Lesson: Team & Culture with Dave Kashen

Step: #3 Values in Tension: All enduring leaders and companies must hold contradictory thoughts

When people think about values, often it has this feeling of like motherhood and apple pie. It's like honesty, integrity, respect. I think those are kind of table stakes. I think the more useful discussion around values is when there are two good things that you have to make a tradeoff between, which one will you choose?

So a good example of this is like speed versus quality. There are some startups that it's like, "It's just all about speed. We'll break stuff. We'll hack it. We'll just go, go, go." Facebook is sort of notorious for being on that side of that tradeoff.

Other startups, for example, most enterprise startups that can't quite go that fast, break that much stuff, they actually need to have a little bit more polish and quality. So this is a good example where there are two good things — speed and quality — and you have to decide which one is more important. It has to align with your market.

If you actually value speed, and you're bored by the polishing, the quality stuff, it’s useful to pick a market for which that is what is valued.