized impact on which hypotheses we choose to pursue, and poor execution could cost the company literal quarters if we rule out the wrong theories. Additionally, unlike larger companies, we simply do not have all the guard rails in place to prevent footguns¹⁴ or misclicks. It’s very easy for a careless employee to bring Motion down, and while we are working on patching each of these holes as we see them, many still exist. We cannot afford to drop everything and focus for many quarters on just patching all holes. Especially when new ones will inevitably introduced with new initiatives. Instead, we rely on hiring capable, detail-oriented people who act like owners.

It is your responsibility to be the owner of whatever domain in which you operate. Understand every step, every process, and its motivations. And most importantly, if you spot something has gone wrong, voice it. This frontline knowledge is the most precious information at the company.

Some may wonder how this interplays with urgency simultaneously being a core value. We will expand more in that section, but to us, urgency means bumping the priority of a particular course of action to the top. It does not mean skipping the details on that course or rushing through in a shoddy manner. Anything that’s worth doing is worth doing well. We may cut scope or accept tradeoffs, but we should never go so fast as to ignore details. In other words, it is very possible to move both cautiously and urgently at the same time.

Act with Urgency

Let’s rewind to 2011. Facebook is worth fifty billion dollars. Most people would say Zuck has made it - relax, and enjoy the beach. Mark has captured the entire market of social networking, and no existing competitors could possibly take down Facebook. Mark on the other hand would never make the mistake of underestimating a small competitor. After all, that was the very mistake people made against him.

I think it’s a really big deal that we ship this photos app quickly.

[sic] I view this as a big strategic risk for us if we don’t completely own the photos space. If Instagram continues to kick ass on mobile or if Google buys them, then over the next few years they could easily add pieces of their service that copy what we’re doing now, and if they have a growing number of people’s photos then that’s a real issue for us.

They’re growing extremely quickly right now. It seems like they double every couple of months or so, and their base is already ~5-10m users. As soon as we launch a compelling product a lot of people will use ours more and future Instagram users will find no reason to use them. But at the current rate, literally every couple of months that we waste translates to a double in their growth and a harder position for us to work our way out of.

I get that there are also team issues and we’ll need to work through those, but if there are actually people available who could build this more quickly then I think we’d be crazy not to do that. [sic] The message I got from your note though was that you care more about fixing the team than shipping the app. I think we need to do both, but I do think it’s a crisis that we don’t have a mobile photos app out and I’d prioritize pushing that out as much as possible. Getting the team to a good state is not a milestone by itself that I care about.

Separately, I just don’t understand why this app is so hard to build. It basically seems like a camera view, some filters, controls for deleting/tagging/captioning your photos, integration into a composer that already exists, and a skin for a photos feed whose infrastructure should already exist. We’ve had designs that I’ve been fine with for months. The only piece that seems technically new for us is the filters, but it seems like we’re doing okay on those now after a long parallel track. What is so hard about the camera view, feed filters and composer integration? Are we building other unnecessary features?

I guess my basic point is this: I get that your team has issues, so fix them and ship the app. I don’t see why this should be so hard, and I don’t think we should accept any excuses for not getting this done in a short period of time.

— Mark Zuckerberg, talking to a director of Engineering (emphasis mine)

With Zuck turning up the heat, the team is able to create an exact clone of Instagram in just a couple months, and he then takes this clone to the negotiation to the Instagram founders! It totally works⁴⁰. The fear of this copy app (aka Mark going “destroy mode”) is what ultimately compels them to take the acquisition offer - and ultimately what saved Facebook over the next decade as Facebook.com itself began declining. By 2018, most people were estimating Instagram by itself to be worth well over 100 billion⁴¹ (a third of Facebook’s entire market cap back then). It is not an exaggeration to say this single act of urgency saved the entire company.

