The Levels cultural handbook (Sam Corcos & Josh Clemente)

Company processes and values are worth articulating—and are worth revisiting and updating as your company grows. In this episode, Levels CEO Sam Corcos and founder Josh Clemente take you behind the scenes for a discussion of the current iteration of the Levels’ cultural handbook. The conversation illuminates the decisions and gray areas that must be navigated to build a strong company culture within the context of an asynchronous remote team.

Avoid paternalistic rules

Sam wants to avoid company processes, procedures, and values that come across as paternalistic.

I’ve been thinking for the last several days about what is the difference between something that’s paternalistic and something that is not? For me, I don’t know why yet I haven’t fully worked this out in my own mind, but defining what tools and communication cadence, and having these types of expectations in the organization don’t feel paternalistic to me, but telling people that you are required to exercise for 30 minutes a day and you have to do these certain things, like you’re not allowed to work on weekends does feel paternalistic. But there’s also an asterisk to that, which is kind of interesting that Mike Haney and I talked about where he said that it’s also reasonable to set defaults and to remember that people… We operate very differently than most companies and so there’s years of programming that people already came in with and we might have to do some deprogramming. So he gave some examples of, it might be reasonable to set a default just for the first month that says, “Hey, I know you’re used to responding to emails on weekends, we’re going to have you install this app and it’s not even going to let you respond to email on weekends for the first month and just see how that feels because that’s the default behavior and you can change it after the first month. It’s not a big deal, but we just want you to know that that is the norm and that’s the default.”

Companies must create structure from chaos

Josh made the point that companies do need to set ground rules and create structure, even if this means being paternalistic to some degree.

Companies have an obligation to create structure from chaos. And we can’t just say, “It’s fully democratized, pick your tool set, pick your communication cadence, do whatever works best for you the individual.” I don’t subscribe to that ideology. We have a responsibility to build an organization with structure in order that we can get things accomplished in a certain way. And we’ve picked asynchronous remote as the strategy. and like Haney is saying, “People don’t work that way.” I mean, we’re in the fraction of a percent, so we need to have some guardrails for people to actually merge onto that way of working. I guess what I’m trying to say is, some degree of paternalism is going to be necessary, there is going to be friction there where we have to tell people… Maybe I have a problem with calling rules paternalistic, parents make rules, yes, but also we have to make rules and so is every rule that we set as an organization practicing paternalism? I don’t think so. I mean, we have to be okay with creating structure.

Foster a productive environment

Sam thinks it’s important to take into account the “downstream” effects of company processes and tools that are adopted.

I was talking with Chris Jones, I know that you and I talked about this as well, how when he started working at Levels, it took him like two weeks to reset the dopamine pathways of checking Slack all the time. I think he described his previous job as playing whack-a-mole on Slack all day, and that’s a really high stress, low productivity environment that we don’t want to exist in our company. So given that for most people, I definitely can include myself in this, Slack became compulsive behavior. I had to install website blockers to prevent me from checking the slot machine and maybe it’s okay to enforce that for some period of time to break people of the habit, because I think maybe some of it for me has to do with – it’s not strictly speaking that we’re doing it because it’s good for the individual, but because it has downstream effects for everyone else at the organization.

Make decisions for the good of the organization

Josh believes that employees engage in a W2 relationship knowing that they will give up some agency.

When you decide to enter into a work agreement, you are giving up a degree of agency, you’re deciding that you’re going to be a part of an entity that has disagree and commit principles built in, you don’t necessarily get to decide all the decisions you’ll have to make and the ways in which you’ll have to make them so I again think that there’s a delineation there between recognizing that outside of the context of work, you have agency, within the context of work, we’re going to have to make decisions that some may disagree with to a certain extent and we expect everyone to respect that, open up dialogue but at the end of the day the decision has to be made… We have to select tools that we believe are not pathological to our way of doing work. And so it’s easy for us to say, “Here are reasons why this tool is not right for our culture.” and people can say, “Well, I like the tool better.” and that’s okay but at the end of the day, that individual can’t overrule what’s best for the organization. And so I think we’ll always have an easier time making these sorts of decisions if we just reflect on how it fits into the culture framework that we’re trying to build.

Leave personal lives in the control of employees

Josh thinks that even when it comes to policies like vacation, companies shouldn’t dictate exactly how and when it happens because that is part of the employee’s personal-life realm.

We say something about, “If we tell our team how to live their lives, e.g. you’re required to take vacation on these days without a specific company objective.” it feels paternalistic and hypocritical. And then a few paragraphs down we say, “In addition to standard benefits, we have a mandatory minimum vacation policy.” And although it’s not saying when, like a holiday calendar that you have to take these days, to me, it feels in direct conflict and granted, I think we have company rationale for that. So I do think we should rework this paragraph into something that is focused on the way we want to do work and leaves everyone’s personal lives to them. For you, think week is your vacation so maybe you call that vacation so maybe vacation’s still the right term, but sleeping and exercising, everyone’s got their own interpretations of these sorts of things. And although I personally believe that as individuals, we can continue to push each other to live in a certain way like achieve your goals, whatever, that should be done on a personal level, it shouldn’t be a company-sanctioned decision.

The definition of project debt

Sam brought up the concept of project debit, which is the invisible load of communication and mental work that accompanies any given project.

Project debt, which is anything you’re on the hook for. So in your case, it’s like the Friday Forum is project debt. It’s a thing that you always have to do every week, it’s the ongoing maintenance of things, it’s the checking in on stuff. Then there are projects that you can do that either lead to project debt or not. And they can either not because the project is done or you’ve handed it off to somebody else and now they have the project debt. So there’s something in here around the situation you don’t want to end up in, which is something that happens all the time in companies is you end up with 100% of your capacity taken up by project debt and you are so underwater you don’t even have the capacity to hire somebody or to document things to hand them off to somebody. And so you just inch closer and closer to burnout.

Maintain a tolerance for risk

Sam finds it ironic that as companies become bigger and more successful, they typically become more risk-averse.

How do we ensure that we maintain our risk tolerance as we get bigger? I had some conversations and thought a lot about why do companies become more risk-averse when they get larger, when they should actually become more risk-tolerant, because every piece is less existential. And a lot of times with these things, you have to ask a question of, if everyone is doing it, there might be a good reason for that, but that’s not always the case, this is like maybe the [burpy 00:38:06] in the argument for it. But I don’t think there is actually a good reason, I think it is loss aversion and I think that we just need to be very mindful of knowing what risks are acceptable and what failures are acceptable and how do we tolerate them as we grow.

Don’t Be a Blocker

Sam describes a section of the handbook that explicitly talks about the importance of keeping work flowing towards completion versus getting stuck.

