Principles we live by.
Four things we come back to when the answer isn't obvious.
They are short on purpose: a principle only works if you can remember it in the moment. None of them are original, and that is fine. They are simply the ones we keep returning to, learned mostly the expensive way.
Always think from other people's perspective.
Behind every decision there is a person — a founder, a customer, a colleague, someone's family. Before we decide anything, we try to sit on their side of the table for a moment and see how it looks from there. Usually the decision gets better for it. Sometimes it changes completely.
Most of the calls we regret were not calculation errors. We just failed to picture the person on the other end — the numbers looked fine, so we stopped looking further. We have gotten better at this mostly by getting it wrong.
Use radical candor in all situations, but with care.
We try to say the true thing early, while there is still time to do something about it. It is rarely comfortable. But the people who thank us years later are, almost without exception, the ones we were honest with when it counted.
The care matters as much as the candor. Without it, honesty is just an opinion said loudly. With it, the other person can tell you are on their side — and then even hard news becomes something they can use.
Compound growth works across all aspects of life and work. Believe in it as a deity.
Small things, repeated for a long time, beat big things done once. We have watched it play out in investments, in products, in health, in friendships. The results come slowly and then suddenly, which is why most people stop somewhere in the quiet middle.
So we try to build for staying: engagements that run for years, positions we keep through the boring stretches, and a daily habit of writing down what catches our attention — around 660 entries in our public record so far, one day at a time.
Karma is real.
We don't mean anything mystical by this. Just that the world is smaller than it looks, memories are long, and the way you treat people when nothing is at stake has a habit of finding its way back to you.
We would rather lose a deal than a relationship. We have, and we would do it again.