This type of brutal acquisition process is all too common. Amazon gave away diapers for close to free, losing $100 million on diapers alone in just three months⁴². After grinding Quidsi (aka diapers.com) for months, Amazon acquired them for just a paltry $545 million. They did the same to many other companies like eToys and Zappos. This is what true scorched earth looks like.

In case these stories aren’t getting the message across, let me be blunt: It is only by the grace of God that we do not have a competitor eyeing to take our lunch right now. And the moment the Eye of Sauron is upon us, we must be ready to withstand scorched Earth. Monday has 300 engineers. Notion has 500. Atlassian has over 1,000. How long would we last if any one of them decided to build a sub-par Motion clone and just give it away for free? How long would we last if any of them decided to try and do everything in their power to simply bring us down? For all our success, we have clearly not found product market fit yet. We haven’t even had to endure a competitor trying to steal our lunch. (Snapchat, by the way, felt the same pressure from Zuck and came through stronger on the other side⁴³. Clear sign of product market fit.)

We have an extremely limited time window before people realize what an enormous market this is. Motion is building the next generation set of company tooling, bundling everything from support tooling to CRMs to emails to project management — all in a seamless, interoperable way. Combined, these markets aggregate to almost $500 billion of annual spend, and nobody has yet successfully integrated them in the way Motion will. It’s only a matter of time before some competitor catches on to what we’re doing.

As soon as we hatched that plan for ourselves, it became immediately obvious that every company in the world was going to want this. What really surprised us was that thousands of developers flocked to these APIs without much promotion or fanfare from Amazon. And then a business miracle that never happens happened—the greatest piece of business luck in the history of business, so far as I know. We faced no like-minded competition for seven years. It’s unbelievable. When I launched Amazon.com in 1995, Barnes & Noble then launched Barnesandnoble.com and entered the market two years later in 1997. Two years later is very typical if you invent something new. We launched Kindle; Barnes & Noble launched Nook two years later. We launched Echo; Google launched Google Home two years later. When you pioneer, if you’re lucky, you get a two-year head start. Nobody gets a seven-year head start, and so that was unbelievable.

— Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

Let’s assume Bezos is right, and we have a two year head start before these bigger players start copying us. What do we do with these two years? Do we sit on our laurels and pat ourselves on the back? We have to use every day — every minute — to widen the gap between us and the closest competition, so that by the time they decide to fight, there’s an oceanic gulf.

Most people think Motion is at 1-5 million ARR. They laugh or give me pitying smiles when I tell them I work at Motion. Good. Embrace it. A willingness to be misunderstood is crucial in any great enterprise - we are starting with a contrarian premise, and most people will disagree. It will be preposterous until it’s obvious. We will continue to stay secretive to build on our premise. When you have a winner (as we clearly do), you don’t brag or boast. As the prophet says, real g’s move in silence⁴⁴. Bezos certainly did when it came to AWS⁴⁷.

Urgency is particularly important for technology companies because technology has a tendency to move slowly and then all at once. We need to be ready to not only adapt but seize onto a change in trends.

In 1993, Microsoft was all in on interactive television — aka the “information superhighway” — as the future of the world. So much so that in interviews, Gates was calling this the “holy grail” of the consumer revolution⁴⁵. Television. It seems laughable, but at the time he dismissed the Internet as a toy (ironic, since critics were saying the same when Gates was championing Basic and DOS). Until, that is, Marc Andressen and his Mosaic browser proved him wrong. The graphical interface would convert a niche tool for nerds into the most popular way the world would connect with each other.

Fortunately for Microsoft, Gates moved with extreme urgency. He pivoted Microsoft to abandon the television initiative, and directed the entire company to focus on building a viable competitor within a week of seeing Mosaic was a viable product⁴⁶. Turning around a fourteen thousand person company is a monumental task, but Gates recognized that technological changes that came once a decade had to be seized by the throat. If you don’t leap at these tectonic shifts, you end up with the Steve Ballmer era where, missing mobile, tablets, social networks, the cloud, and every other trend. It was a lost decade and a half for Microsoft.

