Patrick Campbell: evaluation

Transcript context

…Is there something you've done in building your company that has been counter to that, something you've learned about? Because I totally agree, people always talk about team, team, team and then that's often really sucky to work at a lot of companies and clearly they don't care that much about your experience. So super actionable things that we've done. I think, one, it comes back to the baseline feedback or advice you've probably received, or if you're listening to this before, which is you can't be everything to all people, so who are you for? Who are you for and who are you not for? I think really defining that in your values, and values aren't values unless there's an actual trade-off. And so we had things like optimize for the long-term. There's a clear trade-off when we optimize for the long-term, you probably give up short-term revenue. You also have different types of people that do better at the particular company than not. One of the more controversial things we did is we talked a lot about behaviors and the one thing that we had is this concept known as the most charitable interpretation. It's not something we made up, but there's this idea that basically when there's conflict or when there's some sort of confrontation, the way that you handle that confrontation was really, really important to us. And the way that we wanted our teams or the people that we wanted to hire for basically would take the most charitable interpretation of that confrontation. So Lenny, if you were like, "Hey, Patrick, I like your shirt," and I just didn't like when people commented on my shirt, instead of getting pissed off, going to HR, or getting mad at you, what we would do is we'd say, "Hey, the right way at ProfitWell wall to handle that was be like, 'He didn't know, so I'm not going to bring it up,' or 'Hey, Lenny. You probably didn't know, but I don't really like when people comment on my shirt. '" It seems super trivial, but when you have over 20 people, all of a sudden these things start to come up. And I think most of the time we infantilize our teams where we let them run to HR, we have different policies or all of these different things, when at the end of the day you're paying an exorbitant amount of money for very smart human beings to basically do stuff and you want them basically working together and not having to go in this runaround with policies and people to push things forward. I love that. It reminds me of something at Airbnb where our head of product was always encouraging us to assume good intent from the other person that just like, "What is the good version of what they're trying to achieve? It's unlikely they're trying to cause harm."…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.