I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the kind of company we want to build with Transcriptic.
- Extreme focus. Everyone is tasked with exactly one priority.
- Radical transparency on metrics. Every employee should be able to figure out the company’s exact revenue and burn rates in less than five minutes.
- Big impact in small teams. Adding people usually creates more problems than it solves.
- Refusal to accept constraints, internal or external. You are limited only by the laws of physics.
- Extreme bias towards action. Don’t overanalyze: just do it. Be prepared to fail fast and cheap in your exploration.
- Self-sufficiency. If you want to try something, go do it yourself.
- No diffusion of responsibility. Everything ultimately comes down to one person who owns it.
- Data and implementation win arguments. When good statistics are involved, politics are not.
- Solve real problems, not imagined ones. Solve problems you actually have. Trying to anticipate “scaling problems” is usually premature optimization.
- Quality over quantity. Have a ready willingness to throw out lots of work that went towards something that turned out mediocre or merely good. Be an artist and never let anything less than masterful be seen with your reputation attached.