Our Values

Building the future requires a specific recipe of people. I want to put forth the values and principles that we believe in and that we strive for.

Be Potent

The first value is having a trait I will describe as high potency. This is the trait that looks like obsession. A high potency person is extreme. When it comes to achieving their desired outcome, they accept the burden of doing whatever is required. Paying the cost, no matter what the price, to get to where you need to go.

High potency people bet on themselves. However, that belief is not typically based on the skill that they start with on day one. It's always based on their assumption that they can accomplish whatever needs to be accomplished or learn whatever needs to be learned or meet any challenge of the future.

It’s common to perceive experienced people as potent people because they’ve got all this experience of doing things. But high potency is completely independent of experience level. Infact, experience level often creates or conceals low potency. Which, initially, can seem counterintuitive.

Although experienced people are great, they simply know too much information that it can be detrimental to solving new problems and innovating. Innovation requires solving problems in a different way. That's why not knowing something can be a very powerful tool into accomplishing it because you are not encumbered by “the way things are done.” And you don't know how unlikely it is to succeed or perhaps you don’t know that it’s impossible. But that is what innovation is, not knowing that something is impossible and doing it anyway. That's why it can usually be more productive to hire less experienced, but high potency, people for solving new problems. It’s also more productive to work with high potency people because they always feel compelled to prove themselves since being high potency commonly stems from being bullied or belittled in the past, having deep insecurity or a deep fear of failure. All of which provide the emotional fuel to outcompete and overachieve.

High potency people are also dangerous, because if you underestimate a high potency individual, you must be prepared for your entire world to be turned upside down. And what can be used for good, can also be used for bad. Thus, you cannot just hire for this trait. It must always be present alongside the next trait I will discuss.

Believe in good faith

In the everyday micro of life, it’s very convenient and easy to justify deviating from an originally set moral path. However, most people could never admit to others or themselves if they are deviating from that path because there are always external factors that are forcing their hand which can always be blamed.

This happens because there is an illusion to bad faith behaviour. Every villain believes they’re the good guy. This is the case because a person’s morals doesn’t change overnight, it changes one small decision at a time, without you ever realising. When you take one sheet from a stack of papers, there is no observable change. Neither with the next or the next. With every layer that is removed, you then adapt to the new form which is almost indistinguishable from the old form, and that’s when you’re again susceptible to removing the next sheet.

There’s a parallel to be drawn here between taking sheets off a paper stack versus the moral degradation of a person who is only making decisions that he/she believes are in their best interest. The only counter to this, is finding those with a natural obligation or compulsion to good, in other words, believers in good faith. Being a believer in good faith means at some point that you will occasionally offer good faith to a bad faith person (without knowing they are bad faith) and you will be burned. The critical inflection point is, after that encounter, believing you should cease believing in good faith because intuitively, why shouldn’t you? It has caused you harm.

However, what that framework fails to realise is that good faith engagement is an aggregate net benefit not an infallible net benefit. Meaning being good faith requires stomaching occasional loss for an overall gain. And the reason that it’s worth it, is because through long-term good faith engagement, you will naturally select and find other good faith actors. A symbiotic relationship between a network of good faith actors creates exponential ripple effects of opportunity and growth.

The difficulty is weathering the storm of the occasional bad faith actor and still remaining on your path. Most people could justify deviating from their original path, as it is logical and the people around you will tell you that it’s logical and understandable. But those who feel an ethical obligation to good will more easily combat the the pull of logic to remain on the path of good faith. Which consequently leads to the eventual good-faith network which yields the immense returns. I will compare being a good-faith believer to an investment in the S&P 500. Every investment in an index will inevitably decrease in value for a number of years, but without fail, over every long time-horizon, the S&P will yield its predicted returns. Yet most people simply don’t stick it out. Every negative year for the S&P is equivalent to offering good faith to a bad faith actor.

No human is immune to corruption, but there are definitely humans which corrupt more easily. A team of high potency people without this trait, end up becoming an aquarium of shark-eating sharks, because one bad faith actor can infect an entire pool of good faith actors. But a team of high potency people with a natural compulsion to good, can swim in the same direction with the same goal, without the poisonous politics of bad actors.