Iteration velocity solves all known software problems. Eric Schmitt at Google always said “revenue solves all known problems”. I think that’s actually bullshit. Revenue doesn’t solve Google’s anti-trust problems. But if you’re a professional software engineer, you have to realize at some point, that you don’t know the future. You’re going to make a wrong turn here or there. But if you are able to react quickly, then it’s not as bad. You can adjust quickly.

— Malte Ubl, CTO of Vercel

Urgency means fighting against the impulse that says “let’s do it next week, after all it’s already 3pm on a Friday.” Urgency means we’re willing to throw our plans away if the situation changes. Urgency pushes us to act now and refine later, knowing we can deal with whatever problems arise.

It does not mean moving fast and breaking things. We need to move as fast as we can while executing to our high standards and not having operational failures. Urgency is what pushes us to accept certain tradeoffs instead of contemplating for another month to come up with the perfect plan. It pushes us to act now with the best plan we have and have confidence that we can refine later. It does not push us to poor execution on the chosen plan.

Urgency does not mean being busy. Constantly running around and context switching from one tedious task to another doesn’t accomplish anything, and it’s extremely unlikely that there are so many truly urgent things for any one person to do. Urgency means pushing aside useless, process-based requirements if they’re no longer useful or getting in the way of important work.

An owner knows that in business, victories are temporary. The next competitor is right around the corner, and if not that, the next technological wave that threatens to make us obsolete. A bias for urgency helps ensure that, even when we do miss the first mover advantage, we’re not so far behind as to be swept under the tide. Speed is everything.

I started late. I didn’t have the time for waiting. Women of a certain age are seasoned enough to bypass certain temptations. They can focus on their interests more steadily than their youthful counterparts. It takes a certain tunnel vision: the ability to look directly ahead, and older women are not quite as easily distracted.`

— Estee Lauder describing the reason for her urgency in her autobiography.

Never Be Satisfied

“We have this vision of where we’re trying to go, and we’re a long ways away from it,” Gates said. “You’ve got to be careful of the anti-climax.” He went on in response to a question about what it was like to be the chairman of the world’s largest software company. “I mean, we’re not the top of the networking heap. Or the spreadsheet heap. Or the word processing heap. Computers are not very easy to use. We don’t have information at our fingertips. Yes, our revenue is bigger than anyone else’s. But if we don’t run fast and do good things…” His voice trailed off, leaving the sentence unfinished. “Believe me,” he said as the interview ended. “Staring out the window and saying ‘Isn’t this great?’ is not the solution to pushing things forward. You’ve got to keep driving hard.”

— Bill Gates as quoted in Hard Drive

Most people are too young to remember what a maniacal killer Bill Gates truly was. He was Zuck before Zuck, and two decades of charity work while donning a cardigan seems to have erased peoples memories. The greatest entrepreneurs, to a one, are never satisfied, no matter what heights they reach. Gates here is 35 years old. Microsoft is worth 5 billion dollars, and he’s no where close to satisfied.

You can find similar quotes from Steve Jobs in 1998, Edwin Land in 1965, Sam Walton in 1960³⁹, Bezos in 2014, and many many more. The reason is very simple. As soon as you adopt this “we’ve made it” attitude, you have already lost.

The numbers suggested executives might be backsliding in their mandate to relentlessly improve operating performance, and that Amazon was inheriting some of the attributes of what Bezos ominously called “Day 2” companies. “Day two is stasis, followed by irrelevance, followed by excruciating, painful decline, followed by death,” he had said earlier that year on stage at an all-hands meeting. “And that is why it is always Day one.”

— Brad Stone’s Amazon Unbound

As Motion grows, things we used to do two years ago, and sometimes even two months ago, seem laughable. Our code quality improves, processes become automated, and we grow our sophistication as a business. That’s great, and to be expected. The reason each of you were hired was because of your respective abilities to fill critical gaps in our capabilities at the time.

