Worse is Better Table of Contents It's Not Not Your Job
The Chaos will Not be Minimized
It Should Be Fun
Only Hire A Players
Don't Fill Up on Bread
Worse is Better
Run Into The Spike
Take the Roast out of the Oven
Being Busy ≠ Making Progress
“What is Right?”, not “Who is Right?”
Feel it to my Face
“What do you Propose?”
Be Skeptical of Experts
Pitch Like You Mean It
Write Like a Human
Go to a Gym-esque Place
We'll Figure it Out What are the Genius ISMs? The Genius ISMs are the basic principles by which we try to live and work. They are about “who we are”, not “what we do” and so would remain constant even if tomorrow we became a company that sold air conditioners.
They are a guide for being successful at Genius and a tool for making decisions. Bring them up in day-to-day situations to help make decisions and provoke discussions.
But remember: this isn't The Bible. If you think an ISM is wrong, or being wrongly applied to a given situation, speak up! The goal is for this to be an aid in, not a substitute for, making hard decisions. Think for yourself The ISMs It's Not Not Your Job Whatever it says on your business card, your real job is to make Genius a success. So be careful about saying “it's not my job” – if “it” affects Genius's success, it is your job!
Take ownership. Seek to discover hidden projects and backstop them. Always be asking yourself what's going on and whether it's good. Trust your gut – if something looks broken, investigate even if everyone else is acting like it's fine and you feel unqualified to voice a contrary opinion. Things tend to look weirder as you look closer – turn over the rocks and witness the narsty creepy crawlies squirming underneath.
Then tell someone about it – a peer, your manager, a founder; if you're not speaking up you're implicitly saying everything's good. Whatever it is, don't a**ume someone else will notice or take care of it.
These are the stakes: Genius will either become part of the fabric of the Internet, or it will go into the dark.. Which one is up to you. The Chaos will Not be Minimized Building anything great is messy, and Genius is no exception. We are pursuing a results-maximizing strategy, not a chaos-minimization or comfort-maximization strategy.
Plus, if this thing succeeds, what we are today will be unrecognizable 2 years from now. So fasten your seatbelts and get ready for some craziness – it's gonna feel weird, but we'll figure it out. It Should Be Fun Working at Genius is hard, but it's important that it be fun too! We won't succeed unless we all do great work, and it's impossible to do great work unless you're feeling inspired and enjoying yourself.
Plus all the ingredients are there – a big hard project to work on with other talented people! This doesn't mean “force yourself to have fun! Squeeeeze!!” It means “If you're not having fun, something's wrong and we need to figure out how to fix it”.
Like many things, the best way to cure a funk is to to talk about it. Over-communicate your feelings! Talk to your peers, your manager, a founder, get help! Don't be sad. Only Hire A Players The bar for hiring someone isn't “would this person ‘do stuff'”, it's “would this person be a transformative force for the company”. Or, looked at differently, we want to hire people who are so good that we'd be devastated if they quit. So don't hire people whose refusal to work for you wouldn't leave you devastated (or at least really upset).
“Only hire great people” is of course a startup meme, but few have the courage to actually follow through because it means turning down many candidates who are “pretty good”.
Why only hire extraordinary people? If the criterion is “can this person do stuff” or “would this person be an effective extension of my will”, you're committing yourself to a lot of communication overhead wherein the person will relay information to you so you can make decisions. Instead, hire great people and give them big jobs where they'll have a bunch of information no one else has and therefore be the best situated to make big decisions on their own. Hiring someone new is costly! It increases communication overhead (which grows super-linearly), management overhead, etc. The net effect of these costs is that the more people we have, the less agile the company will feel and the harder it will be to get things done. When you hire someone, you're also committing yourself to hiring people that that person would want to hire. So only hire someone if you think they'll be good at picking their future peers. Every new hire looks to the people who are already here for cues on how to act. It's important to give new people good examples by hiring leaders you want them to emulate. Finally, working with truly exceptional people is fun! You're gonna spend most of your waking hours with these people—why shouldn't they be great? What makes an A player?
One way to think about it is that an A player is someone who's surprisingly good at their job. If you're not consistently surprised by noticing how good someone is, they aren't an A player.
