Most companies have a mission statement and many have a values statement. But not so many companies live their values so much that they permeate the company and ooze out from every pore; the product, the office, the hiring process, the marketing, and so on and so forth.
Last night I did an event with City National Bank and their clients. I did a chat with Robin Gill and he asked me to talk about my most successful investments. I don’t really like to stack rank my investments so I struggle with that question. But I found my footing and started talking about Etsy. Etsy oozes its values from every pore. I am not sure they have a printed out values statement. Maybe they do somewhere but I don’t think I’ve seen it. But it really doesn’t matter because Etsy’s values are hard coded into their culture and they emanate out in every conceivable way.
Kickstarter is the same way. They stand for something. It’s not just talk. It’s real. And you can feel it in the product, the office, the marketing, and in the founder and in the CEO.
Twitter is like that too. I saw that they filed a lawsuit in Federal Court to be able to publish a full transparency report of all government information requests. That’s fucking awesome. And it is not a publicity stunt. Dick Costolo once said “Twitter is the free speech wing of the free speech party” or something like that. That’s a deeply held core belief of the company and it runs deep and strong in the culture.
These are three examples that folks will have some connection to and are easy to talk about. They are not the only three companies I work with or we have invested in that live their values. Meetup and SoundCloud would be a couple of other obvious examples. But they are good enough for the point of this blog post.
Values matter. A lot. In a hypercompetitive world where technology eats at every advantage you have over time it is good to have unique and distinct values that you live as a company. That’s a form of differentiation that is not easily copied. It matters and is at the core of building great companies. The kind of companies I like to talk about when people ask me about my best investments.