But as we grow even further and hire even more people, a strange thing starts to happen. Soon, new hires start scoffing and laughing at work that you did — work that, at the time, you were quite proud of, and perhaps still are. This is the way of rising standards, and it is not only natural but a necessary condition for continued growth.

Being told that the work you did (be it two days ago or two years ago) is lacking does not feel good; it’s not supposed to. Growth does not feel good. Growth comes from being pushed and stretched to the edges of our capabilities. While a chosen few of us are capable of self-growth without external stimuli³⁵, most people rely on the measuring stick of others’ expectations. As Motion grows, the job of the leadership team is to make sure our expectations of what is acceptable are constantly rising.

Great Motion employees accept this and revel in it. Most places in the world don’t have truly high expectations, and much like the tall poppy³⁶, strong performers are forced to stoop down to the level of their peers. That will never be the case at Motion. Being told you need to level up is a wake up call and a luxury; most places never give employees true feedback. Performance reviews are just a way for companies to wash their hands of any liability. At Motion, we take an earnest promise to give you the unvarnished truth of where we you find you lacking and the concrete steps needed to address it.

Our standards are higher than our peer group of companies, and it’s a large reason for why we are succeeding. You should expect that every two years our standards will continue to rise dramatically.

Sometimes, standards seem impossibly high. This is most often the case for new employees in their first several weeks. This, too, is a feature and not a bug. I’m a big believer in the Bannister Effect³⁷, and “impossibly” high standards are a requirement to unlock it. It’s what powers all new ventures, and Motion is no exception. This shouldn’t scare you; as you’ll soon learn, Motion’s history is doing what others proclaim to be impossible over and over again.

Other times, it feels like a case of fairness, when you might actually hit 100% of your goal but still be told not good enough. I’ve seen this exact conversation play out at Stripe³⁸. Usually, it’s some variant of “Well I did everything in my power to scratch and claw and I barely hit the goal, now you’re telling me it’s not good enough?” The business lead would respond with something like, “If we’ve exhausted all our ideas, how is it that we’re going to hit the business target next quarter? As you know, we expect a 10% increase every single quarter.” Usually, there’s several ideas the employee hasn’t tried. So what’s the reason for waiting until next quarter to try them? Why not try all of them this quarter and blow out our goal by 200%?

If you hit all your goals for the quarter in one week, should Motion let you take the rest of the quarter off? Of course not. What if you got lucky this quarter but had a bad process? Maybe your efforts could be put into helping other departments and leveling them up. Perhaps you can help invalidate several other hypotheses now that you have some time, or do some much needed cleanup work.

High agency owners are never satisfied.

The feeling of having finished something is an effective sleeping pill. A person who retires feeling that he has done his bit will quickly wither away. A company which feels that it has reached its goal will quickly stagnate and lose its vitality.

Happiness is not reaching your goal. Happiness is being on the way. It is our wonderful fate to be just at the beginning. In all areas. We will move ahead only by constantly asking ourselves how what we are doing today can be done better tomorrow.

— The Testament of a Furniture Dealer by Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA

Don’t Loot the Company Vault

He blundered early by suggesting in a meeting that Amazon executives who traveled frequently should be permitted to fly business-class. Bezos often said he wanted his colleagues to speak their minds, but at times it seemed he did not appreciate being personally challenged. “You would have thought I was trying to stop the Earth from tilting on its axis,” Price says, recalling that moment with horror years later. “Jeff slammed his hand on the table and said, ‘That is not how an owner thinks! That’s the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard.’”

— Brad Stone’s The Everything Store

An owner of a business treats every dollar the company spends as if it were their own household’s money — and if you truly owned 100% of the company, it is your own household’s money. There’s no difference.

