Life’s too short, let’s make every moment count and live intensely. It’s inspiring to work with the best people on the most interesting challenges
We’re trying to create something out of nothing. We need to squeeze decades of innovation into a few years, because we don’t have the luxury of waiting decades for results
90% of startups fail. We want to win. Also, we want to win as soon as possible, before life is over and none of this matters
Ambitious people have a chip on their shoulder to prove they’re the best at what they do. They hate mediocrity and won’t work here if we’re mediocre
Motion is an extreme company. If you want to put in an average effort to achieve an average outcome, Motion is not for you
You will receive a lot of feedback on your work. Understand that it’s never about you, it’s purely about the work. If anyone else did the same thing I will say it to them too
Anytime I see something subpar that an exceptional person could have done better, I’m going to point it out. It could be as soon as your first day. You may not have all the context that I do, but that’s precisely why I have to tell you when I see it
Please learn to put your feelings aside and focus on the content of the feedback. I’m never going to deprive you of an opportunity to improve because I want to spare your feelings
You should always know where you stand. Ask your manager any time you’re not sure
For most people, this role will give you more responsibilities and hold you to higher standards than you’ve ever had. You’ll grow faster here than you’ve ever grown before. That doesn’t come for free — growth is a painful process. Embrace it and don’t take it personally
Do what you say you will do. The moment you change your mind or realize you can’t deliver something you committed to, let the other person know. Don’t wait for them ask you “what happened to X?”
Employees should make as many decisions as possible themselves, because we hire them for their intelligence and judgement. I don’t want to micromanage every decision and be the bottleneck in this company
Occasionally you’ll make a decision that is wrong. I’ll tell you and we’ll learn from it and move on, it’s ok to make mistakes. That’s the cost of high agency. If it’s really egregious I’ll ask you why you didn’t run it by someone else first. So this isn’t a free pass to yolo every decision. If you’re not sure, run it by your manager until you understand how they think
Be your own harshest critic. If I know you are taking your mistakes seriously, I’ll trust you more and not feel the need to micromanage you
You should assume people on other teams are as excellent at their jobs as you are at yours. By having a transparent and accountable culture, there is nowhere for poor performers to coast. I will make sure everyone carries their fair share of the load
Create a reputation where people deeply trust your words and your judgement
There are so many things in a startup that we can’t control. The easiest thing we can control is how hard we worked. Let’s not fail because we didn’t work hard enough
There isn’t a fixed amount of work that needs to be done each week, there’s always more ways you can help. We want to create a culture of ambition, where every employee is trying to maximize their impact and growth. Motion is looking for heroes
Many companies say “we only care about results, not hours in”. That’s not us. We care about both results AND effort. We have a policy not to hire people who don’t work hard, no matter how brilliant they are. We’ve rejected many great candidates like this even though their output might be extremely high. If we hire them, we’d be setting a ceiling on employee productivity by signaling that anyone who’s more than X productive can work fewer hours, so X is the most we’ll ever get. This goes against our culture of maximizing impact, there is never a ceiling
We make sure the incentives are in place for people to work harder by ensuring their compensation reflects their sacrifices. We also believe one’s capacity to work hard is a muscle that can be developed, like training for a marathon
Ask yourself every week, did you push the company forward as far as you possibly could this week?
If you disagree, you must speak up before the decision is made. It doesn’t count if you thought it but didn’t say it. We will never punish someone for speaking candidly. We care about finding the truth
If the decision turns out to be wrong, we can point to the dissenting opinions and see who has a good track record, instead of chalking it up to “this outcome was unknowable, hindsight is 20/20”
You do not have veto rights over other employees you don’t manage. You can give them advice, but ultimately they decide what to do with that advice and they’re accountable for the outcome
Don’t waste time arguing about things that don’t matter. Ask yourself “What’s the consequence of being wrong?” Just pick something and move on. If it sucks, flip to the opposite and move on again. Place a limit on how long we’re willing to tolerate inaction because of disagreement
For things that matter, don’t leave the conversation until we all understand why we disagreed. Otherwise we miss each other’s insights. After deeply understanding we should 100% commit
Too many people disagree and half-ass commit. When you commit, go all-in
Everyone shares the load on unpleasant work, there are no second-class citizens. If we delegate away the problems to second-class citizens, we’ll forget the problems exist and not be incentivized to fix them
We will never hire employees whose main job is to do the unpleasant work that other people don’t want to do
We won’t be able to attract A-players if we only give them shitty work. And if we attract B-players, more problems will appear. So we need to make everything work with only A-players
We only hire employees to own areas of impactful work that we wish we could do but currently don’t have time for. There’s no work you’re too good for
Every dollar made was because someone in this company fought like hell to earn it for us
Do not view company benefits as a resource for you to extract. Just because a benefit exists doesn’t mean you need to milk it if you don’t need it. We generally don’t have fixed stipends for anything because stipends encourages people to use all of it whether or not they need it
When people think it’s “the company’s money” rather than “my coworkers’ money”, it’s easy to get into extract mode. A major source of discontent in a company is when one group feels like they’re making all the money while another group is spending all the money
If it helps, think of it as my money. Are you comfortable telling me to my face why you needed to expense this? It goes both ways: founders are extremely frugal with company money because we want to be comfortable telling all of you why something needed to be expensed
We pay people well, so act like it. Don’t put unnecessary quality of life stuff on the company, pay for it using all the money we paid you. If you don’t think you’re paid well, ask your manager what you need to do to be paid what you want. They’ll come up with a plan for you
Feel the pain of every dollar of company money that you spend
We want Motion to be the best possible place to work for highly ambitious people. We believe if we don’t adhere to our standards of excellence, we will attract the wrong type of people and make Motion a worse place to work for our ambitious employees
Motion is structured to be the optimal environment for you to work with the most exceptional people, make the most money, and accomplish your greatest achievements