Why You Need Core Values Before You Scale

Desiree: Hey everybody, Desiree Echevarria here. I am once again joined by Steli Efti, founder and CEO of Close. Steli, how are you doing today? 

Steli: Pretty good. How about you? 

Desiree: Pretty good. Steli, have you ever heard of Costco? Yes. The supermarket chain that sells gargantuan portions of food and things. Costco has one core value. It's: Do the right thing. And that means doing the right thing for your employees, your, your customers, stuff like that. Part of that is providing super low prices, bringing value to the community. Another thing about Costco is that it's famous for its food court. And the best value meal of all time, the Costco hot dog and soda combo. $1.50. The price has not changed since 1985. 40 years almost. For $1.50—six quarters—you can walk in off the street, get a quarter pound all beef hot dog, a fountain soda of your choice. Probably refills. I don't think anyone's policing the soda machine. And this is something they've become famous for. Their brand is associated with this promo, this value.

Desiree: A few years back, the then-CEO of Costco figured out that they were losing just a huge amount of money on this hot dog. The hot dog, I mean, it's a loss leader. They're hemorrhaging money. People love the hot dog too much. And he said, I'm feeling the pressure of this one loss leader item. So he went to the founder of Costco and he said, can we please raise the price of this hot dog? We're bleeding here. And the founder of Costco, Jim Senegal, pulled him aside and said, quote, If you raise the price of that hot dog, I will effing kill you. Exact quote from the CEO that he said this to. 

Desiree: And to me, Steli, that is a story of a man who sticks to his core values if you raise the hot dog. “I'll kill you. Figure it out,” is what he said so today, we're going to talk about core values why it's important to stick to them what it means to your company. And this is why Costco is the number three retailer in the United States, due in no small part, I'm sure, to the $1.50 hot dog and soda combo. But first let's define what are core values? What am I even talking about? What's a core value? 

Steli: Well, there's probably many ways to describe this accurately, but what comes to my mind is what it says, right? You are spelling it out. What do we value as a group or as a company? What is important to us and what do we prioritize, right? It's what we value, it’s what we prioritize. Obviously. Most people at most companies value many, many, many things, right. And ideally we'd like to value all the valuable things, all the positives that we can come up. But our core values are the things we value the most above other things, I think is the really core point here.

Desiree: So why bother creating core values if you're a founder? You're a startup founder, there's probably a million other things you can focus on tactically. Why should they prioritize creating core values?

Steli: You should do it from day one. This is the type of thing that I've evolved on with my first couple of startups. I thought values and culture are sort of like fluffy concepts for idiots. They come out of business school. But in the real world, we just focus on customer acquisition. We focus on success. And we don't bother sitting around and thinking about how to articulate our core values in our company culture. And I've had a number of failures and a number of successes, but ultimately I realized that your core values is really sort of the operating system of the business. It will help you attract the right kind of people. It will help orient everybody around the company in one direction. Ideally, it will give people a compass, a way to make difficult decisions without having to go up the chain every time and ask you or some of the other founders. And even more importantly, ideally, it's going to help people make decisions that all align in the same direction, which is where you get maximum momentum and the best possible sort of end result versus when you have, you know, a number of people and they all value or prioritize values completely differently. You get a mishmash that's undifferentiated, where one person is pulling to the left while the next person is pulling to the right and everybody's working really hard and there's no momentum of movement. 

Steli: So in the Costco example that you just shared, you have whoever that was, some executive who was valuing, you know, margins or making profit or not losing as much money, and that person saw the numbers on the hot dog deal and was like, “Oh my God, we're losing so much money. What is most important to me is that there's no loss, that there's nothing we sell or do that costs us more than we make in return.” So that person who would have optimized for that, would have easily said, “Well, let's raise the price, let's double the price of the hot dog, right? Inflation has been going up like crazy over many, many years. We've never changed the price. It's a reasonable thing to do.” The 1 hot dog or whatever it is, $1.50, I don't remember, is now the $5 hot dog, right? Or the $3 hot dog or whatever. 

Steli: Now, the founder of Costco, his value was: “Do the right thing.” And he believes in giving people this loss leading product—this thing that doesn't matter if it makes money or not making money. Costco is not a hot dog company; the hot dog is not really where we're going to succeed or fail. But what we're saying is if you come here, we're going to give you at least one meal at a price that's unbeatable. And then while you're here, we'll give you the ability to buy all the groceries and all the things that you need for your family in the best possible way. It's sort of a symbol for how affordable everything will be here that we nurture you and take care of you—and if you don't have time to go for lunch and go shopping you can do both things here. Like I am just spitballing but this is sort of what I would try, would I imagine going on here. Because I'm not a Costco customer. 