Every dollar we spend has an opportunity cost. It could have gone to providing a cheaper product to our customers, to acquiring more customers, or investing in a new product line. Spending money on a business class flight to have a comfier ride accomplishes none of these. In other words, this exec was treating Amazon’s treasury as a nice side perk, completely unrelated to him. Netflix’s No Rules Rules has an almost identical passage about this same business-class flights scenario. Bill Gates is still taking economy flights when he’s personally worth 100 million dollars, and arguing with the hotel staff about a $12 valet bill³².

When I was at Stripe, some folks would famously bring tupperware and stash a bunch of extra “free” food into it, effectively getting many days of free meals on Stripe’s dime. I’ve always had a visceral reaction to this, and it’s only strengthened over time. At Motion we do our best to pay top of market relative to other companies of our size. Said directly: we pay you well, so act like it. Do not loot the company to save a couple bucks - treat it as if it were your own dollars. Would an owner steal from themselves?

Tanya was paying for FireFoo out of her own pocket to make doing her job easier. That is ownership mindset. When I found out about this, 11 months later, I reimbursed the entire bill and gave her a small bonus on top. This is a person who clearly values the company’s money and doesn’t frivolously spend it. In other words, this is ownership mentality.

I find it strange that I need to defend frugality, because for most of history this was the obvious way of business. Every titan of industry had the same virtue, but perhaps Carnegie said it best:

Profits and prices were cyclical, subject to any number of transient forces on the marketplace. Costs, however, could be strictly controlled, and any savings achieved were permanent.

— The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie

Henry Ford was so frugal that, when he found sawdust and shavings that were waste produced by manufacturing the model T, he found a way to sell those²⁸. Warren Buffet lives in the same home he bought in 1958, and in his shareholder letters, says “a good manager must be a demon on costs”³³. Azim Premji, the CEO of Wipro, only buys used cars²⁹. Ingvar Kamprad (the founder of IKEA) would calculate costs to the thousandth of a cent when negotiating between suppliers³⁰. Sam Walton made Walmart execs sleep eight to a room when traveling³¹. The examples are too numerous to count.

Thanks to the ZIRP era³⁴ and Silicon Valley incumbents, employees have become accustomed to this way of life and often believe it to be the only way to do business. Somewhere along the way, it became “cool” to provide perks, and without questioning, everyone simply accepted that companies needed to have a stellar office, fantastic food, and a whole suite of other expensive things. Ironically, Google is the single party most responsible for this, even though the early Google team themselves do not subscribe to this ideology.

I can always tell when we’re dealing with a proper founder when we start with how are they spending their money. Whenever I go into a startup that has beautiful offices and really nice chairs, I cringe. Because that means they haven’t really figured out that it’s not their money… The great founders are frugal. They understand that the money needs to be used precisely for certain areas. Many of the most successful founders begin with no salary at all.

— Eric Schmidt, former CEO of Google

Motion does not believe in perks as a retention mechanism - this is specifically an anti-goal. This is the type of thinking that encourages mercenaries over missionaries. We want people who believe in making the world more productive and eliminating busywork. If you’re here for free massages, there’s the door.

As usual, Bezos said it best:

But [Bezos] also felt that the perks factored into those high-profile media surveys of workplace desirability—like lavish compensation, unlimited vacation time, and free meals and massages—had little to do with the passion and purpose employees brought to their jobs. “He once told me, ‘If we ever appear in the “100 best places to work in America,” you’ve screwed this place up,’ ” Niekerk said.

— Jeff Bezos, in Amazon Unbound

The “perks” we offer are investments in helping you do more work and of higher quality. Engineers need performant laptops to help compile code faster. Parents who opt to not take parental leave need night nurses so they can get a good night’s sleep to perform at their best. Employees who work weekends get food delivered because they don’t have time to cook. These are calculated ROI decisions, not retention mechanisms. If we found that an investment in this or any other perk was not yielding results, we would happily and immediately terminate that program.

