Integrity
I believe in doing the right thing, even if nobody is looking. Honesty and moral consistency are deeply important to me.
Quality
I always strive for high quality in everything I do. That bar changes depending on circumstances, but it’s always top of mind.
Trust
I aim to build trust with the people I work with, in both directions. Trust is an important part of an effective workplace - if everyone has to double check everyone else’s work, everything goes much more slowly. Trust is hard to build and easy to lose, so trust-losing actions are deeply painful to me.
Transparency and Truthfulness
I believe extremely deeply in the value of honesty, even for the smallest of nitpicks. I also want others to be as truthful with me as possible, because I need that information in order to improve.
Empathy
Emotions drive many behaviors. It’s important to be able to understand how people are feeling, because it can help you predict and react to their behaviors.
Open-mindedness
I always welcome being proven wrong, and I often actively seek it out. It’s important to me to find the best answer, even if that answer isn’t mine.
Leverage
I believe that we should always be focusing on how to make any given unit of work go further. When I am considering what work to do, I often ask myself “which of these things has the most leverage?”, both from the perspective of my output, and the output of others.
Risk Tolerance
I work in startups for a reason. The downside of risky bets pales in comparison to the upside. I believe we should always be taking calculated risky bets, at every scale.
Hard Work
If something is worth doing, it’s worth doing well. And working smart isn’t itself enough - we’re competing with some of the smartest people in the world. We should be working smart and working hard.
Adaptability
Nothing we do should be too fixed - rigid processes lead to poor outcomes for unexpected events. I aim to take any unexpected occurrences in stride, and adapt my behavior to reflect the changed view of reality.
Understanding
It is easy to criticize another person if you don’t actually understand their situation. In general, we tend to under-estimate the complexity and difficulty of others’ jobs and inflate our own. It is important to work hard to understand the true complexity of a task before criticizing someone's performance on it. Further, if we write off our competition without deeply understanding their position, we’re going to miss important signal.
Aesthetics
I care quite deeply about how things look. I think it is often a useful proxy for the amount of thought and care put into it.
Incremental Improvement
Any time work can be broken into smaller chunks without huge overhead, it should be. Incremental improvement (on a product, as a person, as a team) allows us to be agile and gather information as quickly as possible, and reduces the likelihood that effort will be wasted.
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