I was talking to a friend today about company values and how important they are but also how lame so many of them are.
I told him that some of my favorite company values come from our former portfolio company Twilio (which in the spirit of full disclosure I am still a large shareholder of).
Twilio’s founder and CEO Jeff Lawson gave a great talk on company values at USV a few years ago and explained how he approached them. This blog post (and audio post) is about a similar talk he gave at First Round.
Twilio’s company values are shown below:
My favorite of them is “No Shenanigans” which translates to “Be thoughtful. Always deal in an honest, direct, and transparent way.”
It is such a great value. It is memorable. It is broadly applicable. It is interpretable. And I can imagine team members running their decisions against it and getting a helpful result that guides them.
That is what company values are all about at the end of the day – helping people make decisions that everyone in the company will be proud of and supportive of.
Like most things that are incredibly valuable, values are not easy to get right, but they are worth investing a lot of time and energy in.