Don’t Be a Blocker. We have two sections here, the “Don’t Be a Blocker” talks a lot about passive criticism and making sure that… Most people don’t want to be a blocker, they just don’t realize how their input affects the process. They add some information and then the state of the project is now ambiguous because of that. So making sure that we give feedback to people to make sure that things can always move forward and people know what the next step is, I think is really important.

The role of constructive criticism

Sam is a firm believer in being more constructive than critical. That’s because it’s very difficult to build and release things into the world, and much easier to sit back and criticize.

[In improv comedy] it really is a brave thing to do, to just go out there in front of a group of people and try to make jokes about stuff that were not prepared, it’s really hard. And it’s the same sort of thing with ideas where on the one end of the spectrum, if somebody has an idea and they put it out there, we don’t want the first five comments to be criticism of how bad their idea is, because then that person’s probably never going to contribute again. And I can tell you in my own experience – I’m kind of past this threshold in my life now where I just don’t care but for the first five, six, seven years of my professional career, it would’ve been really hurtful to just have everyone tell me how bad my idea is and I would just say, “All right, fine. I’m just going to not do that anymore. No more building. I’m just going to be a critic like everyone else. And then everyone’s going to think I’m smart and no one’s going to make fun of me and make me feel bad.”

Take action instead of complaining

Josh said that when issues arise repeatedly, it’s important to go back to the source and see if a process can be fixed.

We want a culture where, when someone raises a problem like, “Hey, this thing is slowing me down.” the first question is – and this gets tricky when you’re really slammed and projects are behind and things like that but at the end of the day, that should be a, “Hey, we need to change this, we need to implement this other thing. I would do it if I had the time but unfortunately I’m completely drowning on this other thing.” And that should be probably an escalation or across the department conversation, but it’s all always grounded in, “What needs to be improved?” as opposed to just a complaint, like a passive criticism.

Josh Clemente:

We don’t actually need to design a lifestyle for the individual, we need to design a culture that will benefit the company, that’s what we’re all here to do and I think that’s our obligation. So if slot machines end up with people not being effective and being distracted and being addicted to the dopamine hit, you and I may agree that that’s not good for the individual, but the reason we want to change it is because we want improve effectiveness as an organization.

Ben Gyrnol:

I’m Ben Grynol, part of the early startup team here at Levels. We’re building tech that helps people to understand their metabolic health and this is your front row seat to everything we do. This is a whole new level. As a fully remote team. You almost need to overindex on cultural values. You have to be thoughtful, you can’t be passive because a lot of them are based on people putting one foot in front of the other at the same time. And with cultural values, you can’t be overly prescriptive and say, “Here’s exactly the way we do it, the only way we do it.” because really, culture’s built on the conditions that you create for other people to thrive.

Ben Gyrnol:

But as a remote team, culture can be harder to build. You have to be more intentional about it, the way that everybody aligns on the different initiatives that are undertaken and the way that people work. What you want to ensure is that everybody is on the same page. And as you build the team, as you bring more people on board, it’s really important to reinforce these values in the way that a company works. So for us as team Levels, we’re very much asynchronous in our approach. And now, as we’ve gotten to 34 people as of November 7th, 2021, well, we’ve got a cultural handbook, something that Michael Mizrahi, head of operations put together.

Ben Gyrnol:

It’s a reference point for not only new team members, but our entire team to align round and say, “Hey, these are all things we still believe, these are values that we hold within our team and we value deeply.” And so Josh Clemente, founder of Levels and Sam Corcos, CEO and co-founder of Levels, the two of them sat down to discuss this handbook that Miz put together and what their outlook was on it. Here’s Sam.

Sam Corcos:

So one of the concepts is that we’re a team not a family, but this also ties into some of the terminology is that we have teams, not departments. I’m not sure how much this feels like a cultural value to me. Also because like today, yesterday, I’ve lost track of time, but I had to define something of the growth org, the operations team, it’s the category, I would call that a department.

Josh Clemente:

I would too. I’m definitely not married to the teams not departments thing, I think departments makes sense, big corporations also use department, but they also call themselves a company and we call ourselves a company so I don’t think we have to get too worried about that type of thing. To me it’s specialization, it’s where certain types of work happen. It doesn’t necessarily imply that one person can’t do work for multiple departments, I think that’s what we don’t want to end up in.

Sam Corcos:

Right. Yeah. That’s a good point. I wonder how we can differentiate that because I think that maybe just ties into the [short toes 00:03:53], right? Maybe we can have more of the department terminology within the short toes idea.

Josh Clemente:

Yeah. Like focusing the department description as the types of work that occur, it’s essentially labeling categories of work more so than categories of people.

Sam Corcos:

Yeah. Yeah. That’s a good point. I do think we treat each other like adults should be the top one, sort of the main concept. It’s actually very similar to what Marc Randolph talked about is that he said, “Netflix in many ways was an experiment in what does a company look like if you just hire people who have good judgment and then you let them do that.” Yep.

Josh Clemente:

I fully subscribe.

Sam Corcos:

I was reading the We Live Balanced, Wholesome Lives, and it got me thinking more about this concept of paternalism, I understand and what this is saying but I maybe have mixed feelings about some of this stuff. I’m trying to remember, there was another thread in which Scott and I went back and forth a couple times, it was on a particular topic… Yeah, it was in principles of effective communication and Scott proposed… I actually coincidentally have a conversation with him and Andrew about this later, but he proposed that we should enable the use of Slack and we should just rely on people using them correctly. And we should not be paternalistic in telling people what to communication tools they can and cannot use.

Sam Corcos:

And I understand what he’s saying, but I have mixed feelings about this. And I’ve been thinking for the last several days about what is the difference between something that’s paternalistic and something that is not? For me, I don’t know why yet I haven’t fully worked this out in my own mind, but defining what tools and communication cadence, and having these types of expectations in the organization don’t feel paternalistic to me, but telling people that you are required to exercise for 30 minutes a day and you have to do these certain things, like you’re not allowed to work on weekends does feel paternalistic.

Sam Corcos:

But there’s also an asterisk to that, which is kind of interesting that Mike Haney and I talked about where he said that it’s also reasonable to set defaults and to remember that people… We operate very differently than most companies and so there’s years of programming that people already came in with and we might have to do some deprogramming. So he gave some examples of, it might be reasonable to set a default just for the first month that says, “Hey, I know you’re used to responding to emails on weekends, we’re going to have you install this app and it’s not even going to let you respond to email on weekends for the first month and just see how that feels because that’s the default behavior and you can change it after the first month. It’s not a big deal, but we just want you to know that that is the norm and that’s the default.”

Sam Corcos:

And for some reason, that doesn’t feel paternalistic to me. Maybe it’s because it’s in the context of an experiment or it’s time bounded or there’s more intent behind it. I don’t really know, I have mixed feelings about it.

