Our Values
Please find below a set of core values that guide every decision we make... contrasted against depressingly widespread approaches we reject:
| We love, embrace, and aspire to... | We reject and will fight... |
|---|---|
| Intuitive, self-explanatory software | RTFM |
|
Human beings owning their data & fully controlling whether/how it's shared. "Local-First Software: You Own Your Data, in spite of the Cloud" (click to open free PDF) |
Corporations owning & controlling your data |
| Seth Godin -style earned virality through word-of-mouth advertising from delighted users to their friends and colleagues | Buying users through expensive marketing & advertising |
| Thoughtful, user-centric design and code craftsmanship | Vibe coding and a "move fast and break things" mindset |
| Helping you focus by backgrounding distractions & measuring productive time | FOMO and in-your-face, attention-grabbing clickbait |
|
Organic growth and a
"Small Giants"
mindset: "Some entrepreneurs have rejected the pressure of endless growth to focus on more satisfying business goals like being great at what they do... creating a great place to work... providing great customer service... making great contributions to their communities... and finding great ways to lead their lives." |
Venture capital rocket-fueled growth via "blitzscaling" |
| Listening to and partnering with our users to help them live happier, more productive lives | Obsessing over maximizing profit, rather than user success |
| The public, open Internet | Walled gardens and closed platforms |
| Human beings creating and sharing with one another | AI slop and astroturfed content |
User-centric founders/creators who care more about their organization, products, and users than themselves and either shun wealth or give it away, including:
|
Business-centric founders like Zuck, Musk, Thiel, Altman, Ellison, Bezos, Murdoch, and the Koch brothers, who obsess over wealth accumulation to the detriment of their customers, employees, and/or society. (I need not explain who these men are because they fully exploited their creations to amass ungodly wealth and power.) |
|
Eating our own dogfood.
We improve as a company by helping our team and our users leverage the Internet to learn what we need to know. I've gotten a great education on entrepreneurship by watching countless Youtube videos (like
Y Combinator
and
Harvard Innovation Labs
and
EO
), listening to countless podcasts (like
"Founders"
and
Lenny's Podcast
) and reading blog posts like
Paul Graham
and audiobooks like
Disciplined Entrepreneurship
. I'm using Infocorder.com to record and organize what I learn and motivate myself to learn more. |
Relying on management intuition to guess what users want and create "tickets" for reactive "code monkeys" to implement. Developers never meet with users, let alone use their own product. |
|
Small, talented, creative, cohesive, empowered, jazz-band-like team aligned around a clear, focused strategy and embracing
real agile
to understand customer needs and incrementally evolve product offerings that aim to delight users. (See Marty Cagan and his "product operating model" ) Employees are empowered, equipped, and encouraged to thoughtfully deliver real value to customers — including anticipating and preventing problems and maintaining the code in a healthy, extensible, comprehensible state — and work together in a fun, respectful, collaborative work environment to understand and solve customer problems. |
JIRA
-centric
feature factories
where managers obsess over input metrics (commits, timetables, JIRA points, etc.), incentivizing developers to cut corners and deliver "points," not real value, causing security exploits, website outages, frequent pager duty calls, and code that is unpleasant to work with and painful to extend. We reject siloed teams managed via ticket-based, process-heavy, SCRUM-style, "product requirements"-driven fake "agile" that demeans developers as interchangeable "resources" and wastes time and energy on fake work like "planning poker" |