Desiree: It definitely is like a brand affinity thing too. Like that becomes—it does create a feeling, a reaction. They feel a different way about Costco than they do about, you know, the other grocery stores and it doesn't matter that they're bleeding from the hot dog sales because they are the number three retailer behind Walmart and Amazon, which will jack up prices at the drop of a hat. There's not that same affinity. 

Steli: So for the founder, the core value was doing the right thing. And in this case, the right thing is to be offering people sort of an unbeatable meal, right? And always maybe also being consistent in that as the world keeps changing all the prices, there's one thing you can count on. It's a Costco hot dog or something. Right. So the founder values something differently than that executive. And the founder saying, I will, you know, kill you if you change the price of the hotdog is the founder saying, I value this core value at this company higher than your life, right? Like you cannot coexist. You cannot kill the value of Costco and still be alive in this company, right?

Steli: I'm sure he spoke metaphorically. He didn't really mean that he would shoot him and kill him. So. If he had said: Oh, you know, I get that we're losing some money and not losing money is important also to me, maybe we should raise prices. But then again, there's this other value of doing the right thing. What do you think we should do? Maybe we should ask other executives what to do. Maybe we just survey all the managers. Maybe we think about like how to… then again… What the founder would have displayed and demonstrated is we're not quite sure what the most important value here is. I don't know either what the most important value is. And I'm the founder, right? 

Steli: But by saying, I'm going to murder you. If you change this, he just underlined that: Oh, I'm crystal clear what the core value is. And you better get crystal clear very fast, or you don't have a future in this business. Now that sends a signal beyond just that person. Obviously we are talking about this however, many months or years later. Many other people talk about this. I'm sure at Costco, it became folklore. Everybody was selling the story. And what did he do? It reinforced the core value. And now, you know, anytime some manager sees some little thing that is not perfectly getting the best margins, what are they going to remember? Right. They're going to be like, wait a second, is changing the margin here or increasing the price, the right thing to do or not. Right. Um, so I think. When you're not clear on your values, multiple people will have different values and the same person can have different values at different times. That's one of the tricky realities is that we think we're sort of some sort of a constant entity, even as humans, but we're very wishy-washy and unclear ourselves.

Steli: Usually what we value, we're very swayed by public opinion, by external circumstances, by other people's influence, right? You talk to investor A, and all of a sudden, oh my God, we need to work on our margins. And then as a founder, you talk to investor B and that person tells you who cares about margins. You need to scale, you need to spend a hundred million to grow, grow, grow at any cost necessary. And all of a sudden the founder will switch that tune. And now they care about something totally different. So the reason why you need to have clarity on what your values are. You personally, as well as you as a business, is that it will help everybody in the company align, move with the same direction and know how to make tricky decisions when there's multiple things that all seem important, but you can only do one, or you have to prioritize one over others.

Desiree: Can we talk about some examples of core values. Like Close has core values. And so I want to ask you, what are Close’s core values? How did you come to that decision? Because what should be a core value? Innovation? Is that too vague? Or should it be action oriented? I've heard multiple schools of thoughts, uh, but curious about your take on that. 

Steli: Yeah, I mean, this is one of those exercises, just like a vision statement or a mission statement that are so important, but almost always heartbreakingly difficult to do because, um, you want to express something that hopefully is very long term, it's very big, it's very energizing. It's sort of like describing, with a vision statement, the future you want to create while still making it concrete. So it's not so fluffy that it’s meaningless. The same thing applies to some degree about the values. You can't just say we want to be good people, do nice things, innovate, um, and be known around the world for innovation, speed, this, that, and the other one thing. That a good expressed value has is ideally it expresses—or not ideally, like mandatorily—it expresses the truth. It expresses something that is easy to point to as evidence in day-to-day decision making, right? You go and say, you know, “do the right thing” is our core value. That very same day, there must be a couple of situations where everybody can go: Oh, this is where we have acted out this value, these are examples. If you state a value and it's hard for people to find examples for how you live up to it, it's probably a wish, right? It's probably something you'd love to be like, but you really are not living, today, up to.