Josh Clemente:

Yeah. To me, that one definitely feels paternalistic. It’s as if you’re being put in time out from your own email inbox, like being blocked physically from doing it. It’s similar to the example you gave where you went to the office at some point on a Sunday and the door was locked and you were like, “What the hell, I want to do work? This is what I want to do.” If I want to send an email, because it’s on my mind, it’s burning a hole in my consciousness, I’m just going to write it on a post-it note and stick it on my mirror and I’m going to see it every day and be like, “Why can’t I send this to an email?” You know what I mean? So that one definitely feels paternalistic, but I understand the intent.

Josh Clemente:

And to back up one step, companies have an obligation to create structure from chaos. And we can’t just say, “It’s fully democratized, pick your tool set, pick your communication cadence, do whatever works best for you the individual.” I don’t subscribe to that ideology. We have a responsibility to build an organization with structure in order that we can get things accomplished in a certain way. And we’ve picked asynchronous remote as the strategy and like Haney is saying, “People don’t work that way.”

Sam Corcos:

Sure.

Josh Clemente:

I mean, we’re in the fraction of a percent, so we need to have some guardrails for people to actually merge onto that way of working. I guess what I’m trying to say is, some degree of paternalism is going to be necessary, there is going to be friction there where we have to tell people… Maybe I have a problem with calling rules paternalistic, parents make rules, yes, but also we have to make rules and so is every rule that we set as an organization practicing paternalism? I don’t think so. I mean, we have to be okay with creating structure. So yes, I also have mixed feeling, it’s a gray area, but there are gradations. Locking someone out of their inbox, forcing someone to do 30 minutes of exercise, both of these things feel like extremes as opposed to the Netflix strategy of saying, “Here’s the culture we’re building, we trust you to make good decisions, but this is the way we want things to be run. And it’s okay if you deviate a little bit here and there, but use your good judgment and don’t pass along cultural values that do not match these.”

Sam Corcos:

Yeah. I think one of the principles here that we should try to work through is not all rules are paternalistic, just because something is a rule doesn’t mean it’s paternalistic. Like you can have somebody who… Hypothetically, you’re visiting a friend’s house and they say like, “We’re a shoes-off-household.” and you’re like, “No, I’m keeping my shoes on, you’re not my mom.” I just don’t like having dirty shoes in my house, that’s not paternalism, this is just the way that we operate the house and that’s pretty reasonable. I think for me, maybe the thing that changes something into paternalism is the, “It’s for your own good.” type of stuff, and it’s like, “You should exercise because we believe that it’s good for you so you should do it.”

Sam Corcos:

So another interesting case study as it relates to paternalism is when I was talking with Chris Jones, I know that you and I talked about this as well, how when he started working at Levels, it took him like two weeks to reset the dopamine pathways of checking Slack all the time. I think he described his previous job as playing whack-a-mole on Slack all day, and that’s a really high stress, low productivity environment that we don’t want to exist in our company. So given that for most people, I definitely can include myself in this, Slack became compulsive behavior. I had to install website blockers to prevent me from checking the slot machine and maybe it’s okay to enforce that for some period of time to break people of the habit, because I think maybe some of it for me has to do with… It’s not strictly speaking that we’re doing it because it’s good for the individual, but because it has downstream effects for everyone else at the organization.

Josh Clemente:

This is where I was about to go with it is that you’re right, I think in your definition of paternalistic you’re right in framing it as something that you must do that is uncomfortable, but it’s good for you, it’s almost pastoral, like faith based or something. Whereas, if we instead take the position of the what’s in the best interest of the company, that’s what we’re all doing here. The family versus team concept, drawing that line and saying, “No, we’re not a family, we’re a team.” We don’t actually need to design a lifestyle for the individual, we need to design a culture that will benefit the company. That’s what we’re all here to do and I think that’s our obligation.

Josh Clemente:

So if slot machines end up with people not being effective and being distracted and being addicted to the dopamine hit, you and I may agree that that’s not good for the individual, but the reason we want to change it is because we want improve effectiveness as an organization and maybe drawing the line there.

Sam Corcos:

Yeah, I hear what you’re saying, but that is the justification for every paternalistic policy. We have mandatory vacation time not because we think that people taking vacations is good, but because we want to have a forcing function for organizational redundancy where taking time off and not being available means that we have fewer single bus factor events.

Josh Clemente:

Yeah.

Sam Corcos:

Like when Miz took a week off recently, Zach was able to take over almost all of his responsibilities. And there were a couple things that we discovered maybe we needed more redundancy on them and that was really useful to surface. And that would not have happened if he hadn’t taken time off. So, almost every justification of like… I can totally see this as a possibility. Somebody goes to business school and they read a study that says people who exercise 30 minutes a day have 10% more productivity. Great, we need to institute a policy that’s good for the company that everybody should do this thing, And that might strictly speaking be true in the scope of company productivity, but it is in my mind, clearly misaligned, has a strictly paternalistic policy of like, we’re going to buy everyone a Peloton and they have to be on it 30 minutes a day because the statistics show people are 10% more productive when they do that, and that’s better for the company, right?

Josh Clemente:

Yep. Yeah. I hear what you’re saying. It’s something like modifying personal behaviors under the guise of benefiting the company versus modifying behaviors within the context of work, which I think is different. You’re saying, “You have to go to this happy hour to create bonds with your team.” or “You have to get on the Peloton because it’ll make you better.” versus saying, “While you’re operating on company work, here are the ways that we do these things.” and the delineation is just control work factors, add structure to the way we do work, but don’t try and intervene in… Maybe it feels a little bit disingenuous to say, “This is what’s best for you.” to be interfering in someone’s personal life under guise the guise of improving your work. I don’t know, I hear what you’re saying though.

Sam Corcos:

Yeah. There’s definitely something about personal life that’s relevant. Although again, I can see all of these things being justified of like, “Oh, okay, well then we’ll just do it during work hours therefore, it’s not your personal life.”

Josh Clemente:

Yeah. We’re definitely going to run into the vacation policy over and over on this one I think, because by saying, “You have to take vacation one week per quarter.” we are doing this. Maybe instead we should say, “We have a three weeks per…” What is it? [crosstalk 00:16:47]. Yeah.

Sam Corcos:

Yeah.

Josh Clemente:

Well, it would be the opposite. It would be, “We have a 48 week work year.”

Sam Corcos:

Sure.

Josh Clemente:

You don’t have to go on vacation, you can do email-

Sam Corcos:

You definitely don’t have to go on vacation, I go on think weeks.

Josh Clemente:

Right.

Sam Corcos:

That’s how I like to do mine. We could call it something other than vacation. I think in our particular case, it’s a legal definition thing, which is why we call it that.

Josh Clemente:

Paid time off or something?

