Culture typically lives outside of the bounds of a written document. It’s hard to legislate, and it generally does (and should) evolve. So trying to write down what our culture “is” can be a fraught exercise. We encourage you to think of these more as a set of notes than a manifesto. Our goals with this document are a) to put into words the values that brought us together as a team, b) to have a set of principles we can all refer back to and hold each other accountable to, and c) to help prospective team members filter whether we’re the kind of team they want to work with (or not).
We’ve tried to capture the opinionated values that are distinct from the corporate best practices that often find their way into companies’ cultural values, e.g. effective communication, high ownership and autonomy, collaborative teamwork, extreme speed, customer obsession, continuous learning, etc. Those are all absolutely essential to the work we do, but they don’t define how we are unusually different from other teams.
It’s easy to confuse our worth as people with the value of our work. When we produce good work or achieve a particular outcome, we feel better about ourselves. When we produce poor-quality work or fail in some way, we can feel like a failure as a person. It’s also easy to let this way of thinking inform our perceptions and judgments of other people.
We think it’s critical to separate these two. Our work does have value, and can be good or bad in quality. But the value of our work is not correlated to our worth as people. In this sense, no member of the team is (or could be) above or below any other—we’re all equally important, equally valuable, and equally worthy of compassion, attention, and respect.
Not only do we think this is true, but we also believe it frees us up to speak more honestly to where we are succeeding or failing as individuals or a team. Once the value of our work is no longer a vehicle for shoring up insecurities or ambitions in our egos, we can be more clear-sighted about what is actually the case. We believe the problems we’re working on are incredibly important, and the decisions we make matter. It’s important to be rigorous and objective in how we evaluate our performance and to place conditions on whether someone qualifies to contribute. And we also undergird all of our interactions with a fundamental understanding that we are spiritual equals, and that our work together is just one piece of the larger arc each of us is tracing through life. We want every member of the team to be able to take big swings and hold each other accountable from the security of unconditional regard for one another.
What this means is that we value contributors with low egos, highly developed emotional intelligence, and a capacity for constructive honesty. We want a culture that is team-focused and mission-driven, rather than ego-driven—where everyone contributes to a psychologically safe, blame-free environment. We don’t tolerate “brilliant assholes,” and we also don’t avoid voicing concerns or constructive criticism for fear of conflict or making others uncomfortable. We embrace healthy conflict as a core ingredient in building trust, we practice non-violent communication, and we seek ongoing inner development through the challenges we face in work and beyond.
There are many reasons why people want to work on startups. Building something from the ground up is exhilarating in a way that working in a larger company rarely is. Startups push us to rapidly learn new skills and domains and take on responsibilities that may not otherwise be available to us. And when startups succeed, early contributors can emerge with a tremendous amount of personal wealth and reputational capital.
These are all valid motivations. But the truth is that the vast majority of startups fail. Building a company from the ground up is incredibly stressful, demoralizing, and exhausting. Statistically, it’s a much worse strategy for making money than taking a high-paying corporate job. We’re constantly learning, but we’re also constantly behind.
The reason why we’re working on Not Diamond is because we believe that AI has the potential to produce enormous public good and radically reduce human suffering, and that infrastructure for ensembling together and discriminating between diverse machine intelligences will significantly drive this progress forward while reducing the probability and severity of negative outcomes. When tuned correctly, we believe startups are one of the best vehicles for driving long-term, sustainable impact at scale. Markets are not well-positioned to solve all problems. But when we can point thoughtfully incentivized market dynamics at a problem, there are few things more powerful for driving positive change.
We don’t believe corporations are automatic producers of the good, and it’s critical to account for the negative externalities that any successful venture or technology inevitably produces. But we want to work with people who are motivated by the possibility of building an engine for positive systemic impact. We orient towards a service modality for leadership, both within our internal teams and with respect to the wider world. While we are pessimists in the short term—we assume that what could go wrong will go wrong, and we are rigorous in first identifying and then shoring up risk and uncertainty—in the long-term we are radical optimists: we believe that the future can be better than the present, that the human condition (and that of other sentient beings) can be improved, and that building new technologies can effect such change.
Because startups are so incredibly difficult, it’s essential to work with people who are world-class in their abilities—and to constantly develop ourselves to be world-class. We don’t mean world-class in a rhetorical sense: we literally strive to be amongst the best in the world (or better yet, the best in the world) at both the narrow problems we’re solving and the general skills which allow us to solve them.
Because excellence can’t always be neatly measured, a critical element for developing it is finding innate pleasure in the process itself. We enjoy going down rabbit holes nobody else would think to go down, asking questions no one else would think to ask, and solving problems no one else has thought to solve. We look for opportunities to do things differently. We like to go way deeper than we have to, or way shallower (and faster) than we thought we had to. Whatever the nature of the problem we’re exploring, we cultivate pleasure in solving it exceptionally.
We work, a lot. We are inspired and excited by our work, and we understand that success doesn’t wait for people to catch up. We also recognize that excellence extends beyond just the quality of our work and also to how we treat ourselves and others. The greatest drivers of impact in our work come not from the quantity of hours we invest but from the depth of our creativity and our capacity to truly connect with others, both of which suffer tremendously when we don’t take appropriate care of our physical, emotional, and mental health. Excellence extends to our communication and emotional intelligence, and should never become a justification for ego-driving, aggression, or territory-staking. And true excellence is built over a lifetime of sustainable progress—not in short-lived flashes of brilliance. We try to make some progress every day.
It’s easy to fall into a transactional mindset when growing a team: we have certain goals that require certain skillsets and experience, and so we seek out matching contributors. But there are two fundamental pitfalls with this mindset. First, each member of our team is far more than their capacity to help us reach our goals. And as a startup, our short-term goals will be changing rapidly—so they are necessary but insufficient conditions for evaluating collaborators. Just as building a company requires holding to a long-term vision while pivoting along the way, we want to work with people we feel comfortable building long-term relationships with, even as the focus of those relationships constantly evolve. Life is too short not to work with people you love.
We believe the best teams are made of spiritual equals, rather than of owners and employees, and we see every collaborator as a source of creative impact in their own right. When we make a commitment to work together, we want that commitment to be predicated on a long-term, high-autonomy bet in our collaborators.
To hold ourselves accountable to this, we’ve decided to offer an investment in any future startup that a team member might start in the future. Making this offer requires us to be far more thoughtful when deciding to work with someone. It forces us to ask whether we believe in a potential team member independent of the value they can contribute to our immediate goals, if they’re someone who’s journey we want to be a part of even after they’ve moved on from Not Diamond, and if we truly believe they have the skill, ambition, ownership, and creativity to wrest value from nothing.