Be Bold

There’s two aspects to being bold:

1. acting with high agency, and doing things others would not think of

2. taking risk, even if it means personal failure

Acting with high agency means thinking outside the box and prioritizing solving the problem above everything else. This way of acting opens up avenues that others frequently dismiss or don’t even consider. Here’s an example from Stripe’s founders:

At YC we use the term “Collison installation” for the technique they invented. More diffident founders ask “Will you try our beta?” and if the answer is yes, they say “Great, we’ll send you a link.” But the Collison brothers weren’t going to wait. When anyone agreed to try Stripe they’d say “Right then, give me your laptop” and set them up on the spot.

— Paul Graham

Most people don’t even consider doing that because socially, it’s quite awkward. It turns out, though, that people don’t mind such a white glove installation. This single act of initiative has now become legend, such that all new Stripes are told the story. Underlying the awkwardness is a fear of failure. For most people, failure has become a thing to fear and avoid. At Motion, failure²³ should be welcomed. Once again, Bezos says it best:

As a company grows, everything needs to scale, including the size of your failed experiments. If the size of your failures isn’t growing, you’re not going to be inventing at a size that can actually move the needle. Amazon will be experimenting at the right scale for a company of our size if we occasionally have multibillion-dollar failures. Of course, we won’t undertake such experiments cavalierly. We will work hard to make them good bets, but not all good bets will ultimately pay out. This kind of large-scale risk taking is part of the service we as a large company can provide to our customers and to society. The good news for shareowners is that a single big winning bet can more than cover the cost of many losers.

— Invent and Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

As Motion grows, size of our failures should naturally grow; it would be a catastrophic mistake to reduce our risk appetite precisely when we can afford to take risks. You will frequently find us trying out ideas that only have a 30% chance of success — or even less — if the payoff is worth it. Meta knows that there’s an extremely small chance that AR glasses will work. But if it does, then that’s the next iPhone, and that’s worth literal trillions of dollars. So of course it makes sense to burn 30 billion for such a large potential payoff.

Funnily enough, it is often the case that the best ideas are universally hated.

Bezos announced that Amazon would develop its own dedicated electronic reading device for long-form reading. It was a stunning edict. Creating hardware was expensive and complicated. It was also well outside of Amazon’s core competency—its litany of obvious skills. There was a chorus of vehement objections. Jeff Wilke in particular had the background in manufacturing to know what challenges lay ahead for the company if it tried to make and sell its own devices. “I thought it would be difficult and disruptive and I was skeptical that it was the right use of our resources,” he says. “It turned out that most of the things I predicted would happen actually happened, and we still powered through it because Jeff is not deterred by short-term setbacks.”

— Brad Stone’s The Everything Store

As this passage shows, the critics are often right. Everything that Wilke (Bezos’s second in command) said would happen did actually happen. But so what? We persevere, and the result was the Kindle, Amazon’s most successful hardware launch ever.

As Luis likes to say so often, “the opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea.”²⁶

If we’re not having increasingly spectacular failures²⁴, we are not taking enough risk! Accept that failures is a feature, and commit to it. When someone brings up an idea, “I don’t think it will work” is not a reason to not do it.

Only while sleeping one makes no mistakes. Making mistakes is the privilege of the active – of those who can correct their mistakes and put them right. Our objectives require us to constantly practise making decisions and taking responsibility, to constantly overcome our fear of making mistakes. The fear of making mistakes is the root of bureaucracy and the enemy of development.

• The Testament of a Furniture Dealer, the IKEA handbook written by Ingvar Kamprad, founder of IKEA (emphasis mine)

Lastly, whether or not you make a mistake doesn’t matter. Just make a decision. The vast majority of decisions aren’t 1-way doors²⁷, so if you’re wrong, just come back and fix it later.\

You should read biographies about CEOs, about business. And you would see that even Steve Jobs, he made probably 90% of mistakes in all his decisions. And many, many stupid mistakes. And he was not good altogether. Maybe the single common trait between all successful CEOs I may found is decisiveness. You should make decisions. And because when you make decision, you move forward. Even if decisions are stupid, you are moving forward and you are getting new information and next decision will be better. The worst is just this analysis paralysis not making any decisions.