Sam Corcos:

Yep. That’s right. But we could call it whatever we want. I think conceptually that’s right. It’s not a, what’s good for you sort of thing, it really is in the company’s interest to have this level of redundancy. I think people really underestimate how important that is in terms of how it just de-constrains and solves for bottlenecks across the organization as having that level of redundancy. There’s something about agency in this, like an adult has agency, right? An adult can say, “I’m not doing this thing.” a child can’t. So the after work drinks example, which is a common one at companies, which is like you have to go socialize, you have to go on a play date and mingle with your colleagues. Children don’t have a choice in that, they’re just forced to interact with other children.

Sam Corcos:

Adults can decide whether they would rather have dinner with their wife or watch a movie or do like a 20 mile run if they’re [Mike de Nato 00:18:32] or anything else. So there’s something about agency in it as well where paternalistic policies reduce agency, but one of the things that I… Anyway, yeah, go ahead.

Josh Clemente:

No, I was going to say yes, but again, related to I think time outside the context of work. So again, when you decide to enter into a work agreement, you are giving up a degree of agency, you’re deciding that you’re going to be a part of an entity that has disagree and commit principles built in, you don’t necessarily get to decide all the decisions you’ll have to make and the ways in which you’ll have to make them so I again think that there’s a delineation there between recognizing that outside of the context of work, you have agency, within the context of work, we’re going to have to make decisions that some may disagree with to a certain extent and we expect everyone to respect that, open up dialogue but at the end of the day the decision has to be made.

Sam Corcos:

Yeah. I’m starting to come to maybe a recognition that this is going to be one of those gray area topics that isn’t going to have perfect definition in terms of the principle, but maybe we can come up with something that’s at least reasonably consistent. One of the other concepts that regularly comes up for me when I think about this stuff is how does the behavior affect others? And that makes it feel much less paternalistic for me in general when I think about a lot of these things. So we can take using text messaging as the default mechanism for communication or Slack, like it is from most companies.

Sam Corcos:

Some people might like it, but it is incredibly disruptive for most people. There’s a reason why basically everybody dislikes it as a workplace communication tool. We have all of the documentation on that. And by having a subset of people who say, “I like this tool, I want to use it.” at a certain point you hit this critical mass where the only way to be involved in conversations is to start using it, this is the entropy problem, eventually everyone is using it and then eventually conversations if you’re not involved in it in real time, you get left out so then you need to get push notifications for everything. And then you’re in the whack-a-mole situation which we know that we want to avoid.

Sam Corcos:

There’s trade off here that I don’t know quite how to articulate. A conversation I had with Tom, which I think I’ve mentioned previously, Tom is somebody who really does live our values and he was saying how he knows he doesn’t have to respond to email on weekends, but he can’t, and it’s because of the tool because email, if you don’t use something like Mailman, which is actually interesting, Tom has been using Mailman and he said it’s made a huge difference in the way that he interacts with email. There is something to be said for it is our responsibility as a company to use tools that are not pathological.

Sam Corcos:

If we build a company of slot machines and people have really compulsive behavior because of that, I think that’s bad. So yeah, how do we make a low stress culture?

Josh Clemente:

I think we a again, have to evaluate why we care about lowering stress. Is it to improve effectiveness as a team or is it to improve the mental health of our employees? Because I think it’s not up to us the latter, the former is we should be making decisions in the context of… And it’s not that I don’t care about the mental health of our employees, it’s just that if we want to avoid paternalism, then we shouldn’t be saying, “This is what’s better for your mental health.” And I’ll back up and say related to the Slack tool itself, I count myself among those people that actually enjoyed slack, and I could go back to it and it wouldn’t disrupt my life because I found a good balance of notification management and I treated it much like we treat Threads.

Josh Clemente:

I was not ever in a mode of doomscrolling Slack or in the slot machine. Maybe I’m one of the few, but the point I think is that there will always be some people who will prefer one thing over the other and what we have to decide is… We have to select tools that we believe are not pathological to our way of doing work. And so it’s easy for us to say, “Here are reasons why this tool is not right for our culture.” and people can say, “Well, I like the tool better.” and that’s okay but at the end of the day, that individual can’t overrule what’s best for the organization. And so I think we’ll always have an easier time making these sorts of decisions if we just reflect on how it fits into the culture framework that we’re trying to build.

Sam Corcos:

Yeah.

Josh Clemente:

By the way, we use culture a lot, I think culture also has belief ramifications and personal elements to it, it’s like, maybe the better term is just the company… Yeah, I guess company culture is right.

Sam Corcos:

We need values, yeah.

Josh Clemente:

Yeah. It seems to me like culture and values and principles, they’re all very personal terms which we use as though we’re speaking for everyone and some people may not personally hold some of these principles and that’s okay, we’re talking from the perspective of the company.

Sam Corcos:

That’s right. Yeah. And it’s one of the things that, especially founders who have scaled organizations, the reality is that your values do change over time as you learn more about them. I remember a few months ago looking at our original list of values and I remember thinking like, “Wow.” It’s interesting how, I don’t use the word juvenile, but really there were things where in a very abstract way we’re like, “Yeah, it’d be nice if that was a thing.” but they were not really thought through in any meaningful way. It was like our best articulation of what we thought of at the time, and now as we’ve gone through this, it wasn’t until like more than a year in that I think we really started to understand and memorialize what our actual values are.

Josh Clemente:

Yeah. No plan survives first contact because that was perspective, we didn’t have any context for what we… We wanted values because that’s what all these other founders said you have to have, but we didn’t have the experience yet to know what was going to be most important.

Sam Corcos:

Right.

Josh Clemente:

So in many ways that was a good exercise I think, to show just how far off you can be in your expectation versus reality.

Sam Corcos:

Right. Yeah. So I guess coming back act to this document the We Live Balanced, Wholesome Lives, I feel mixed about this.

Josh Clemente:

Yeah. I think maybe a modification could be something like we work in a balanced way or it should reflect the way that we want to do work in a deep reflective manner or something.

Sam Corcos:

Yeah. I read a book recently that was interesting, The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry, which is an interesting book, it actually comes out after [My Christian Lens 00:26:22] which I did not know before starting it, but there’s something about… We value deep-focused work time. We value deep work in a way that other companies do not, is that a value maybe? I personally do not believe that work should be a major source of anxiety in your life. Now, that doesn’t apply universally, if you’re underperforming and you’re feeling anxious about being fired, it’s like, well and it probably can’t be avoided.

Sam Corcos:

Like playing whack a mole on Slack is a very high anxiety way of operating. And I personally don’t want to work in an environment that is that, I want to work in a deep focused work environment which is low anxiety, where I’m able to manage things effectively. So there’s something about that, I think this might be what this section is hinting at but the terminology in here is definitely different than what I would agree with.