Steli: The next thing is ideally you can express it in a memorable way. So in a way that people will be a catchphrase or something that people will say so often that it's becoming second nature, right? One of our core values and most popular values is: “Build a house you want to live in.” Right? And that is also probably the one value that almost every person that works at Close will immediately be able to, to quote. There's maybe another two that most will be able to say, and there's probably one or two that most people will have a difficult time reciting off top of their head, right? So we've got some more work to do, and things have changed over time. We've added values, we've subtracted values, we reworded them. 

Steli: But “build a house you want to live in” is the strongest value because it encapsulates so many ideas of who we are as a business and how we make decisions. To us, that means we're building this company like: Do unto others, the way you want to be done unto yourself or whatever the saying is, but it's like build something you want to use. So to us, it's like build software the way you want to use it. Sell the way you want to be sold to give support the way you'd like to receive support. Create a kind of place that you like to work for, right? Think and act with long term thinking and with integrity. That's all encapsulated in “build a house you want to live in.” And we have lived up to that value in the strongest way possible. So people feel very passionate about it. They have lots of examples for it. It's sort of very vibrant, very real.

Steli: We had values in the early days that we abandoned over time, right? So one of the great examples where in the early days of like a value that we really liked and that we stole or borrowed for a little bit from Facebook was, you know: “Done is better than perfect.” And that's a value where Facebook said, the big competitor of the big counterexample in the market was Google, where in Google quality code, quality was really important back in the day. And so everything had to be reviewed many, many, many times. They never wanted to break things and they took quality very seriously. But if you take quality very seriously, usually speed is going to be slow, slowed down by that. Facebook said: All right, everybody wants to say we want to move really fast and we want to have perfect quality and never make any mistakes, but that obviously doesn't go together. So we are gonna value speed higher than quality—which means we're okay with breaking things if you fix them quickly and so done is better than perfect. It expresses that idea of moving really fast and shipping really fast and not aiming for perfection, but aiming for course correction for iterations.

Steli: And we used that. We borrowed that value because we liked it and it worked well for us in the early days, because, many times people go: Should we do this or not? Or is it ready to be shipped or not? And then somebody would go, “Done is better than perfect.” And then they're like, all right, well, answers the question and they will do it eventually as we scaled and grew. We were like, well, “done is better than perfect” is not really what we like. It doesn't really fit our ethos anymore. And it's not really who we are. Like at this scale, we don't want to just move quick and break things all the time because what we provide to our customers is sort of mission critical. They run the entire business on Close. So we can't just be breaking things left and right every day. And so we killed that value, right? We took it off the shelf. It had its usefulness for a while, but we outgrew it or we out evolved it.

Steli:  But ideally, a value is expressed well if there's constantly examples for it being enacted, like people making decisions based on the value. And when you see people use those words in interactions, in meetings—like when people on your team using the values as sort of a day-to-day language to express ideas or to make decisions, you're doing pretty well. And when that is completely lacking, you have a list of values and that was a meeting. You had a two hour meeting where everybody brainstormed. What do we want? We want innovation. We want speed. We want security and quality. We want all the nice things we can think of. And then you publish that on a, on a landing page on an about us page. And nobody ever looks at it again. Nobody thinks about it. And certainly nobody's acting based on these values, using them as an operating principle as a compass. That's what most companies do. And that's why values and core values seem like, you know, frivolous and wasteful to most people is because they don't see them being utilized day to day. But the greatest companies have very strong cultures and have very powerful core values that are being used and utilized every day.

Desiree: How do you as the founder make sure that core values become integrated into the company? How are you setting that example? Is that something you're actively trying to do?

Steli: No, so it's not something that I think about in a, in a sort of like, you know, “Oh, what can I do today that would display the core value number three for, to the company. That's not really how it works. I think that what you do is you need to be clear on what are core values. And some of these values that we've spelled out at Close, the reason why I don't have to think about it is because it's second nature. It is what I value in my personal life. It's the way I make all my decisions. So. That's also how I may work at Close. And then other people will point out, this is an example for “build a house you want to live in.” And I go, “Oh yeah, that's true.” But while I was making that decision, I wasn't thinking about that, right? I was just trying to live up to my values every single day in all situations, not just at work or at a specific meeting. Now, what happens is that once in a while I'll see great examples within the company. And that is something that is worth highlighting and encouraging. We do this a fair bit at Close, but I personally can be much better at this, you know, in general, like I could do an even better job at sort of highlighting when somebody lives up to a true value in the company, but I don't.

