The Rutter team finalized company values recently: Grow Humbly, Give More Than You Take, and Do More with Less.
It was my mistake as a first-time founder to not have finalized values sooner, but ultimately values should reflect the team you bring on and how we carry ourselves in the day to day. As we’ve scaled in the headcount, it became very important for us to set these values in stone and to reinforce them in our everyday actions.
Even though we never put these values in words, the team's culture had already shown what we cared about. When we sat down as a team to come up with these values, it became clear what the top values were: those that represent how we want to act as a company.
My one pet peeve on values is that they must be reasonable to disagree with. Of course everyone wants to work with people that are nice, or work hard. Beyond baseline intelligence, grit, and kindness, values determine how a company culture is unique from others. Values determine who we hire and fire, and how we expect individual teammates of the company to act if no one was watching. Every value must have a counter value that another stellar company could embody.
1. Grow Humbly
What it means: Learning and growing are top priorities. Everyone has something to learn from others. Feedback is welcome.
Why it’s disagreeable: Can come off as ignoring the experience other people have and may dissuade more experienced people from joining. We believe that it’s more important to ensure that the team is humble and continuously learning, rather than overvaluing their previous experience.
2. Give More Than You Take
What it means: Prioritize the team and customers first. Be a coach, enable others, give feedback, and have empathy for other people internally or externally. Leave a better mark on the world than when you first started.
Why it’s disagreeable: It may encourage a burnout mindset and may come off to people as we don’t care about their personal growth. We believe that a rising tide lifts all boats and that the effectiveness of the team as a whole is always better for everyone than any individual performing highly.
3. Do More With Less
What it means: we are efficient, we empower people to take on as much responsibility as they can. We prefer to under hire and give more ownership than over hire and give less ownership. Anyone in the company should be able to make an outsized impact regardless of where they are in the company.
Why it’s disagreeable: Some people prefer redundancy and fault tolerance by having multiple people responsible. We believe that we can run a process that doesn’t break with a tight ship, reducing bloat, keeping the company hiring bar strong, and giving everyone more ownership.
(This one was originally going to be Keep A Low Bus Number, but no one outside of engineering understood what that meant)
If you resonate with these values and want to work with a stellar team building the future of commerce data, come join us here.
