Geoff Charles: belief

Transcript context

…I love that you set expectations very clearly upfront. That seems really important to be successful at a company like that. It also just makes me remember every successful startup is extremely chaotic. As much as it may not feel like that on the outside, it's insanely chaotic. Things are constantly changing. I was at a fireside chat with Sheryl Sandberg once at Airbnb and somebody asked her just like, "How do you deal with change? Things are just ... We're reorging every six months. People are leaving and coming and teams are shifting and priorities are always adjusting." And she's just like, "This is the problem you want, you want to be going through this because that means you're growing and you're going through hypergrowth because the alternative is much worse where you're not growing and that's much more painful." So I think it's just a good reminder that if you're working at a place that's chaotic, it's often a good thing. I would say so. I mean, oftentimes, people use that excuse to not have a very strong strategy. And I think that for us, we've always been, from the start, the spend management platform that helps you spend less. Our strategy ... I share an annual newsletter around what we did and what we're going to do next year. And it's oftentimes pretty spot on in terms of the goals. Again, the goals and the value and the problem and the vision, that's consistent. The specifics, the timing, the quarterly scopes, all these things, yes, it changes, but what you want to avoid is the thrash of people waking up and feeling like they're working at a different company or that leaders are constantly changing their minds. We've been extremely consistent from the start and I think most of the products that we build, most of the code that we written, is in the customer's hands and hasn't been ripped away. And I think that speaks a lot to velocity, too. Awesome. That was a good addition. I didn't mean to say if your place is chaotic, it's no problem. It's that side effect of growth and hypergrowth as things are going to be pretty chaotic. This episode is brought to you by Attio, a new type of CRM that's powerful, flexible, and built around your data. Traditional CRMs were built for a different era with totally different speed, scale, and data demands. Attio is different. It allows you to quickly build a CRM that matches your unique workflows and data structures. Within minutes of connecting your email and calendar, you'll have a CRM that's already set up complete with customer profiles and automatic data enrichment. You'll also have real-time dynamic reporting at your fingertips. No more slow deployments, outdated user experiences or tedious manual data input. With Attio, you can build and adapt your CRM on the fly no matter your business model or company stage. Attio is the CRM for fast-growing startups. Get started today and get 15% off your first year at attio.com/lenny. That's A-T-T-I-O.com/lenny. So you've talked about strategy a couple of times and I want to dig into that a little bit. So there's maybe a couple directions we can go. One is you talked about this contract you create with teams of a strategy. So maybe let's just go there. What does that actually look like? What's part of this contract? And is there a document you put together to lay this out?…

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