Sublime Principles and Culture (shared internally with the team):

Be fanatic about product excellence

We're not in the business of creating software - we are in the business of building a product people love. Most organizations lower their standards in an effort to move things along and get things off their desks. We have to fight that impulse every step of the way. We have to take pride in our craft and approach our work with a maniacal drive that continually raises the bar for excellence. That means if you make something that doesn’t make sense, your teammates are going to call you out on it. Our code should be clean. Our designs should be flawless. Our logic should be crisp. And most importantly, our understanding of our customer's life should be so strong that we are able to design a solution that far exceeds anything the customer themselves could have found words to request.

Company > Team > Individual

We favor the company's interest above the team’s. And we favor the team’s interest above our own. In practice, this means we make decisions based on what will enable us to better deliver on our mission, not based on anyone's ego. It also means we are willing to have hard conversations and regularly give each other direct and honest feedback.

Dream in years, Plan in months, Evaluate in weeks, Ship daily

We have to acknowledge that good things take time, and combine a long term horizon with creative experimentation and fast cycles to learn quickly and validate our ideas. And we have to remember that addressing challenging problems is NOT the same as building complex solutions. Complexity is often the easy, seductive answer. But we have to fight to boil things down to their essentials. This means we think big, but build simple.

Embrace and drive change:

We should all have the courage to spark change and be intellectually honest about what's working and what isn't. Embracing change is a shared responsibility, but driving change is an independent one. If you think something isn't working - in our product, our process, our people - it's up to you to raise your hand and drive change.

And lastly, embrace the grind.

We are setting out to build an exemplary, awe-inspiring product, and we will. The only way to get there is to get through the messy middle, to iterate relentlessly through interim states of the mundane and uninspiring.

In my experience working with dozens of companies over the past decade, I've witnessed the gap between what success looks like and what it actually is. Greatness comes from consistent, mundane action sustained over time.

If we embrace the grind, I know we will pull off the impossible.