Exia Labs Culture Memo v1
The Best Work of Our Lives
Intense and high-performance cultures found in elite military units, sports teams, and business organizations are intentionally created; they don’t just come about by accident. One key lesson we’ve learned at Speedrun is that building culture is just as important as finding PMF at early stage companies. This is v1 of the Exia Labs culture memo.
Relentless: Founder mode, ultra hardcore, war time CEO, these words are iconic. No explanation necessary. You know what it means.
Nobody Cares Mindset: There’s no point in getting worked up about things you can’t control. Use your energy to build a better product, write a winning proposal, or talk to a customer about their issues. Of course this principle is named after Ben Horowitz’s classic short essay. “All the mental energy that you use to elaborate your misery would be far better used trying to find the one, seemingly impossible way out of your current mess. It’s best to spend zero time on what you could have done and all of your time on what you might do. Because in the end, nobody cares, just run your company.”
Customer Obsession: Jeff Bezos famously banned slides at Amazon because that instrument is about persuasion, not truth. In lieu of slides, Amazon adopted a “Working Backwards” process which guides product strategy from the customer perspective, not from the typical internal/company perspective or competitor perspective. I’ll admit it. It felt really corny at first, as a three-person startup, to use the working backwards process for a new product, but it worked.
Clear Writing is Clear Thinking: We view the working backwards process as part of a broader writing culture at Exia. Having a writing culture is great for a remote team that works asynchronously. On a more personal level, I hate debating the same topic twice, and startups move so fast that people tend to forget things if they are not written down. It may sound boring, but we always have agendas, notes, decision documents, and monthly investor emails at Exia.
+30 Grit: If life were an RPG, we want to hire people who earned a lot of points in Grit. You need a lot of stamina and perseverance to weather all the ups and downs of a startup to make the future a reality.
We’re only a few months into our journey. As our business grows and evolves, our culture (and this document) will, too. Follow our blog for more updates on Exia Labs’ tech efforts, company culture, product developments and more.