However, good faith actors can sometimes fall into the trap of naivete. Hence, good faith must also be combined with the next trait to make sure you see things for what they are, not what you hope they are.

Winners are in the details

The next core principle asserts that winning comes from everyone being in all the little details. Every person should be deeply knowledgeable in their own field and actively seek to learn from the fields around them. It’s not enough to be great at your craft, you must also understand how your craft connects to the rest of the system. In practice, this means engineers understand the customer, designers understand the codebase, operators understand the product roadmap, managers understand the thought process of every single piece of work of their team and leaders understand the individual motivations of their people.

Being in the details can be conflated with micro-management. However, the difference between the two is that being in the details is not telling people what to do. It is being present in understanding what decisions are made and why they are made. When everyone in an organisation verifies, questions, and strives to truly understand what’s happening across functions, you build a culture where quality becomes unavoidable. You are subconsciously enforcing a high standard across the company because everyone is paying attention.

Hence, winners are distrusting in a good way. They don’t assume things are fine; they confirm them. They know that verification is simply respect for the high standard that is expected of a high performing team.

Hence, search for people who are deeply excellent at one thing, but aware enough to see how that thing fits into everything else. Be a jack of all trades, master of one.

Planning is seductive, not productive

The fourth fundamental principle at the core of our work is that planning is seductive, not productive. This is not to say that planning cannot be useful because plans are essential to know which direction to head towards. The issue is that plans are rarely used for just that. The seductive nature of planning means that we often are fooled into creating perfectly predicted journeys that simply are not based in reality due to their untested nature. The significant blindspot for those, who pride themselves on a thorough and detailed plan, is that the correct path forward only reveals beneath moving feet as it is execution that reveals what planning conceals. You simply cannot know the right decisions and what obstacles you will hit until you hit them. And only then will the obstacles point to the unforeseen paths.

The advantage of adopting a lightweight planning strategy is twofold: first, it ensures we spend more time in execution, the zone where genuine learning occurs; second, it dispels the illusion that perfect decisions are possible, enabling faster and more flexible movement. We strongly believe that if you always strive to make the perfect decision, you are inevitably moving too slowly. Most decisions should be made with approximately 70% of the information available; waiting until 90% usually means you've already missed the moment. Therefore, perpetual caution ultimately costs far more than occasional error.

Accountability makes the world go round

Our fifth foundational value is accountability. The conscious decision to take responsibility not only for the outcomes we directly shape but also, crucially, for those we don't entirely control.

At first glance, this might seem unfair or counterintuitive. After all, if an outcome wasn't entirely our doing, why bear the responsibility? The non-obvious truth is that accountability isn't about assigning blame. Blame is a word used solely to decrease the agency and power of the person using it.

By choosing accountability even when circumstances aren't fully within our control, we position ourselves as active agents rather than passive observers or victims. We accept that our greatest leverage lies in embracing our capacity to respond and influence future outcomes, not in debating or assigning fault. Accountability, therefore, is a deliberate claim of agency, making us stronger precisely where others might feel powerless.

This means that we should own our work because ownership itself transforms effort into fulfillment. Genuine accountability allows us to see our fingerprints clearly in every result, offering a deep sense of meaning and pride. When we fully own our outcomes, the work itself becomes inherently rewarding, reinforcing our commitment to excellence and creating a virtuous cycle of purpose, satisfaction, and continuous improvement.

Intellectual humility

The final foundational value is the intellectual humility of ideas. We believe that there should be a strong emphasis to question every idea, every assumption, and then question the choice of questions for the assumptions themselves. Superficially, it tends to be quite easy to question assumptions, and many could convince others (and themselves) that they are being thorough in their rationale. However, what tends to be the case is that we question all our ideas, choices and assumptions, except the ones we truly believe in. And those, we never think to question, and therefore they carry our greatest blind spots. That is what we're fighting against. Ideas strengthen and mature through rigorous doubt and continuous questioning, and this discipline must be uniformly applied. Hence, we commit to question everything, especially certainty.

The reason that we chose this principle is because it breeds a culture of meritocratic humility with an underlying incentive structure to follow evidence and not egos or experience. The disattachment to ideas is what lets the best ideas rise to the top, rather than drown at the bottom.