Company Culture

“When you have that kind of a melting pot of ethnicities, religions, media consumption and kind of socioeconomic status in one place, you learn a lot of them because in school you're mixing up with everyone. That gives me this really different perspective that shows up at work.”

“Kayfabe is a word that comes from professional wrestling and it means a thing that everybody knows is fake and yet everybody acts like is real. And I think it's one of the defining forces within an organization, any organization. So kayfabe in the small is optimism, enthusiasm. The problem that you get is as organizations get larger, this compounds. So then your layer above you does the same, and levels up you can be many orders of magnitude off of the ground truth.”

“By far, I would say the speed and ambition of working at OpenAI are just dramatically more than what I can imagine. And I guess it's kind of an embarrassing thing to say because everyone who's a startup founder thinks like, 'Oh yeah, my startup moves super fast and the talent bar is super high and we're super ambitious.' But I have to say, working in OpenAI just made me reimagine what that even means.”

“I think it's very misguided for leaders to have this notion that their most important role is to keep people happy, is to create this high engagement workforce. What that comes from is winning culture, which means we're set up for success. We've got the structure for success, we have the culture for success, everyone understands their role, they know the impact of their role.”

“The thing that has led me to the places where I do my best work is a feeling of being at home, which is all about trust. Can I walk through and feel like these people are going to have my back, they're going to let me take risks, I'm going to enjoy spending time with them?”

“You got to be fluid because when designers can code and engineers can design, it really becomes, you can't have a lot of structure around that. So you want to build a culture and you want to build an environment or milieu that is really, really flexible, which is uncomfortable for a lot of people.”

“I reward the learning versus the outcome. If we're constantly learning, it's okay if we make bad decisions as long as we learn from them. Even in making a bad decision, we learned something about our customers or business that we can use in another context.”

“One of Calendly's core principles is focus wisely. I think many organizations really struggle to say no, and they're always adding more onto the plate versus taking off. There is something around focusing and the ability to focus to therefore deliver the highest quality of product that you can to your target customers.”