Company Culture

At a well-run seed stage startup, engineers will often describe the work experience as intoxicating . At a larger company, the best you get is "enjoyable".

This is what a healthy culture feels like. Expectations were high but I knew that I had the support and environment to deliver on those expectations. I wanted to be around other people because I needed them to do great work. This is similar to what Brie Wolfson had to say about why she put up with intense demands at Stripe: “it felt good to care... See more

somewhere along the line we morphed "bad working environment" and "hard working environment" together and transferred the sins of the former to the latter.

Hire for expertise, not experience. The best candidates talk about what they can do, rather than what they did.

If you look closely, all these problems fundamentally come from:

1. Decreased skin in the game, which reduces team alignment


2. N^2 communication, which creates need for managers and specialization, which reduces individual agency and breadth of learning


3. Reduced risk tolerance, which slows everything down

#1 and #2 are inevitable results of having more... See more