Biographical vs. Aspirational Startup Values
I’ve always been skeptical about traditional company values. I remember my early days as an engineer at Airbnb, where the leadership put enormous effort into crafting and socializing their value statements. They ended up with a well-crafted set - “Champion the Mission,” “Be a Host,” “Embrace the Adventure,” and “Be a Cereal Entrepreneur.”
There was once a fifth value: “Simplify,” which ironically vanished over time, simplifying itself right out of existence. That always made me sad - simplify was perhaps the best value because it was, well, simple and actionable.
Airbnb’s values were clever, sure, but I always had to look them up to remember them. Even having worked there for years, I could only consistently recall “Be a Host.”
This isn’t to pick on Airbnb; they’re just my most salient point of reference. The challenge with so many company values, especially in the early days, is that they’re aspirational to a fault. Often, they’re meticulously worded, on-brand, and uplifting - but not always directly actionable. How do you decide whether to reduce AWS costs or over-provision your database for stability by referring back to “Embrace the Adventure”? These principles can feel too vague to settle real-world tradeoffs. You end up with either overly broad platitudes or niche specifics that no one remembers.
When we started Graphite, we tried to articulate a set of values we wanted to embody. We came up with something like this:
Work in Pencil
We constantly edit and improve everything we build.
Expect your work to be changed or erased as we grow.
Mine, Cut, and Polish
Start by testing many ideas to discover what resonates.
Refine and reduce to only what’s most valuable.
Polish until the result is stunning.
Exercise Empathy
Understand what matters to users and teammates.
Treat everyone with kindness, honesty, and respect.
Play Like a Championship Team
We’re a team, not a family.
Align ambitions with the team’s goals.
When we succeed, we celebrate together.
We spent hours debating and refining these statements. The hardest part was wrestling with hypothetical situations: How should we weigh quality versus prototyping speed? When should we push for polish versus good-enough solutions? These theoretical tradeoffs led to endless discussions. The result, while thoughtful, sometimes felt too aspirational - more like predictions of who we hoped to be than reflections of who we actually were. And just like Airbnb’s values, the the team struggles to rattle them off - they’re simply hard to remember.
Over time, I’ve come to believe that early on, you shouldn’t waste much time trying to nail down company values. In the beginning, what you need is traction - forward motion that tells you what actually matters. Only after you’ve faced repeated challenges and made hard decisions do certain truths emerge as genuinely core. Values should be an uncontentious record of battles won and lessons learned, not a wishlist for who you might become someday.
At Graphite, I’ve found myself organically settling on three simple words that capture what we, the team, live and breathe every day:
Kindness, Expertise, and Urgency.
That’s it. Three words, easy to remember, and perfectly aligned with who we’ve become. When candidates ask about our values, I say these three words. They’re uncontentious internally, and they reflect attributes we’ve seen proven crucial, time and again. If someone doesn’t embody all three, it shows quickly. These values help us hire the right people and, if necessary, let go of those who aren’t a fit.
Kindness
We’re an in-person company, working together under high pressure, iterating at the whiteboard, debating product direction, and building for world-class engineering teams. Half our job is building the company itself - collaborating, communicating, and leading. Without kindness, this environment becomes intolerable. We need people who are supportive, who turn tense moments into opportunities for understanding, who help others feel safe to contribute. Without kindness, the whole thing falls apart.
Expertise
We’re not just building a product; we’re building an opinionated tool that tells world-class engineers - at places like Vercel, Datadog, and Snowflake - how they should shape their development workflows. That’s a bold stance. You can’t convincingly do that unless you know your craft inside and out. Expertise is non-negotiable. If you’re going to guide top-tier engineering teams, you need to be at their level - or pushing beyond it.
Urgency
Our mission is to help engineers ship code faster. We exist to accelerate software development. We’re also a startup, and speed is one of our greatest advantages. We’re not advocating recklessness, but we do believe in moving quickly, trimming unnecessary steps, and pushing out iterations to learn faster. If something’s blocking progress, we resolve it immediately. We ask: “What can we do right now to move one step closer to our goal?” Move fast, stay nimble, stay alive.
Evolving Values Over Time
What’s beautiful about these values - kind, expert, urgency - is that they emerged naturally over time. I didn’t force them into existence. After two years of growth, iteration, and facing real-world challenges, these words feel obvious, almost inevitable. They reflect the core of who we are and what we need. They’re easy to remember, easy to explain, and easy to uphold.
Will our values change again as we learn more, evolve, and grow? Possibly. Probably. Values should be living, reflective documents, not stone tablets. Today, these three principles describe our lived culture. And if a few years from now, we learn new lessons that push us to re-articulate our values again, we’ll update our values again to accurately describe the energy in the room.