In March 2021, I took up a new role as Director of Engineering at a (then) small startup called fabric. Almost 1 year later, I decided to leave this role and take a few months off. It’s been an eventful year with so many changes including a country move and various life events. Like any role (and probably more so in a early stage startup), it was a roller coaster ride with various highs and various lows. fabric had a strong emphasis on cultural values and we had 9 of these values. As I reflect back on my year there, these were my top 3 learnings.

Insist on highest standards

One of the core values at fabric was insisting on highest standards. It’s very important when you build a company that wants to fundamentally change how commerce is done to do things right and sustainably. However it also has a associated “while being pragmatic”. Imagine you want to build a spaceship that goes to Mars and you do not want to launch until you are 100% sure it won’t blow up. You might wait decades insisting on highest standards. However if you bring that down to 99%, perhaps you now need to wait only years. High standards need to be realistic for the problem at hand and the team involved.

The other thing I learned was that the same principle applies equally to your personal life. You need to hold yourself accountable to high standards to people around you especially friends and family and even yourself. You need to hold your health, physical and mental, to high standards. You need to hold your relationships to high standards which involves doing the work to keep those relationships great. There will always be friction between high standards at work and in personal life and I think the last year opened my eyes to the fact that there is a personal side of this equation as well.

Say it like it is

In a company where you have 100s of employees, from diverse backgrounds it is important to stress on speaking the truth and highlighting the state of things. It’s even more important when things are not going well because it can prevent bigger failures by highlighting and correcting the smaller failures. Imagine you are driving a car blind with someone else giving you inputs about the world around you. You want them to tell you when you are approaching a curve or going in the wrong lane. If people don’t say it like it is, the outcomes can be very costly.

The other side of this equation is that saying it like it is does not mean you have to be rude. On the contrary, it requires even more skill to ensure that not only can you get the message across but get it across in a way that brings about change. Just telling someone they are failing at a particular task and feeling great about how you “said it like it is” is not really helpful. You need to communicate in a way that the audience understands and takes the message well. Hence giving context, reframing the message and sharing your thought process behind difficult messages is equally important. Being blunt is being lazy.

Earn trust

This is one of the core values I have believed in for many years. Human civilization is built on trust and without trust, we can accomplish nothing. I was super happy to see this be a core value at fabric as well. In any human social structures that needs more than 1 person, trust is the differentiating quality of the longevity of those structures (IMHO). Hence how much a team trusts each other (part of the psychological safety) is a key differentiating factor to the success of those teams. (Google study)

Without trust, the best teams and best companies fall apart. Hiring really smart people is not enough by itself. Making sure they can work together and trust each other is equally important. Trust but verify is a maxim I hear a lot and I believe in it. However the strategy of verify then trust is a losing strategy IMHO. Why? Because I believe most people are good and well-intentioned. I think maybe 85-90% people can be trusted. In a verify then trust you will spend inordinate amount of time trying to verify which weeds out about 10-15% of the bad people. However trust first leads to 10-15% failure rate which I think is a lot more acceptable and faster. So trust people by default and assume they are well-intentioned and then create light-weight processes to identify the 10-15% scenarios to reduce the failure rate.

Summing up

Values are important guiding principles that allows faster and higher quality decision making. I do believe every individual should think about their own values and every organization should have at least some of its core values defined. However values by their nature can be inherently ambiguous and you can draw your own meaning out of them. The above 3 were the ones I really resonated with at fabric and I am glad for the learnings they provided.