Josh Clemente:

Yeah. When I was reading through this, we’ve implicitly been pushing certain programs or benefits that drive for an interpretation of a balanced, wholesome life. It felt, when I was reading it, in direct tension with we treat one another like adults or maybe, wherever we mention paternalism, we say something about, “If we tell our team how to live their lives, Eg. you’re required to take vacation on these days without a specific company objective.” it feels paternalistic and hypocritical. And then a few paragraphs down we say, “In addition to standard benefits, we have a mandatory minimum vacation policy.” And although it’s not saying when, like a holiday calendar that you have to take these days, to me, it feels in direct conflict and granted, I think we have company rationale for that.

Josh Clemente:

So I do think we should rework this paragraph into something that is focused on the way we want to do work and leaves everyone’s personal lives to them. For you, think week is your vacation so maybe you call that vacation so maybe vacation’s still the right term, but sleeping and exercising, everyone’s got their own interpretations of these sorts of things. And although I personally believe that as individuals, we can continue to push each other to live in a certain way like achieve your goals, whatever, that should be done on a personal level, it shouldn’t be a company sanctioned decision.

Josh Clemente:

The way Whoop is looking at recovery scores I think, and giving out bonuses based on them, I think that oversteps, although we could implement that with the metabolic score. And again, I would not be getting bonuses.

Sam Corcos:

No. Yeah. I think that makes sense. Align Incentives, I understand this one, I think maybe we can come up with maybe a better idiom or exact terminology for it around the idea, but I do think there’s something here about being customer-centric and making sure that we position ourselves so that our incentives are aligned with our members. So I agree [inaudible 00:29:54] in concept.

Josh Clemente:

Yeah, I think the one we spent a lot of time on, The Balanced, Wholesome Lives, probably ends up being covered by the How We Work sections, like we document everything and we have redundancy which we reinforce through week off per quarter, something Like that.

Sam Corcos:

Yep. In fact, there is a section in here We are Calm, Not Busy.

Josh Clemente:

This one gets a little bit… I think that the utilization versus capacity conversation is a little bit abstract, it doesn’t-

Sam Corcos:

Yeah. Well, because of semantic.

Josh Clemente:

Yeah. Yeah. It’s like, what’s the difference between capacity and utilization, I think people have different mental definitions, but at the end of the day, I think the goal that we’re trying to say is that you’re maintaining some air gap to burnout so that if you have to pick up some urgent stuff, you can do so without your brain exploding and everything falling apart.

Sam Corcos:

Yeah. And it’s an interesting thing. There has to be slack in the system, and this is what they talk about in the context of assembly lines and manufacturing lines in the Phoenix Project is you have to have slack in the system in order to take on new work. But one of the other concepts here is related to project debt as well, which is figuring out how to get something… Your base load is project debt. I should probably put together some documentation around this and some visualizations because there’s some base load of just communication debt which for me, it’s something like 30% or 40% of my time every week is just communication. And that’s probably the most of anyone at the company as I think it probably should be, but everyone will have some.

Sam Corcos:

Engineers, it might be 10% is your communication debt, which is just ongoing communication overhead. On top of that is project debt, which is anything you’re on the hook for. So in your case, it’s like the Friday Forum is project debt. It’s a thing that you always have to do every week, it’s the ongoing maintenance of things, it’s the checking in on stuff. Then there are projects that you can do that either lead to project debt or not. And they can either not because the project is done or you’ve handed it off to somebody else and now they have the project debt. So there’s something in here around the situation you don’t want to end up in, which is something that happens all the time in companies is you end up with 100% of your capacity taken up by project debt and you are so underwater you don’t even have the capacity to hire somebody or to document things to hand them off to somebody.

Sam Corcos:

And so you just inch closer and closer to burnout. By ensuring that you are never at more than 50% capacity with ongoing tasks, like things that involve project debt, it ensures that you can always flex into different things so that you can… It’s like, “Oh, we now need to hire somebody for this role.” I’ll go from 60% capacity to 100% capacity for the next two weeks or three months to find somebody to fill this role that is not an ongoing concern.

Josh Clemente:

Yeah. I think where it gets complicated is defining that capacity. Like I’m going from 60 to 100, it implies that you are at 60% capacity, but I think your intention is to say that you were at 60% on ongoing tasks and you’re going to flex up that focus to add hiring for those tasks in order to be able to drop back to 50%.

Sam Corcos:

That’s right. And I think that’s what the capacity concept is. So I think maybe we can play around with the terminology because the utilization thing I think is also where it gets confusing, because they’re just arbitrary semantic definitions. Basically what it’s saying is that just because you’re only 50% or 60% allocated towards projects doesn’t mean that in the rest of the time you should just like watch YouTube videos. But I’m not even sure if it’s necessary to say that, right?

Josh Clemente:

Yeah. It’s a good point. I mean, allowing for that 40% to be used in the way that the responsible individual… By the way, I’m not using the responsible individual internal program term, I’m using like a responsible individual act in any way that is responsible and so they will either decide that they can use that 40% to contribute to other projects, to do reflective work, to figure out how to improve their processes. So they’re at a 100% utilization, but 60% capacity. And I understand the rationale there, it’s just that I think it feels a little abstract and maybe confusing, those two terms could be close to synonyms in certain scenarios so maybe just like a Loom video for something like this would be most useful.

Sam Corcos:

Yeah. And I think different terminology is helpful, what does capacity and utilization actually mean? I think there’s something in here about project debt and ongoing work that is useful. And I’m sure some visualizations will help and maybe some specific scenarios on what it means could also be really useful.

Josh Clemente:

Yeah. Something else that’s difficult, and I experience this myself is being reflective about what is project debt that you’re working on?

Sam Corcos:

Sure. It can often be like, “Oh no, I’m only at 10% project debt.” There is no project debt, I’m just doing my work and then having a peer review system of some kind where it’s like, all right, I’m going to sit down and talk through everything I do for a little while with Ben. And Ben’s going to be like, “Dude, you’re at 95% project debt.” And so having some system like that, a buddy system or a peer review. We did something similar to this… Well, not really. We had peer reviews at SpaceX where it was just for quality management, before going and doing a big presentation with the whole company you’d instead sit down with one person and walk them through it. And then they’d gut check on whether or not you’re in the ballpark.

Sam Corcos:

Something like that could be helpful as well where if people want to have an analysis of how they’re spending their time, they can get it from somebody who maybe is like a third party.

Josh Clemente:

Yeah. That makes sense.

Sam Corcos:

We kind of do something similar to this, coming up with a more consistent cadence for areas of responsibility maps, which I think really help a lot, uncover those things. And those are almost all of the times when we’ve figured out how to chunk work and hand them off to different people and when to hire has come from that exercise. So coming up with a more consistent way of doing that I think would be really helpful.

Josh Clemente:

Yep. I think that makes sense.