Here's a way to look at the components that add up to surprisingly good: Is the person smart? Really really actually smart? Do you feel yourself getting excited just talking to them? Does reading their writing / code make you feel lightheaded (in a good way)? Note that we must still stress this question even when dealing with people with great resumes – be skeptical of your natural tendency to think “this person's a meme, they must be smart!“ Would the person be effective in our environment? I.e., even if they are effective in their current spot, Genius is different – here we are building something brand new versus maintaining and improving something that's already established. Not everyone wants this. Is the person HUNGRY? Do they have GRIT? Are they looking to “make their mark”? Or do they consider their mark already made? This is the most important quality – we are trying to do something incredibly difficult and even the smartest among us will fail if they're not down to run into the spike. Another good heuristic is is this person good enough that you'd be down to report to them?
One thing that's NOT super-important is “does the person have all the relevant sk**s”. Sk**s can be learned – raw intellectual firepower and determination to succeed are much harder to teach.
It's important to stress hiring the best because it's easy to compromise when we have so much pressure to make hires. But it's equally important to remember that we shouldn't let this ISM prevent us from hiring anyone at all! Worse is, after all, better.
In particular, “only hire amazing people” doesn't mean “only hire people you are 100% sure are amazing”. It's very hard to become 100% convinced you're in the presence of greatness in an interview, and missing out on someone great is bad, so we must take risks! But we should only take risks on high variance people who we think might turn out to be amazing – if you're confident that a candidate is “pretty good”, it's a “no”.
Nor does “only hire amazing people” mean “only hire people who are amazing along every dimension”. We are looking for strength, not lack of weakness, and amazing people often have significant weaknesses. So when considering candidates, you goal should be to suss out whether they have transformational strength, not to discover their weaknesses / search for reasons NOT to hire them – the latter you'll be able to find in even the best candidates. Remember: strength produces results, weakness produces headaches, and lack of weakness produces nothing. We're trying to maximize results, not minimize headaches.
Last thing: amazing people are rare, so when we find one we must get them at all costs! Remember James Somers's immortal mantra: ♪ we can get anyone on our team, no matter how big their meme ♪. Don't Fill Up on Bread Choosing how to spend your time is one of your most important and difficult jobs. Choose well and you'll have a ma**ive impact on our chance of success. Choose poorly and you might as well not be coming to work at all.
Metaphorically, when you're at the high stakes buffet line of life trying to decide what to eat (i.e., work on), resist the bread's siren call. It's right there in front of you, it'll definitely taste good in the moment, but ultimately it's unsatisfying. Likewise in life, don't fill up on tempting but unsatisfying small projects.
Always be asking yourself: “What am I working on? Is it the most important thing I could be doing? Do I feel urgency to complete it? Does the prospect of completing it excite me? Could Genius succeed without it?” If so it's probably not worth doing. Work on important projects – don't fill up on bread.
This doesn't mean you should be trying to do big projects in one go; instead, do them in small chunks by releasing your first drafts. But be aware of whether you're taking a series of small steps toward achieving a big vision or whether you're taking a series of unrelated small steps that lead nowhere.
This is also about ignoring distractions – small projects are tempting when they float into your inbox: they're new, exciting, and represent a welcome break from whatever hard thing you're currently buried in. But don't be tempted! In particular don't be tempted by small projects that “seem easy” – they only seem easy from a distance. Once you start you'll realize it was harder than you thought. So focus on the biggest bang, not the smallest buck, because the smallest buck is bigger than you think.
Finally, because working toward big projects is hard, it's easy to find yourself saying “okay we should be working on X, but before we can we'll do the ‘easier' and slightly less important project Y”. If you find yourself saying something like this, run into the spike and just work on X! Worse is Better It's likely that your natural tendency is to be a self-critical, overly-an*lytical perfectionist. This comes from a good place, but don't let it paralyze you from doing anything at all!
First drafts are golden – put one out there as soon as you can, while you're still embarra**ed by how bad it is, and perfect it in public. It's hard to subject something you think is incomplete to public scrutiny, but it's the best way to to work toward something great. Be bold!
In addition to overcoming an*lysis-paralysis, a worse-is-better approach is important because you can't design the perfect outcome up front. Don't be Le Corbusier! You think you know what's important now, but you don't – in fact right now you're the dumbest you'll ever be. When possible, postpone decisions until you're smarter!