— Dimitry Gurski, CEO of Flow Health²⁵ (emphasis mine)

At Motion, you will be given responsibilities outsized to your role and years of experience. Stop looking for a process or a committee to bail you out. Make decisions, and move the company forward. And if the decisions happen to be mistakes, own up to it and fix them. This is a privilege.

Conclusion

The application of these core values may be very different in each department, and for the exact tactical applications, please speak to your department head. But surprisingly, it’s quite easy for me to recognize if they exhibit these values even in departments I know nothing about. Olesya regularly takes meetings until 10pm on Fridays to accommodate those of us in North America. Ethan is fighting tooth and nail with every vendor to save us money, even if it means not having a vendor and just increasing personal pain tolerance. Bishop is continuously raising the standards of the support org to the point of jumping in and manually responding to hundreds of tickets if Front or Intercom has an outage.

I don’t know the details of what a good support agent or marketer or recruiter does, but I can recognize ownership from a mile away. And I suspect you can, too.

This document is a huge risk. I’m sure if passages are posted online without context, it’ll be seen as yet another naive, cringey startup culture doc. The cynical will say something to the effect of “Culture is just another way to squeeze more hours out of people for less pay.” This couldn’t be further from the truth. Of course, acting like an owner — with extreme agency — is good for the company. But it’s also good for you.

Nearly every successful person in history has high agency, and all of them are looking for more such people. Paul Graham calls this “relentlessly resourceful” vs “hapless”. Jeff Bezos calls this “the person you’d call to break you out of a 3rd world prison.” Keith Rabois calls this “barrels vs ammunition”. It can be anything from getting your garden shed to be the highest rated restaurant in London¹⁹ to escaping Auschwitz by hiding in a wood pile doused with gasoline, only to come back and help 120,000 Hungarian Jews also escape²⁰.

High agency people are happier, generally more successful, and live more fulfilling lives²¹. As I’ve said many times, the most precious resource we have is not time but energy²². High agency people leave us feeling more energized, and this feeling is addictive. In contrast, low agency people are energy vampires who suck the soul out of any conversation, any party, or any victory.

Motion should be a life changing experience for all employees — not just financially, but for your character. It’s a hive of passionate grinders who genuinely believe in doing the impossible, and once you get a true taste for high standards, the rest of the world will seem bland by comparison.

Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.

— Steve Jobs

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¹ A case for founders sticking around and managing the transition very carefully.

² I don’t normally recommend patent law cases, but this book is a seminal read.

³ This and other fascinating stats about companies on the S&P 500.

⁴ The infamous fart app

⁵ The origins of Exxon Mobile

⁶ The legendary Peter Thiel on the nature of competition

⁷ List of oil-related billionaires. You’ll note that almost all of these billionaires are high-level execs at major conglomerates like Shell. Only a handful, including Monty, truly ran a vertical shop and did everything, persistently, on their own.

⁸ It turns out that venting is bad for you

⁹ A link to the rest of our communication guidelines. These are currently not public.

¹⁰ A link to how I instruct managers at Motion to do performance reviews. These are currently not public.

¹¹ A link to how we do signposting internally at Motion. This is not currently public.

¹² From the legendary Paul Graham essay.

¹³ It’s literally the first step in their manual on bringing down organizations.

¹⁴ Apologies for the software lingo.

¹⁵ From Walter Isaacson’s incredible biography on Steve Jobs.

¹⁶ The words of the legend herself in her autobiography.

¹⁷ From Brad Stone’s Everything Store. They settled, in case you’re wondering, and a decade later Bezos drops the “.com”.

¹⁸ From his autobiography, Made in America.

¹⁹ No notes, just wow.

²⁰ The remarkable life of Alfred Wetzler.

²¹ A rather excellent study on mindsets and associated life outcomes.