Sam Corcos:

Yeah. This is actually related to one of the other cultural norms that I’ve been thinking about as we scale, is how do we ensure that we maintain our risk tolerance as we get bigger? I had some conversations and thought a lot about why do companies become more risk averse when they get larger, when they should actually become more risk tolerant, because every piece is less existential. And a lot of times with these things, you have to ask a question of, if everyone is doing it, there might be a good reason for that, but that’s not always the case, this is like maybe the [burpy 00:38:06] in the argument for it. But I don’t think there is actually a good reason, I think it is loss aversion and I think that we just need to be very mindful of knowing what risks are acceptable and what failures are acceptable and how do we tolerate them as we grow.

Josh Clemente:

Yeah. I think taking the big swings is a little abstract. I personally believe that risk aversion is the pathological and entropic factor, it’s that risk aversion increases with security and stability. It seems like as companies get more and more successful and more stable, risk aversion increases proportionally or even disproportionately. And so saying like, “We are not risk averse or we take risks.” or something like that is pretty important. Also obviously qualifying that with like, “We don’t commit crimes.”

Sam Corcos:

Yeah.

Josh Clemente:

But… What was the second part of this I was about to say? Yeah, lost the train of thought, it’ll come back to me a sec, but yeah, risk aversion directly I think is a problem.

Sam Corcos:

Yep. We have two things that are related here, we have the Yes, And Thinking, which in some ways ties into the Don’t Be a Blocker. We have two sections here, the Don’t Be a Blocker talks a lot about passive criticism and making sure that… Most people don’t want to be a blocker, they just don’t realize how their input affects the process. They add some information and then the state of the project is now ambiguous because of that. So making sure that we give feedback to people to make sure that things can always move forward and people know what the next step is, I think is really important. And this ties into Yes, And, which I think you and I might have a disagreement on maybe with the exact terminology.

Josh Clemente:

So Don’t Be a Block I fully agree with, passive criticism, I think is maybe a gray area. I think it’s important in general that people feel perfectly comfortable providing critical feedback. And so having a negative statement about passive criticism is okay, but then when we add in the Yes, And section where it goes further and says, “Essentially, respond with your critical feedback in the affirmative first.” To me, it stacks into a, “We don’t want people to disagree with a decision.” And what I make sure we have is an environment where you’re perfectly comfortable saying, “Hey, I disagree with this for these reasons, I think we should do it this other way.”

Josh Clemente:

I have mostly a concern with the “Yes/And” framework, because maybe this is supposed to be more metaphorical than exact, but having people trying to contort their language just to be agreeable, starting with a yes, and instead of just saying, “Look, there’s this better way where I think this is a really bad idea legitimately and hear me out, these are the reasons why.” Rather than saying, “Yes, I agree with this and we should do something totally different, not this.” that’s what I have trouble with. It’s almost like I don’t like forcing speech patterns if you-

Sam Corcos:

Yeah. It’s very much not an enforced speech pattern, it’s actually just a concept from improv. And I think we just have to go back one step, I have very strong feelings on passive criticism, much, much stronger negative ones than I think you do. I think part of this is that… This is an interesting thing that’s shown in studies that people who are critical are perceived as being more intelligent than those who are not, which can create this incredibly toxic spiral of everyone just becomes a critic and nobody’s actually building anything, everyone’s just criticizing the ideas of the builders.

Sam Corcos:

And there’s a big difference between saying like, “I think your idea sucks.” It’s like, “Thanks for the note.” And I think there’s this, “I hear what you’re saying, but I think there’s a better way to do it which would be this other way.” One of those is passive criticism and sometimes it’s okay to not necessarily have a great alternative. So like, you’ve maybe seen in one of my recent threads, I don’t remember exactly what it was, but I think JM recommended some terminology and there was something about it that didn’t sit right, I think it was about like Levels Premium versus Membership versus something, and I didn’t really have a great answer for it, so I didn’t throw it up as a blocker and I explicitly called out like, “I don’t have strong opinions about this so don’t consider it as a blocker, but here are some thoughts of why maybe it seems weird to me.” as opposed to just saying like, “No, this sucks.”

Josh Clemente:

Yep.

Sam Corcos:

Also, I think part of it is because I also didn’t think that it was bad strictly speaking, just something seemed strange about it to me.

Josh Clemente:

And would you describe that as passive criticism? What is that in exchange in your opinion?

Sam Corcos:

It’s somewhere between constructive and passive. I didn’t have an alternative in mind so there wasn’t a clear path forward other than just putting the ball back on him, but it wasn’t strictly passive because I engaged in the conversation, that one for me was more in the gray area. I think one of the other things that’s related to the passive criticism point and the Don’t Be a Blocker is, we should also encourage people to directly contribute when it makes sense. It’s okay to just directly edit the document if you have a strong opinion about something in most circumstances. Like sure, we can envision a future scenario where we have too many people that are doing this and then we can address that when it happens.

Sam Corcos:

But I can tell you from my experience, 90% of the time, maybe 99% of the time since working at Levels when Miz or Ben or somebody makes a direct edit to a document that I wrote, it’s like, “Yeah, that’s correct.” Great, now I don’t have to edit that myself and it just saves us a step.

Josh Clemente:

Yeah. And I think we have a good culture around that where people will edit and then they’ll add a comment and say, “Hey, added this thing.”

Sam Corcos:

That’s right.

Josh Clemente:

And that way you have traceability, I think that’s what’s important. We have traceability built in, but it shouldn’t be on the original author to go looking through page history to see who did what, just surface it as, “I made this edit.” With the example you gave, I agree it’s in the gray area, but the intention is what matters in my opinion. Your intention is to give the full picture as it’s like, “This isn’t a complete thought, but here are the things that feel off about this and so maybe you can use these breadcrumbs to find a different alternative, if not, no big deal.”

Sam Corcos:

Right.

Josh Clemente:

That to me is not passive criticism and I make sure that that exchange can be protected and that’s why I have a little bit of a concern about just talking about passive criticism and not providing what we want. Maybe we should focus on, “Here’s what we want. If you’re going to provide criticism, your intention should be constructive.” We have to move forward as a company, it’s your responsibility, if you’re going to raise issues to also provide, if not an alternative solution, at least be constructive in working with the person to understand why you feel the need to criticize it. Yeah. I agree with you that someone just throwing landmines out constantly is a disaster, that person needs to modify their behavior.

Josh Clemente:

But at the same time, criticism has a role. We can’t just be yes people to each other all the time, there are going to be problems and we have to be able to help each other understand and solve them and disagreement has a place. Yeah. So this is the short toes rationale. It’s like, you need short toes because people will disagree with you and that’s okay and you’re going to work together, you on the same team.

Sam Corcos:

Yeah. I think where the yes, and comes into it is taking this from improv. It has very little to do with enforcing specific terminology and much more around the mindset that I think is what we should capture, which is that there are no correct answers, there are only trade offs in the world. I can just talk about some personal experiences that I’ve had in workplaces historically, which is they’ve been cultures that overemphasize the criticism and when people come up… So the intent within the improv world of the yes, and is when you come up with a new idea and you put yourself out there, you’re taking some risk, some real emotional risk of like, “I have this thing that I think is great. I’m going to put it out in the world.”