Also, if you only allow yourself to put stuff out there when it's perfect, you'll be much more tempted to fill up on bread. It's much easier to write the perfect email response than it is to engineer the perfect way to advance the product / community. Restrict yourself to output that's perfect and you'll end up doing only projects you can execute perfectly in one go, which will be exactly those projects that don't matter.
Finally, remember: we have nothing to lose! If we fail it will be because we didn't seize the opportunity, not because we made too many mistakes. Ripeness is all. Run Into The Spike Whenever you're deciding what to do next, pick the thing you least want to do. Chances are it's the hardest and most important thing on your plate. Want to check your email? You're avoiding some bigger ambiguous task that you shouldn't put off. Want to chill and watch TV? Go to a gym-esque place instead.
Doing big, important things in life / at Genius is hard! Recognize the feeling of doing something good and hard and unnatural and learn to cherish it – you'll accomplish big things by running into the spike, not going with the flow.
Life is a battle against the evil voices inside that tell us to give in and take the easy way out. Beat back the forces of darkness by learning to love the spike. Take the Roast out of the Oven An “almost done” project is just as valuable to the company as a project you haven't started. So always be asking yourself “how has the world changed due to my work here?” If the world isn't any different then you haven't accomplished anything, no matter how hard you've worked! Effect change on the world by taking the roast out of the oven and finishing the job.
This also means that the worst thing you can do is get a project to “almost done” and quit. But this is also dangerously easy! Both because it's probably a lot more work than you thought to get from “almost done” to “done”, and because you now have much more information about how valuable the project is and perhaps it doesn't look so enticing anymore.
But this doesn't mean you shouldn't give up on a bad project just because you're close to finishing it – you should ignore sunk costs. What it does mean is that you should think carefully about how important a project is before you start so you don't find yourself wanting to abandon it mid-stream in favor of what's now clearly truly important.
It also means you should consider releasing your “almost done” version as-is and perfecting it in public (if it turns out to need perfecting at all) – this way the world will have changed AND chances are the “almost done” version was better than you thought. Worse is better.
Finally, it's far more valuable to take the roast out of the oven on one project than it is to get two projects to being “almost done”. So when working on a project, force yourself to ignore all the other interesting things you could be working on until the roast leaves the oven. Focus. Run into one spike at a time. Being Busy ≠ Making Progress There's so much going on at Genius that there are unlimited ways to stay busy. But beware: just because you're not on Facebook and are feeling busy and generally stretched thin and tired doesn't mean you're making progress!
Ask yourself: how, through my efforts, is the world different now than it was a few days ago? Have I brought about a positive outcome? Have I pushed things forward? Or am I offering opinions and making sure things don't break? Am I pushing my own agenda for what should happen? Or am I reacting to what the world is throwing in my face? Am I running into the spike? Or just sharpening my pencils? Do I need to lock myself in a room without internet to actually get something done?
Think hard about that last one – big hard projects require long, uninterrupted periods of deep thought and work. You should spend most of your time working on a single project for multiple hours, either alone or in a small group. No phone calls, no meetings, no “urgent emails”, no “offering opinions on other stuff that's happening”.
To that last point – of all the ways to “stay busy”, checking and responding to email is by far the most pernicious.
Why? Because we're hardwired to love the email slot machine! Most of the time there's nothing good, but sometimes there's something incredibly juicy – even writing this sentence makes me want to check right now!
And it's so tempting to respond! Here is this little discrete task that's way easier than the ambiguous project I paused to open Gmail, why not write an eloquent response? Plus, someone is definitely interested in my opinion here, maybe I can help point them in the right direction!
Resist this temptation – having email debates rarely moves the ball forward. Instead, figure out what you want to accomplish and push for that. Doing so might require some emailing, but calling someone on the phone or (better still) talking in person is better – it's higher bandwidth and creates less work (people feel obligated to write thoughtful responses when they get long emails).
Unless your job specifically calls for a high level of email responsiveness, your orientation toward your inbox should be “is there anything REALLY cooking in here that I absolutely MUST deal with right now?” If not, resist the natural temptation to tear through your inbox top to bottom and give everything the perfect response and instead just close the tab and get back to work.
