/ CULTURE

An opinionated operating system for a five-person AI company.

Leverage over comfort: write first, use AI first, automate repetition, stay close to users, and let evidence beat vibes.

5people
4×shorter meetings
Dailyshipping cadence
Evidencedecides

What this page is

Not office wallpaper — an operating document for how a tiny team compounds speed, leverage, and customer truth. Each principle is a deliberate trade-off, not a universal virtue.

Principles

Ten deliberate choices.

  1. 01

    Write first

    Meetings are a last-mile tool for decisions, not a place to discover what is going on.

  2. 02

    Ship every day

    If a day produces no visible progress, it probably produced theater.

  3. 03

    Talk to users constantly

    Customer reality is more valuable than internal cleverness.

  4. 04

    AI first

    Use AI before you use team attention. Human time is for judgment, taste, and irreversible decisions.

  5. 05

    Automate repetitive work away

    If you do it twice, notice it. If you do it often, kill it with automation.

  6. 06

    Extreme ownership

    Ambiguity does not own work. A person does.

  7. 07

    Speed over comfort

    Choose validated learning over emotional convenience.

  8. 08

    Measure reality

    Opinions are useful; evidence decides.

  9. 09

    Fast disagreement, full commitment

    Challenge before the decision; commit after the decision.

  10. 10

    Share what you learn

    Private learning is wasted leverage.

What we track

Reality has metrics.

WAU and paid usersMRR and demo-to-payment rateRetention and answer usefulnessCitation correctness and hallucination rateUser trust and repeated usageWhat changed after each ship

Sources used

The references behind the culture.

  1. S1Business Insider — Amazon / Jeff Bezos memo culture
  2. S2Slab — Amazon writing culture & narrative memos
  3. S3Sam Altman — Startup Advice
  4. S4Paul Graham — Do Things that Don’t Scale
  5. S5Slab — Stripe writing culture
  6. S6Stripe — Operating principles and culture
  7. S7Amazon — Leadership Principles
  8. S8SEC / Facebook S-1 — Zuckerberg letter
  9. S9Sam Altman — The Gentle Singularity
  10. S10OpenAI — The State of Enterprise AI 2025
  11. S11The Lean Startup — Principles
  12. S12Bill Gates — Automation applied to an efficient operation