Resilient: By choosing to work on a startup we’re choosing a hard path. It’s fun and rewarding but will also be full of setbacks. Resilience is taking failure in our stride and recognizing it as part of the journey. And seeing the outsized reward of choosing to do hard things.
Humble: Recognizing that we can be wrong and that there’s always room for improvement sets us up for success. The first step of doing better is being open to feedback and leaving ego at the door. The second step is asking for feedback proactively and constantly, we don’t wait for opportunities to improve.
Ambitious: We are a team competing against the best teams on the planet. 90% of startups fail. If we are starting this journey it is because we believe we can win against all odds. If we believe we can win it is because we believe we can be better than the best. If we believe we can be better than the best it is because we believe that we too can be great.
Optimistic: Our outlook and energy is contagious - we believe strongly a positive atmosphere and this starts with a conscious choice to view things positively. We structure our daily meetings to lean positive, and stay optimistic about the success of the company and each of us as individuals.
Benchmark before inventing: We must always learn from world-class companies and strive to be better when it counts. Even the greatest innovators in the world were always learning from others before them. We look to ways that others have effectively solved problems we face before us, and avoid reinventing the wheel wherever possible.
Scientific Approach: We must take a scientific approach to our work by constantly setting hypotheses, running experiments, evaluating data and trying new ways until we find success. Each of us is responsible for knowing how our individual success is measured, and tracking these metrics ourselves.
User obsession: The biggest way that we create value in the world is by helping our users succeed. Working backwards from how we are improving user experience at every step ensures we are aligned with the interests of our users.
Optimize for Speed: Speed is a startups only advantage. When in doubt, optimize for speed - we have very little to lose from getting things out into the hands of customers quickly and iterating. Perfect is the enemy of done.
Fail fast, often, and conclusively: Making mistakes and learning from them is the backbone of growth as individuals and a company. We are happy to make every mistake once. Designing conclusive tests that let us fail fast prevent the company from spending time and resources on the wrong path.
Prep and plan: Any presentation at Aim will prompt the questions ‘What do we want to achieve?’, ‘What are the criteria to judge by?’ and ‘What tests can we run?’. We think carefully about our goals and intentions before executing because we recognize that the right prep and process is far more important than the sheer effort of execution.
Fuck yeah or No: Reluctant choices lead to mediocre outcomes. There are almost certainly more options than ones we aren’t thrilled by, so we focus our efforts on things that are a ‘Fuck Yeah’. We recognize that we work best when we’re excited about what we’re doing, and plan around it.
Disagree and commit: We are doing nobody a favor by withholding disagreement. We welcome and encourage disagreement. But we commit wholeheartedly once a decision is taken - even if it’s one we didn’t agree with.
Ownership: We care much more about results than optics, this comes with owning our outcomes. We push for clarity when ownership is vague, take ownership liberally and don’t sacrifice long-term value for short-term results.
Kindness: We’re people before workers, treating each other with true kindness and empathy is a priority. We’ll go out of our way to help each other and set each other up for success.
Fun: Work is a large part of our lives, we place a large emphasis on enjoying the process. There will always be parts of work we don’t love - but we’ll work with each other to make Aim a fun place to be and work.
Transparency: We recognize that we’re all humans and being transparent about our successes, failures, and vulnerabilities. We’re open about our expectations to ensure we’re aligned on what success for each other looks like. This goes both ways, we expect questions about anything - even from those outside our domain.
This goes for resources too, we’ll share videos, ideas, tools with each other all the time, sharing knowledge makes us all more effective.