‘Ambitious’. ‘Honest’. ‘Results-guided’. These are examples of ‘company values’ which some startups put on their websites in the hope that they’ll resonate with prospective employees. Actually, I think it’s sweet when a start-up shares their values, when they select a few words in an attempt to summarise (sometimes over-generously) their modus operandi. And if the people in charge have selected carefully, the list of values broadcasts what kind of people they are in a short, effective way. The choice of words shouldn’t be a dumb marketing exercise, but a very conscious, slow decision.
Generic values, for me at least, are a red flag: so boring. Every startup is by nature ‘ambitious’ so having ‘ambitious’ as the first value on your list conveys zero information besides your lack of care about the values list. When picking values, I think it’s important to select fairly unique ones. The way you can tell if a value is unique is by asking whether a rival startup or another successful company would not say it, or would say the opposite. ‘Focused’ is not a good value: no startup is going to have ‘unfocused’ as one of their values, so it doesn’t distinguish your company culture from any other’s. ‘Engineers own their features’ is a good value: it tells you there is less team culture there and a higher onus on each IC to take responsibility for what they build.