Sam Corcos:

And if as soon as you do that, you have 10 people that say, “Your idea is terrible, I hate you.” You’re like, “Wow, okay. I’m never going to do that again. I’m just going to sit in my corner and throw bombs like everyone else and just be a critic.” And so in the context of improv where it’s even more the case where most of your ideas are going to be bad, I personally don’t perform improv, but I like going to improv, I even like bad improv. In some ways, I like it more because you can just see how much they’re trying.

Josh Clemente:

Right.

Sam Corcos:

And it really is a brave thing to do, to just go out there in front of a group of people and try to make jokes about stuff that were not prepared, it’s really hard. And it’s the same sort of thing with ideas where on the one end of the spectrum, if somebody has an idea and they put it out there, we don’t want the first five comments to be criticism of how bad their idea is, because then that person’s probably never going to contribute again. And I can tell you in my own experience… I’m kind of past this threshold in my life now where I just don’t care but for the first five, six, seven years of my professional career, it would’ve been really hurtful to just have everyone tell me how bad my idea is and I would just say, “All right, fine. I’m just going to not do that anymore. No more building. I’m just going to be a critic like everyone else. And then everyone’s going to think I’m smart and no one’s going to make fun of me and make me feel bad.”

Sam Corcos:

And so I think over anchoring on even if the idea is objectively bad, it’s appreciating that the person put their neck on the line and had this idea and went for it. It doesn’t have to mean we say like, “Yeah, that’s a great idea. I think we should totally do this and we should do this.” It’s the positive reinforcement of like… It’s sort of like how we are trying to positively reinforce failures. It’s the same exact thing, it’s okay to criticize something in the context of like this was a failure, failures are bad, but that’s also a good thing. And so it’s the same thing with yes, and. It’s like when you say something that is actually not funny in the context of improv, you don’t say like, “Yeah, you’re not funny.”

Josh Clemente:

Right.

Sam Corcos:

You’re like, “Yeah, okay. Great. And this other thing that’s completely different and we’re going to take it this other direction and let’s just like, try to keep it positive.”

Josh Clemente:

Yeah. I fully agree with the motivations and it’s an important cultural value or feedback loop that we need to build. I think I specifically have a problem with saying employ yes, and in language. If someone has an idea, don’t say this thing, just say, “Yes, and.” The difficult thing for me is that this will read like an instruction manual for new people.

Sam Corcos:

Yep.

Josh Clemente:

Okay. “So when I want to give feedback, I have to agree with the bad idea.” The goal is positive reinforcement. People are trying to push the company forward and achieve our goals and so here’s one way that that’s done. In improv, yes, and is the strategy, the intention here is positive reinforcement and solutions oriented discussion. And maybe I’m overindexing on this, but I read this as an instruction manual, “Make sure that you don’t say no, say yes, and.” I probably will never use that figure of speech because that’s just not how my brain processes it and I don’t think I’m overly negative when giving feedback. I totally agree with you, in my first PDR, in front of a bunch of much better engineers who go to work on shredding my [inaudible 00:52:09] and it sucks. And I don’t think we want that experience to happen, but we do want there to be an opportunity for learning.

Josh Clemente:

If there is a better way, people should be able to clearly articulate that, that’s my intention. And so maybe there’s a rework to do here, maybe I’m overindexing, but it comes across as an instruction.

Sam Corcos:

Yeah. I see what you’re saying because in the paragraph itself it does give specific terminology to use so maybe it’s more of a description of the mindset, yes [inaudible 00:52:40].

Josh Clemente:

How to position feedback is like… Remember that this person put effort into it and maybe they didn’t, maybe they just mailed it in and that’s a different thing.

Sam Corcos:

Yeah. For sure.

Josh Clemente:

If someone mails it in, then we have bigger problems and we need to address them differently.

Sam Corcos:

Yeah, definitely. Which is even slower than phoning it in.

Josh Clemente:

Why did I say mail it in? [inaudible 00:53:02]. Yes, if they phoned it in, that went over a DSL line, that’s actually quite quick.

Sam Corcos:

Yeah, that’s right. Improved Continuously is one that I like as a concept, the more we do it, the better. Adding this into onboarding has been really cool, to just make it very clear to people, it’s sort of like getting every engineer to where they ship something in production on day one, it’s really empowering to have them realize that they have the ability to do this. Whereas in other companies, you’re just like a cog in the machine and you feel trapped. When you can get something on your first day into production, that’s a really cool, empowering feeling.

Sam Corcos:

And I think similarly in the onboarding process, making it clear like, “No, you are responsible for improving onboarding right now, make the [inaudible 00:54:06] directly, you improve it. There’s no saying like, “Man, the onboarding process sucks at this company.” If it does, that’s your fault because you went through it.

Josh Clemente:

Totally I agree.

Sam Corcos:

That’s a big part of it.

Josh Clemente:

Yep. I think roll with the punches and improve continuously connect to each other through the short toes concept as well where… This goes back to the yes, and conversation, but people need to… Maybe roll with the punches is striking me as short toes in a sense-

Sam Corcos:

Yep. It might.

Josh Clemente:

… because it’s like, yeah, don’t overindex on the negative. That can happen a lot where people are like, “Everyone’s always tearing me down and I feel like my work is just getting edited and notioned by other people and…” Taking a big picture lens is really important and appreciating if someone’s going to go in and edit your work, great, they just did something for you. So that kind of feels maybe a little bit redundant to me, but maybe it’s separate, I don’t know.

Sam Corcos:

Yeah. But we can tie some of these in together. Another one is Make Yourself Obsolete, which I agree with in principle. I wonder how that is interpreted because I know there are companies that have similar concepts, [inaudible 00:55:41] culture still rules the day. So I think it’s a policy at Google that if you make your job redundant, they guarantee that you will not lose your job. And yet I think it’s pretty obvious from anyone who has worked at Google that making yourself redundant or making yourself obsolete is not something that people do. So what is the more underlying value there? This reminds me actually, I don’t think it’s released yet, but Braden did a podcast on-

Josh Clemente:

Oh, cool.

Sam Corcos:

Yeah. It’s really good on basically what his experience has been like starting in support and working his way into soon-we’ll-be-responsible-individual type of role. His scope has really increased and he’s been growing a lot professionally. For me, I’m thinking of one company in particular, I know the CEO, so I’m going to try to not be too specific. They very much have a culture of you, are hired to be this particular cog and you are never allowed to do anything other than that. So maybe this relates to short toes because short toes, I think in the GitLab definition, is anyone can contribute to any part of the organization at any time.

Josh Clemente:

Yeah.

Sam Corcos:

If you’re in ops and you want to do something in growth, go do that.