Steli: The way I work on the culture and the values is that I try to observe what is truly happening and then sort of collect what is changing and maybe every three to six months, I'll sit down and have a really deep conversation about this where maybe with my co-founder, maybe with a senior leadership team, or maybe it was just, you know, the Director of HR and people ops and go, “I'm finding that this is shifting in our culture, or I'm finding that this value is really getting more and more outdated, or I'm finding that this is becoming more important and we need to sort of invest more in clarifying this thing. So it's more about observing how culture is moving within the company and culture is constant. It's a living, breathing thing. It's constantly changing as you add people, as people leave, as the world changes, as people change, things will evolve.

Steli: And so it's about observing what is evolving and is it evolving in a way you want to encourage and highlight and increase, or there's certain negative trends? And then you want to just be careful and in tune with that and realize, wow, we've started really eroding in our core values in this area. Why is that happening? Do we need to fight that? Do we need to re-clarify that? Have we been giving mixed signals—just being aware, observing, and then, once in a while, you step in and you make adjustments, right? Hopefully very rarely do you have to step in and make big, sudden changes in kind of your, your core values as a business if you're doing it right. And that's sort of how I work. At this and think about it. But it's very rare that I’ll be thinking, “This is a core value. Which meeting should I bring this up?” or “How should I tweet more about this? How do I make this more popular within the company?” That's not something that I typically approach that way.

Desiree: I find this is sort of a pattern for the advice that you give in all the episodes we've done in this series is: constantly be paying attention, constantly be evaluating, “Is what I'm doing working?” You gave that advice with how to know when it's time to pivot, like what are the signs—how to get your first, like, 10, 100, 1,000 customers. I was thinking that I was going to get like, Oh, here's a tactical list, and the real advice is just always be listening, always be learning, always be nimble. And it kind of sounds like that's the same thing with core values. Like you always, I don't think I've heard a founder say that before, like always be reflecting on: “Am I sensing shifting winds within the company? And is that a good thing or a bad thing? And should we react to it?” 

Steli: Yeah, I think, kind of the principle that I try to follow is that I'll go very much into the details and then I will zoom out and look at the big picture, go right into the details and zoom out in the big picture. So most founders are comfortable in one or the other. Most leaders are. People either want to be totally in the details. They want to be in the meetings. They want to make the detailed decisions. They want to project manage every little thing. They want to be on the customer calls. They want to be looking at the design team, putting together the mock ops and giving details on everything. They want to either live in the details or they want to live in the lofty sort of big picture, just being in these like high-level strategy meetings and visioning the next 10 years—just thinking very high level, what has to happen, but they're kind of not interested in the details at all. And I find that both models are deeply flawed, right?

Steli: As a leader, if you're only in the details, you're just going to be like, you know, going with the wind left and right. And yes, you might be providing incremental value and have an incremental view of what's going on in this little project and that little project, but you're never far enough to have a perspective that gives you a big picture view. And this is your job. Your job is to keep the big picture in mind to see the whole picture and understand the direction things are going. What is the vision that I want to point and march towards? And conversely, I don't think that people are able to see the big picture just by being far away—as far away from any reality as possible and just like daydreaming, you have to have little data points that, you know, as you walk back now, these dots, you can start connecting a new and different ways to create sort of a vision. And so with the culture question, it's a question of: How do you listen to and how do you pay attention to the conversations people have when you're not in the room?

Steli: How do you pay attention to the conversation that when you talk—like when I talk to new candidates I always ask them that people that interviewed the company what uh, you know What has been standing out interviewing with us versus with other companies? How would you describe Close's culture based on what you've learned so far? What is confusing or what's really interesting? Just hearing people that interview the company, talk about the company, hearing new employees, talk about the company, talking to all the employees and asking them questions like: What is changing? What has been improving? What has been decaying? What are you most worried about? If you're in these detailed conversations, you listen, listen, listen, but then you step out of it and you ask yourself: Overall, what is going on in this company? What is the culture that we are exhibiting these days? What was a hard decision we had to make recently where all the options were terrible and how did we decide and what was the value that drove the decision? I think then you can make good guiding decisions and you can make good adjustments and you can provide direction and narrative and prioritization. You can give people a way to think about what is going on and what is important and what do we need to do and accomplish next. And, um, that doesn't work if you're just high level all the time.