If email is the Cadillac El Dorado of staying busy, meetings are the set of steak knives. There are a few reasons for this.
The biggest is that it's easy to waste a lot of time talking and hanging out with the cool people who work here! Remember: 5 people meeting for an hour is like 1 person meeting for 5 hours, i.e., k**ing their day. This costs the company a lot of money! When scheduling a meeting, consider whether it's important enough that you'd be willing to throw some laptops out the window just to have it.
In addition to the time you're spending actually meeting, meetings make it difficult to work for long, uninterrupted chunks of time – the “well I have a meeting in 25 minutes, might as well stop work now” phenomenon is very real.
When you must meet, make sure there's a clear goal. This makes recurring meetings suspect – can you really say now that you will have a clear goal every week?
Also, stay on track! In particular, resist the temptation to fall into the weeds and start talking about a project at too low of a level – e.g., if, in a discussion about the best way to interview for a role, you find yourself on a tangent discussing the merits of one particular candidate, you have fallen into the weeds and someone can righteously call you out by doing the “weeds growing” hand gesture and saying “weeds!”. “What is Right?”, not “Who is Right?” Think for yourself.
Very rarely should you do something because “Tom wants it” or “Ilan wants it” or “[some other person] wants it”. Relatedly, you should never approach a situation with the Tom/Ilan-whisperer mindset of “my job here is to figure out what the boss wants and make it happen”. Your job is to figure out what you think is right and push for it!
Likewise, when Ilan or Tom (or anyone) stakes out a strong position, and even says “I think we should do x”, what they are REALLY saying is something more like “Here's an idea for solving such-and-such problem. I think we should either do it, or, if you have a better idea, let's talk about why it's better and do it instead of my idea.”
Don't worry about “rocking the boat” as you push for what you think is right – capsize the boat if that's what you need to do to surface a problem. Conversely, be wary of saying / hearing “we've always done it this way”. Feel it to my Face If you ever find yourself wondering “should I bring this up?” the answer is yes!
If you're feeling awkwardness / weirdness with someone, whether it's a peer, your manager, or a founder, talk about it with them. Emphasis on the "with them" – go feel it right to that person's face. Don't talk about it with others first – and if someone comes to you to discuss a problem they're having with someone else, your goal should be to get them to talk directly to the person instead of talking to you.
Even if you're not feeling bad vibes, over-communicate your feelings about someone so you're on the same page with them and they know where they stand with you. When you're feeling positively about people, it's a great thing to really let them know.
Also, don't spend a bunch of time planning how to have the perfect conversation. Worse is better – say what you feel, be as honest as possible, and pick up the pieces afterward. It probably won't be as intense as you think because whatever you want to say probably won't be as unexpected as you anticipate, and people are more resilient than you fear.
And in general, always err on the side of transparency. Keeping secrets is much harder than you think (ever seen A Simple Plan?), and it's hard to productively interact with people from whom you're keeping secrets.
It's especially important to be honest about the quality of the work we're doing here together. Is someone's work output bad, good, great? Let them know. Be critical, but try to help. Feedback is a gift.
Make sure you give positive feedback as well, but don't sugarcoat your criticism; be honest (but not cruel). Also, make sure you're not simply telling someone that you're grumpy, hungry, or that you didn't sleep much last night. If you end up going overboard with negativity because something else was on your mind, apologize. But it's better to err on the side of being totally honest even if it means occasionally going too far rather than the reverse.
When receiving criticism, don't be defensive! Getting feedback doesn't meant that the criticizer doesn't like you – on the contrary, it means they care about helping you make things better and are willing to bear the awkwardness of a difficult conversation. It's hard to speak up and be honest – feedback is a gift. “What do you Propose?” If “what do you propose we do?” would make sense as a response to something you're about to say, stop yourself and revise your statement until it doesn't.
Many things at Genius are messed up, and it's your job to help fix them. But instead of just noting there's a problem, push yourself to come up with a suggestion for how to improve things.
And “we should do X” isn't a proposal – who specifically should do what exactly? And of course the best answer to the “who” question is “me” – while offering solutions instead of pointing out problems is important, your bias should always be toward action. Do the thing instead of just talking about it. Get the sponge you want to see in the world.
Also don't complain. If you're tempted to vent, put “practical suggestion colon” at the end of what you're saying and force yourself to come up with something.
