More surprising is the inevitable follow up question: “even the financials?”
Especially the financials! That’s the point of being an owner.
Plus, I never understood that concern. Public companies release their financials to the whole world every 3 months and they’re fine.
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This email transparency policy (adapted from Stripe) was great in the earlier days of KA (once we got above 100 people it got rough):
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For me, similar to what implied in his followup (stripe.com/blog/scaling-e). Say each teammate (well-intentioned & curious) has prob ε of creating drag by wading into low-context situations. Rare when N is small, increasingly common as N grows. (Curious what would say)
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This drag manifests in practice subtly, e.g. people spending an extra 4 hours adding lots of context and caveats to a document before sending it; people being more hesitant to share early and often because they don’t want to deal with onlookers; etc.
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Also FWIW I was very frequently the culprit here!! Drag instigation often looked like someone on the sidelines (*cough* me) asking: “hm, but why are we even doing this in the first place? why not this other thing?” Which, like, OK, you want some of that—but not every thread.
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Agreed w/ all here. I simultaneously feel fondness for our old email transparency practices and deliberately did not bring it into .
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If a primary goal is to define yourself by your culture, fighting a novel, opinionated, philosophical system’s “drags” can be worth it. I wanted this cultural focus at KA and believe it served us well in many ways, especially recruiting.
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At same time, I feel my number one historical failing has been “innovating / focusing too much on practices that don’t need innovation.” Choosing battles is pretty important.
I think email transparency was a good battle choice at KA. Many other battle choices of mine were bad.
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If you ever feel like sharing, I’d certainly be interested to hear which battles you wish you hadn’t fought!
Would love to hear about them too :)
Also wonder if there is a way to get the benefits of transparency (shared information) without the downsides (context drag)
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