Steli: It doesn't also work if you're just knee-deep in details. So I think what I'm trying to do usually with anything that I'm involved in is sort of go between those two—go really deep in details and then zoom out and try to ask myself the bigger level questions of like, what the hell is going on in this company right now? What the hell is going on in the world? What's my summary of what is happening in our industry right right now, but it's the collection of many little conversations, articles, podcasts, debates, discussions, email threads, Slack threads, and then the zooming out and going: what is all this? Like, what does all this mean? That leads to sort of big aha moments. So you need both, but I don't think you can—I at least am not the kind of person that can just go into an empty room and, you know, and figure everything out sort of just by wishlisting it or by envisioning it with like visionary brain power. I have to sort of like be amongst the day-to-day and then get out of the day-to-day far away, and try to understand what I just experienced and what it means. 

Desiree: So let's say, all right, I'm a founder. I'm a B2B SaaS founder. You've convinced me. I need core values before I do anything else. What are some mistakes I should look out for? Mistakes maybe you've seen other founders do, mistakes you've done when it comes to core values specifically.

Steli: So first of all, think of your core values not like a one time exercise—it is a product just like many other things are products within your company. And you're going to come up with a version one, and then you're going to iterate hopefully forever. So don't psych yourself out that everything you write down now has to be law and can never be changed. It's not like—you're not writing a Bible, right? You're just like writing out today to the best of our knowledge and understanding: What is it we want to value? What is it we truly value the most? That's one. Some founders get too psyched up and then they work on this for way too long, work way too hard for something that will change a year from now anyways. And that is flawed in version one anyways. Right? So just do your best. And have a one hour, two hour meeting, write a bunch of stuff down, pick the ones that seem the best and keep it moving. Right. See how it works, try to use them and then revisit three months, six months down the line. So don't overthink. 

Steli: Then you're going to want to include too many things typically in the list of your values, right? Because we all want too much. We're all too greedy. We all want everything. Oh, I want to have an incredible family. I want to be entrepreneurial and build a huge business. I want to be, you know, adventurous and travel the world, but I also really want to be spiritual. And at home, I want to have a farm and a garden. I want to win ultra marathons and run. I want to write a book and I also want to be more artistic and I want to join more social community ways to give back. We all want everything, but it's not really feasible for most of us to accomplish all this stuff. And that's the same when people write down values is: it's too much stuff. And, and a lot of these values that are contradicting, you know, one is like we value speed and the other one is we value quality above all else. And it's like, Hmm, this is kind of tricky. What do we value more of those two?

Steli: And so usually what you'll find yourself as you write down a list, let's say it's like five or 10 things, and some of them hopefully are like everybody in the room or you and your co founders are like: “Hell yeah, that. That's cool.” Like that evoking emotion. That's very positive. Like, “Yes, we like this. This is strong. This feels good. This feels energizing to us.” And then there'll be some that you feel really are important, but nobody else kind of cares or nobody else can get excited about, right? So you're like, “Oh, this value is really crucial to me.” But your two co-founders are like, “Nah, I don't know if this is really it.” Or the team overall, nobody's sort of latching onto it. Nobody likes it. Everybody's just, and you're not even thinking about people hating it. You're just thinking about values that people instantly forget and feel nothing about, just like have no response to. Even if you feel really passionate about that, you'll have to just be okay with like, you know, putting that on ice, delete it, edit it out of the list. And if you feel so passionate about it, work more with it in three months, six months on the line, bring it up again and go, “Look at all these examples that this value is really what we are!” and see if you can convince people then. 

Steli: Be pragmatic and just pick. I’d rather you have just one value or two or three, then have a list of 15 that then nobody remembers, nobody cares about what's the point of this, right? So, make some difficult choices—which is another thing you'll have to get good at and used to is: you can’t include everything you want. You have to prioritize. So pick a couple of winners and move on and realize you'll keep working on this and you'll keep better at this and you'll keep evolving this, so don't spend too much time and don't have too many fights and arguments and don't hold on too strongly on something that you really love, but nobody else in your team cares about. Be pragmatic. That'd be my advice. Do a version one and then move on and see what happens. 

