Josh Miller: belief

Transcript context

…Well, first of all, thank you Scott, if you're listening. It's somewhat of an awkward question admittedly, because it's like someone complimenting you about your product. It's always impossible to really take and accept the compliment, because you see all the blemishes. Of course we see all these ways in which we don't ship fast enough and could be doing a better job listening and building with members. But, at risk of sounding a bit cliche, I really think we ship our values. So, we thought a lot about our values as a company. You can read about them online. And I think if you examine those values and then you look at your compliment or Scott's compliment, you can see [inaudible 00:20:05] one-to-one. So the first, and I really think the most important is, we hire people that show up with heartfelt intensity. And, a lot of companies I think obsess over craft details. They'll be a value like, "We obsess over the details." What we say is, we want people that show up to our company with some fire in their belly, something that they are out to do. And for each person it's a little bit different. For some people it may be UI Craft details, for other people it may be achieving double the performance with a quarter of the engineering head count. Everyone has something, but they show up with this heartfelt intensity. And I think even relative to everything else, I'm going to say, that's it. If you have a team that has heartfelt intensity and is there for a purpose and something to prove, you give them a very exciting, ambitious prompt and get out of their way and they will do remarkable work. So, showing up with heartfelt intensity. Our second value is assume you don't know. Assume you don't know. And the value "assume you don't know" is, even if you're a subject matter expert. We have someone in our company that literally built the first version of Chrome and ran it for 16 years. But he more than anyone embodies this beginner's mind of, "I have no idea how this should work or what will happen." And the follow up to that value is, "So we got to get going." It's like dropping in a new city. You just got to walk out the door of your Airbnb turn left and ... Maybe you'll turn right and then you'll hop on the subway, but you just got to get going and see what you find. And so, we have this attitude of, you're showing up with this heartfelt intensity. But you start by saying, "I've no idea what I'm doing. I have no idea what's going to happen." So we've just got to get going. And that biases in a default to action. We have another value of, start by asking, "What could be? ", which is pushing ourselves to be as aspirational, ambitious as possible. So the Peek feature that you mentioned, we just didn't want to solve the problem of context switching. We wanted to almost blur the line between native and web software, and make it feel like a sheet of paper. ek feature that you mentioned, we just didn't want to solve the problem of context switching. We wanted to almost blur the line between native and web software, and make it feel like a sheet of paper. And really pushing ourselves to be as ambitious as we can be, which is the consequence of blowing back around and more deeply motivating the people working on it. So, I mean, I could keep going. We have a value, "You're doing it for the crew when you got to swarm. When you got to swarm," and we have value of, "make them feel something." But I think what it all adds up to is, a team that has a lot of heart, has a lot of intrinsic motivation and a, "It's the first day of my career. I wonder what's going to happen?" attitude. And I think all of those things add up to a culture which is, "Let's get something out there. Let's see what happens." How did you come up with these? What was the process to come up with company values? Because I know a lot of companies are like, "We should come up with these." How do you do that?…

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