²² An excellent Harvard Business Review article exploring why we flock to high energy people.

²³ Let’s separate out failures in which we took intentional risk from operational failures that we messed up on. The first is okay (trying something new, maybe a feature won’t work). The second is never acceptable. We’ve built competency in certain things: doing daily deploys, billing customers, doing sales demos. If you’re following a set playbook of things we already know how to do and have done dozens of times successfully, this is not an area in which failure is accepted.

²⁴ Zuck’s ability to take egg on his face and continue marching forward, undeterred, is most impressive.

²⁵ Separate from all this, do read more about Dmitry - he’s an incredible founder and amazing human being. An amazingly well balanced, well intentioned person who is humble and thoughtful while being ultra determined. Flo Health came into the market three years behind competition that was much more well funded (including Max Levchin from the PayPal mafia).

²⁶ ""The opposite of a good idea can also be a good idea” - Rory Sutherland” - Luis Carrasco

²⁷ This is now embedded in the social consciousness, but the original explanation can be found in Bezos’ shareholder letters, and I still think it’s worth reading.

²⁸ Henry Ford inventing barbecue kits out of sheer disdain for waste.

²⁹ Premji recommending everyone buy only second-hand cars.

³⁰ Leading by Design: The IKEA Story.

³¹ From the autobiography of Sam Walton, titled Sam Walton: Made in America.

³² People forget that Microsoft was profitable from day one. They started out in an apartment that he and Paul Allen lived in together, and the next several new hires were also living with them. All from the excellent Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire.

³³ Berkshire Hathaway’s shareholder letters.

³⁴ ZIRP era in all its glory.

³⁵ Even incredibly capable people often need external stimuli to really force growth. While Kobe Bryant may be truly one of the few people in history with such an internal drive, even Lebron James, a better player, did not have that kind of internal motivation. Here’s Lebron after truly seeing Kobe’s work ethic for the first time when participating in the Olympics as Kobe’s teammate: “This motherfucker Kobe was already drenched in sweat, and we was like, ‘Yeah, he different’.”

³⁶ The Tall Poppy Syndrome is where over-performers are forced into mediocrity to not stand out, much like the tall poppy is cut to match the height of the surrounding poppies.

³⁷ Check out my full talk on the Bannister Effect. It’s also filled with lots of lore from the founding of Motion! Highly recommend if you truly want an accurate picture of where we came from.

³⁸ Patrick Collison runs Stripe in the same way.

³⁹ Walton is unique because he had already become the #1 variety store operator in the US prior to starting Walmart. He was making $15 million a year in today’s dollars, and was incredibly dissatisfied. So he started to look for a bigger idea. All from his autobiography (see chapter 3).

⁴⁰ Mark’s threat to go “destroy mode” totally worked; we know this now thanks to lawsuits against Facebook that opened up these emails to the public.

⁴¹ Instagram’s worth back in 2018.

⁴² Brad Stone’s The Everything Store.

⁴³ Facebook released an exact replica of Snapchat called “Poke” - every screen, every copy, and every UX pattern was copied exactly. Snapchat, however, rallied and just one month after Poke went from #34 to #1 on the app store. How to Turn Down a Billion Dollars.

⁴⁴ The youth of today need to educate themselves.

⁴⁵ Gates’ love afair with the “Information Superhighway”.

⁴⁶ Overdrive is an excellent biography of those early days of Microsoft.

⁴⁷ Amazon did not disclose AWS earnings for nine years, and even then it was only because they were required to do so by the SEC (any line item constitution more than 25% of the company’s revenue must be disclosed independently). Until then, AWS earnings were put into a random “other” category. Check out Amazon Unbound for more details.

⁴⁸ It’s a very hard to acquire book but well worth it. Estee might be the most impressive entrepreneur I’ve read about. Maniacal focus, insane urgency, and unbelievable attention to detail. Nearly all of the best practices you read about in women’s makeup come directly from her.