Desiree: And I'd also add there's a little bit of, be honest with yourself about what you value. Like are you going to be the—maybe you want to have a Costco value, “do the right thing,” because that sounds like it's so feel good and flowery and you might attract a better, more ethical people that way. But really what you value, maybe you're more of a cutthroat company and what you actually value is profit, profit, profit—you know, crushing, grinding, all that stuff. You're going to attract the wrong people and you're just going to create confused mixed messages. It's okay if that's what you want, if your core value is like—Oracle had the core value that was like “We eat our young.” Do you remember?

Steli: I think that was more sort of internal folklore. They would say, “We eat our young,” but I don't think it was a core value on their website. I don't think so. Consistency and clarity is better and overall, more good and more kind to the world and your employees than wishful thinking. So yes, if all you care about is let's make it rain, let's make money, and that's the only thing that's important to you by any means necessary, that is your value. Then live it, live it fully. Being truthful is way more kind than being full of shit, right? Even if you're full of shit with nice slogans, right? But, in reality, you can't live up to any of that. All you care about is like, let's make as much money as possible, but you're pretending we really care about the environment and we want to be socially responsible and climate change—and if that's important to you, then it's important. But if it's not, don't say these things to just seem nice and attract others and be accepted and be loved or be popular because by not living up to it, you're going to create so much pain, so much harm, so much waste, so much frustration that's going to be way harsher in the world than somebody that just stands very clearly for value that says, “I don't care about people. We are here to make money.” And then the people that are with it can join you and you can all enjoy the single-mindedness and the game of making money. And that's fine. That also has to exist in the world, right? 

Desiree: There’s nothing wrong with it. Just be honest. It's a also very telling if you're like a Google, for example, who very famously had the don't be evil core value. And then one day, whoops, it sort of quietly disappeared from their core values roster. But at least they were honest, you know, you got to give them that. 

Steli: Hey, that was a difficult transition. I mean, to have to, uh, and this was the, this was Google's thing, like the engineers that love this value because that was the, we are never going to be Microsoft.Thing that was the stance. Don't be evil, really referred to Microsoft. And they're like, we'll never be like that. No matter how successful and big we get. And then one day the new CEO of the founders goes, this is in the way of all the shit we need to do. To still exist and compete and be big and so we gotta kill it. Oh my god That was I think a very difficult transition to be like, I know everybody here really loves this thing But guess what? We've got to be a little evil right now We're with it Uh, we gotta succeed and so we think we have to maybe do some things or at least not have that many debates about evil, and more debates about winning. And so that probably was very painful and very difficult Was it good or bad or successful or not? I don't know. I'm like not in the day to day operations, but that was a monumental uh value shift that Google had to go through 

Desiree: And also a little bit of the lesson: You have to have clarity because “Don't be evil” can mean a million different things to a million different people. I don't work at Google and I assumed that meant this very altruistic type of value. I didn't know it was specifically about Microsoft. So like the clarity and the specificity, you might say you need that in a core value as well. So it's less open to interpretation. 

Steli: I mean: yes and no. Yes, of course it's good if it's specific. But many of these things, they're not math formulas. Like “Do the right thing” could also mean many different things to many different people. 

Desiree: Right, right. That's true. 

Steli: Do the right thing for whom? For our bottom line? For financial investors? For our customers? For the environment? 

Desiree: You can contort it to whatever you want it to mean. 

Steli: Do the right thing for society, do the right thing for the planet. Like do for whom? So I'm sure they've had to have, at Costco, I would assume people know what that means to the right thing for whom? Probably for the customer, and not for everything else that's possibly something you could do right by. The same thing is true for,“build a house you want to live in.” To me and to the people that work at Close for a number of years, it's crystal clear what that means. There's no confusion about this. Nobody ever was like, what does this mean, Steli? Really, could it mean this or that? It's never been a debate, but I'm sure if you just read the words, “build a house you want to live in,” not everybody on the planet would exactly know what we know and mean by that. But it's important that it is clear for you and your employees and your team and that it's not ambiguous because you yourself are, like—the further these things are away from how you act and live day-to-day, what your actions are, the less valuable it is. And the more confusing it can be because you're confused about it yourself. You write down things that you read somewhere else, but you have no idea what this means in practice and how to embody that value, which is the only thing that really matters. 

Desiree: Great advice as always, Steli. It's almost like you've done this before. But that's actually all the time we have left for today. Next time we're going to talk about another never ending saga for startups, finding product-market fit. Everyone thinks they've achieved product market fit, but have you, have you really? I'll let Steli be the judge of that next time. So stay tuned. Bye everybody.

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