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Dear reader, I am working on two posts that continue our exploration of commerce. I hope to have one of them ready to share some time this week, and the other the week following.
In the meantime, some news.
Banter has raised our pre-seed round. We have brought aboard a tremendous group of investors and advisors for whom I am eternally grateful.
We are hiring. If you or anyone you know is interested in making shopping social and the Internet less lonely, please reach out.
Here’s a recruiting video we’ve put together.
Additionally, I believe it is important to share our values with the greater community. We have six values that spiral to form the DNA of our company. These values help guide everything from hiring, to marketing to product strategy.
They are the following:
Be Fearlessly Different
Every person has superpowers. We often tend to oscillate away from our zones of genius, away from our superpowers, to norms and consensus.
Don’t.
We want to identify people’s superpowers and lean into what makes them different. We will hire for superpowers, rather than for roles.
Why? We seek to change online shopping. To create change we must deviate from the consensus and reject the variables that optimize for the existing trendline. To do so, we must have different inputs than everyone else. Thus, if forced to choose between two options of seemingly equal merit, choose the one that doesn’t look the part. The one that doesn’t look the part has had to overcome much more to achieve its status than the one who fit in perfectly.
This is unfamiliar and uncomfortable. It cuts against heuristics that have calcified over time, but often without merit. We will interrogate these heuristics. Many, we believe, will crumble under the lightest pressure.
So, be fearless. Fear is a shackle. It slows us down. Some fears, like the fear of being unethical, must exist and serves us. But many sources of fear do not.
Nothing thwarts creativity and growth more than the fear of being judged. Being wrong is ok, being afraid of being wrong is not. Be fearless in your commitment to your superpower(s) and those around you.
Never waver when you wrong. You can only wrong when you fear to waver.
Be Inspired
We seek people who are truly inspired by our mission and our journey. Inspiration is magic, it rushes through our body and transforms what we believe is possible. We will remove any space between inspiration and action. When you feel the magic, cast a spell.
Remember, nothing is fixed. Ideas can come from anyone, anywhere, at anytime. Embrace new ideas and ways of doing everything at all times.
Embrace Autonomy
When you find people who are inspired, they care. When they care they should be rewarded with:
Autonomy to act on their inspirations
Trust in their intuition
Ownership over their work
Yet, these rewards come with an expectation for action, this will be held accountable.
Move Fast
Autonomy, trust and ownership allow for speed. Speed enables quick feedback loops that allow us to update our models. More importantly, speed creates more collision. So much insight comes from the unintended collision of ideas and experiences. Optimize for the volume, rather than the accuracy, of such collisions.
Indeed, the rate at which you can make decisions is a far greater predictor of success than the accuracy of the decisions you make.
Act quickly. Embrace failure. Learn fast. Move.
As such, we must be mean and lean. Mean to success, as success makes us slow and complacent. And lean in our processes; every idea and decision should be given the path of least resistance. That comes from investing in small and mighty teams and dividing down to the lowest number of stakeholders as possible.
Seek the Truth
Ask why? Rigorously interrogate your assumptions, heuristics and biases.
How? Search actively for evidence against favored beliefs, plans or goals and weigh such evidence fairly when it is available. Steel man.
Recognize that the world changes constantly and that all of the views that we hold are tenuous. Seek varied points of view and update your beliefs as new information dictates. Remember, diverse input combined with rigor lead to insight.
At the same time, set aside ego, politics and bureaucracy. Instead, act with integrity and allow ethics, rather than heuristics, serve as boundaries.
Tell Great Stories
‘If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.’
Stories create a codify way for people to more intuitively understand complicated and abstract ideas. The right stories can form a currency that creates trust and enables the exchange of ideas and values between diverse groups of individuals and concepts.
Stories also act as the electromagnetic force that puts these collisions in motion. It convinces ideas of different charges to collide instead of repel. It coaxes the stern, unforgiving laws of physics with a sprinkle of alchemy that turns energy into serendipity, inspiration into magic.
Invest in storytelling. Great storytellers are valuable. We will help train them.
How?
Write, write, write.
Why? Writing holds us intellectually accountable. It requires substantially more proof of work than speaking does. As such, we are forced to dive deeper into topics before opining. Writing is the best tool for learning — as it forces you to teach yourself in order explain a topic to an audience.
We will tell great stories. The stories we tell are the prism by which the world around us is refracted. A great story changes how we feel, lessons from which can be applied to our mission.
Yet, we recognize the most important story is the one we tell ourselves.
Things happen. We cannot control the what happens around us, we can only control how we perceive them. How we perceive things is simply a function of the stories we tell. Here’s a secret, we control the story, and an optimistic story costs the same as a pessimistic one. We want everyone to be great at telling this story.