Josh Clemente:

Yeah. I think the Make Yourself obsolete kind of comes from Improve Continuously, the goal is to improve continuously. It’s not to-

Sam Corcos:

Yeah, for yourself and for the Company.

Josh Clemente:

Right. The end is not to make yourself obsolete necessarily because theoretically you could do that by being like, “Oh, I deleted Help Scout, now I have nothing to do.” but people’s emails aren’t getting answer it’s… If you can improve continuously and get to the point where you’ve taken on some maybe it’s like systems thinking or what have you, but I think it extends beyond the individual, really the risk aversion conversation… I mean the reason that companies are risk averse is that they are afraid to obsolete themselves, they do not obsolete the things they’re doing.

Josh Clemente:

And so maybe it’s make things obsolete, improve continuously kind of covers it. But yeah, we want to obsolete systems with better systems constantly and so at the individual level, being able to put things on autopilot and move up a degree of abstraction and take on other roles across the company, great. At the product level, producing something better and deleting the old thing should be the best feeling in the world as opposed to something that’s fought over which is the innovator’s dilemma. So yeah, I think that’s right. Improve continuously, make things obsolete, something where those two merge together I believe is more what we’re going for.

Sam Corcos:

Yeah. This might also tie into short toes in some way. As a culture, we believe in this continuous improvement, to just use the anchor on the other side, we are not the, “We hired you to be a customer support specialists for the next four years and staying in your lane.” that’s one side of how this operates and we’re basically the exact opposite, which is we’re always trying to give people opportunities to improve themselves and to improve the process. We’re not looking for people who color inside the lines.

Josh Clemente:

Yes. And the difficult thing is it’s not that we are giving opportunities like… That almost feels like someone has to be responsible for making sure that you know there’s this other opportunity, it’s your responsibility to find ways in which you can improve things consistently.

Sam Corcos:

Yeah.

Josh Clemente:

And it’s everything that’s not currently improved, that’s the domain of the things that should be improved. And so we want a culture where, when someone raises a problem like, “Hey, this thing is slowing me down.” the first question is… And this gets tricky when you’re really slammed and projects are behind and things like that but at the end of the day, that should be a, “Hey, we need to change this, we need to implement this other thing. I would do it if I had the time but unfortunately I’m completely drowning on this other thing.” And that should be probably an escalation or across the department conversation, but it’s all always grounded in, “What needs to be improved?” as opposed to just a complaint, like a passive criticism.

Sam Corcos:

Yeah. And I think actually Know the Tools ties into that Improve Continuously. I think the idea is Improved Continuously means not only company processes, but it means yourself as well. A culture that I don’t want to build is the Up or Out Culture, which is famous at like GE where either you get promoted every year or you get fired. I think there are people who are in a role that they like and they’re very comfortable there and they’re performing adequately and that should be fine. I think for them, as long as they’re performing adequately, that’s fine. But there’s still the expectation that they will be improving the systems around them.

Josh Clemente:

Right. Yeah. I think that’s driving at a point where improvement is conflated with moving up the ladder or something.

Sam Corcos:

Sure.

Josh Clemente:

That you’re not improving unless you’re moving into management and I totally agree that we don’t want to implement… Some of the best engineers I know, shout out Jesse McElhanney, he’ll never be a manager. He does not care to manage people, but he’s just an extraordinary individual contributor and I know several people like that and I think that’s what you’re driving through as like a subject matter expert. Maybe they’re not an expert at the earlier stages in their career, but eventually they get there because that’s the track they’re on, is getting better at their domain.

Josh Clemente:

And yeah, we definitely want space for that role. Yeah, it doesn’t interfere with the Improved Continuously concept. Theoretically, they should be getting better every day and their capacity should be expanding if they’re staying in that sort of localized focus.

Sam Corcos:

Right. Are there any other top level cultures or values that you think are missing from this?

Josh Clemente:

Like the Be Responsible executer, we could probably reinforce that… I mean, it’s sprinkled throughout the Improve Continuously, Make Yourself Obsolete, we want to clearly state that everyone at the company, there’s no cap on your responsibility level or your accountability. You don’t have to ask permission, typically you shouldn’t hold back from making an improvement, again, I think this is covered, but we just really want people to feel unblocked to fix things. You are responsible, you’re a part owner of the company, this sort of concept so I don’t think it’s new, it’s just reinforcing that explicitly.

Josh Clemente:

When I was writing up the JD for one of the roles this weekend, I was saying that explicitly. We are a company where you are going to have a lot of responsibility and accountability so I just feel like we can just state that clearly somewhere in here.

Sam Corcos:

Yeah. I remember there was a story you told me about how that works when you were at SpaceX and how you said something along the lines of how every engineer has Elon’s cell phone number. And if they find something that’s wrong, they tell him. They’re like level one technician and they see something that might explode the rocket ship, they have the ability to pull the plug on it.

Josh Clemente:

That’s right. He would send an email before launches and it was like, I don’t know, few weeks out when things are getting really tense and he’d be like, “Every person at this company is responsible for ensuring this rocket does not explode. If you know of something that you don’t feel has been adequately taken care of or is being paid attention to, this is my cell phone number, it’s your responsibility to stop this thing from happening.” which comes from the Challenger experience where tons of people knew that the O-rings were going to fail.

Sam Corcos:

Really?

Josh Clemente:

Yeah. But at some high level, some ivory tower decision was made where like, “No, for PR reasons were going to launch anyway under the thermal limitations of the O-ring.” and somebody didn’t have the cell phone number that they needed, and just making sure that… Maybe that’s, something, like hierarchical barriers don’t exist here.

Sam Corcos:

Right.

Josh Clemente:

Something like that where you can give feedback, you can raise concerns directly to Sam or maybe to Ben, whoever’s closest to the problem. And if it’s not getting solved, escalate.

Sam Corcos:

Right.

Josh Clemente:

Yeah. I think that’s an important one, especially as more people come on, they will feel as though hierarchy exists even if we don’t want there to be.

Sam Corcos:

Yeah. And this relates a lot to… It’s not specifically but it’s related to what we’re talking about, Improving Continuously, there’s something in there about agency of the individual within our company that I think is unusual in most organizations.

Josh Clemente:

Yeah. Agency is the right word, that combines responsibility and accountability, you have agency-

Sam Corcos:

Yeah. Right.

Josh Clemente:

… and are expected to use it.

Sam Corcos:

Yeah. That’s a good one. Like a critic is somebody who sits in their armchair and just pokes holes in other people’s ideas, that’s their job.

Josh Clemente:

Yeah.

Sam Corcos:

And I think we need exactly zero of those in the company.

Josh Clemente:

Yeah. The armchair critic, the Monday morning quarterbacks, I-told-you-so types, both of those are just criticism for no real benefit to the organization.

Sam Corcos:

Yep.

Josh Clemente:

Yep, I agree.