Culture

As we’re kicking off hiring efforts at Contour, it’s been super top of mind for me what sort of tenets I want for the business. As I think about what sort of profile I want to hire, I’ve started asking a deeper question: even after you know what traits you want, how do you actually identify them in candidates? And then AFTER you’ve identified those traits, how do you empower those people to fully utilize their best traits?

Definition

To me, culture is what makes people want (or not want) to come to work every day. It’s the intangible harmony created when the quirks and personalities of an organization’s people come together. One thing to note is that the manifestation of culture can change depending on the general momentum and whether the company is in a downturn or an upturn.

The ultimate goal of a good culture is to create missionaries. To me, missionaries are people who will ride or die with the team — no matter the momentum or the progress.

Now, how do you create missionaries?

Conversion

A testament to the Conversion culture is that the team has always consisted of high-optionality people who choose every day to slog through the dark and bright times together. Whether it was almost running out of funding, pivoting three times, mass firings, and much more, the core nucleus of talent has always stayed together. Tangibly, almost everybody in the first seven employees has been at the company for 3+ years. And personally, even after offboarding, I still feel responsible for the team and the product.

What I believe to be the qualities that created missionaries at Conversion:

  • Inspiring leadership
    • James is someone who I deeply believe will win no matter what. The founder-led leadership has always been impressive.
  • Broad talent density
    • Feeling like you’re the least talented in every room drives you to GRIND. Even one mediocre player disrupts this energy. Talent dilution in the early stage kills missionaries.
  • Fun + Personal growth + Ownership
    • For many years I felt like I was put into positions that no other 19-year-old was in. I was actually trusted to figure things out. True ownership and trust are empowering.

Palantir

The organization’s culture is one of the only large companies that I’ve ever been truly impressed with. I’ve never worked there personally, but the way that past employees have a certain reverence for the intensity, talent, and mission is something I’ve never seen before. Most large tech companies either grind their undriven employees and have sweatshop cultures, or they have great cultures but are very relaxed. It’s very uncommon to see a truly mission-driven, high-intensity culture — something I think Palantir, Anduril, and some of the Elon Musk portfolio companies pull off really well. This company is one of the most contrarian companies of its era.

After extensive conversations with Palantirians, these are the qualities that I think create missionaries there:

  • Truly mission-driven impact
    • People are indoctrinated into believing that they’re pushing America’s critical industries forward. It’s a mission that people actually care about, and it’s constantly reinforced in its employees.
  • Ego + Ownership
    • The combination of the belief or even ego that you can rework these antiquated enterprises’ most critical problems, combined with deploying small teams solving tens to hundreds of millions of dollars of problems, is empowering to people. It makes people feel like they can do anything and Palantir trusts them to do it.
  • Immersing people in a cult culture
    • Terms like impl, ack, delta, echo, and fde that are almost exclusively used at Palantir create a cult-like belonging that adds to the missionary approach. It’s a community and branding that only people who’ve gone through Palantir will understand.

Contour

Besides doing our best to empower the highest talent density team in the world with hard problems, I’ve recently been thinking about how to position Contour in a missionary way. I think the way we do this is scope out what the world will look like in the future. I personally believe that one day most baseline requirements for human sustenance will be automated (I’m optimistic). The world’s core infrastructure will run on its own — whether that’s from robotics or AI — and people will be able to do higher-level things, whether that’s chasing their own fulfillments or simply learning to learn. Agents will be everywhere.

The first step to that abundant world is what I qualify as the new generation of services agent businesses. As models start to commoditize intelligence, they can start to reason through the most manual tasks, freeing up human intelligence to do higher-level systems thinking. Contour is part of the new wave of agent companies. Our goal is to continuously free up human labor to do higher-leverage activities, moving us a little closer to a fully abundant world.

Traits and Tenets

Now, what are the Contour tenets that I think are important?

  • Missionary — Obviously
  • Brutal honesty
    • No sugarcoating. If something’s wrong, let’s get after it. There’s nothing personal here; it’s us vs. the problem.
  • Question anything
    • You should be able to question anybody on anything; they should be able to defend what and why they’re doing something no matter who they are.
  • Disagree and commit
    • No passive aggressiveness. When you commit, you commit.
  • Relentless Agency
    • Always ask, “What’s next?” You can always do more if you open your eyes. Identify the problems and autonomously solve them.

Identification

I wish it were easy to identify good candidates, but the reality is the obvious candidates are wanted everywhere. Our team is polarizing in many ways, so I suspect we can win candidates that are a good fit, but the challenge is identifying the non-obvious candidates. The ones that don’t have a lot of experience but have taste. The ones that are spiky in unconventional paths like Minecraft modding or underwater basket weaving.

Recruiting Strategy

Currently, I do think for the core team we’re looking for friends or referrals exclusively. The first hires need to be people who have a baseline level of trust and are properly motivated to build something generational. The founding team very heavily shapes culture. I also think the intern style recruiting might be productive for finding hidden talent.