“What do you Propose?” applies even when there's no problem. For example: Can we sign this contract with a vendor? Before you ask someone else to make the call, form and express your opinion on what we should do. You needn't be an expert to contribute. What should feature look like? How should this copy read? Propose something! Remember: the first version of a proposal is always the worst and hardest to make. But it's also the most valuable. Be bold! Be Skeptical of Experts Experts won't solve your difficult problems so don't expect them to save you. Run into the spike and face down ambiguous situations yourself instead of wasting time looking for the mystical expert who'll tell you what to do.
We first learned this lesson during Y Combinator when we'd constantly have the experience of walking into a meeting thinking “This is it! This investor, or this lawyer, or this YC partner is going to tell us exactly what we should do to solve our problem and we won't have to deal with this unsettling ambiguity!”. And it never happens.
Why? Because an “expert”'s advantages in experience and knowledge are dwarfed by the advantage you have in knowing the full context and history of your problem. Put another way, to be able to help you with a truly hard problem, the expert would have to listen to you explain its contours and history for like 10 hours. Also, if the expert doesn't work here, they probably care much less about the problem than you do.
And even when it seems like an expert has sufficient context to help, chances are you think they know more than they actually do. Trust your gut about what's right instead of blindly following an expert's advice. And don't a**ume you can't contribute because you're not an expert. You know more than you think. Pitch Like You Mean It Whatever your job, it requires public speaking – whether it's giving a talk, pitching an investor, or just presenting a project you've done to your team. So it's important to get good at pitching.
The most important aspect to being a good public speaker is being (or just acting!) excited about the idea you're sharing and being (or just appearing!) excited to be “on stage” / presenting it to your audience.
This sounds simple but it's a surprisingly rare sk**. Even when we were in Y Combinator I was shocked by how many founding teams had trouble projecting enthusiasm for their own companies while on stage. Yes it's hard and nerve-wracking, but this is your thing! Get excited!
(Memorizing what you plan to say (or at least not reading from something) and keeping it short are also quite important!) Write Like a Human Whenever you write something read it aloud and ask yourself “is this what I would say if I were just explaining this to someone in person?” If the answer is “no” then make it more human and less “professional”.
Arguably Tom goes too far here with stuff like “muchhh loveeee” in emails and so forth, but it's better to sound like a corny weirdo than a corporate drone! (Jokes are good for this purpose as well, so let me know if you've got any good ones.)
So if you're using phrases like “prior to” (versus “before”), and “in the event that” (versus “if”), and “don't hesitate to ask” (versus whatever), or whatever else that makes it sound like “a business email”, rewrite it to be more conversational. (And again, let me know if you have any good ideas for jokes!) Go to a Gym-esque Place The healthier you are you are, mentally and physically, the happier and more productive you will be. So whether it's the literal gym, yoga, taking a walk, meditating, SoulCycle, or whatever, make time in which to step away from that glowing rectangle and take care of your mind and your body.
“But how will I have time to both go to a gym-esque place and work hard enough to make Genius a success?”
While going to the gym-esque place means you'll be able to spend fewer seconds staring at your computer, overall it will make you more effective by getting you into a frame of mind where you feel inspired to do intense creative work.
And the converse is true as well – when you're feeling tired and slouchy, you'll be much more tempted to work on things that don't matter instead of running into the spike and tackling something hard and big. So don't fall prey to the illusion that “you have too much work to go to the gym-esque place” or that you must “skip the gym-esque place so you can get more work done”
And in general you should be thinking about how you can set aside quality time to work with high intensity on important projects, and then take real breaks – fight the temptation to be “always kind of working”; it's exhausting and not productive. We'll Figure it Out Stay cool. It's not as bad as it seems. We've been through worse. In 6 months no one will care.
There have been so many times in Genius's history that we've seemed totally f**ed. Some of them you might have even read about! And yet, historically at least, there's always been a way out. So stop freaking out and figure out what to do!
But remember, though “staying cool” is difficult, it's rarely enough! Don't just “weather the storm”. Do something to fix the problem!
Finally, complaining is especially toxic during a crisis. Remember: you get ZERO credit for being right that things were f**ed, and a TON of credit for turning a crisis into an opportunity. So stay positive and look for one!