An incomplete list of essays and books on company culture

Your holiday reading, sorted

A lot gets written about a lot of companies, but it’s often hard to figure out exactly what goes on inside the good ones.

To many people, all companies look the same – meetings, laptops, fluorescent lights and bonuses – but there can be intricate structure to discover, if you look for it. Sometimes it’s revealed in a magazine profile of the company founder, other times it’s described directly, either by an interested observer or an ex-employee. Rarely by current employees!

What do the people who make up successful companies think, do, and believe as a group that is different from their competitors? That’s worth reading about, so we (Fergus and Tom) put together the following list of essays, just in time for the holidays.

What have we missed? Let us know in the comments (or elsewhere).

Palantir

Byrne Hobart: Palantir: On Business, Cults, and Politics

Cults are high-variance. You can get superior growth and focused pursuit of a variant thesis. Or you can get fraud that’s ostensibly perpetrated for the greater good. Normally, that would be a large risk, but Palantir is an unusually scrutinized company, with many high-profile and controversial projects, so if you’re looking for dirt you have lots of competition. Just by process of elimination, they seem to embody most of the positive aspects of cultish behavior.

Nabeel S. Qureshi: Reflections on Palantir

The overall ‘vibe’ of the company was more of a messianic cult than a normal software company. But importantly, it seemed that criticism was highly tolerated and welcomed – one person showed me an email chain where an entry-level software engineer was having an open, contentious argument with a Director of the company with the entire company (around a thousand people) cc’d.

Maureen Dowd, Alex Karp Has Money and Power. So What Does He Want?

Mr. Karp said he likes to think of Palantir’s workers as part of an artists’ colony or a family; he doesn’t use the word “staff.” He enjoys interviewing prospective employees personally and prides himself on making hires in under two minutes. (He likes to have a few people around who can talk philosophy and literature with him, in German and French.)

Stripe

The Generalist, Stripe: Thinking Like a Civilization

Though virtually every former and current employee I spoke to seemed, extremely, genuinely thrilled to be working at Stripe, this was a subtle leitmotif: this is a hard place to work. Working nights and weekends seems to be a common expectation and the most frequent complaint on the company’s Glassdoor page is the lack of work/life balance.

Brie Wolfson: What I Miss About Working at Stripe

There’s no way around it:the culture was demanding. I spent many late nights working. I cried more than a few times after feeling like I let a user or a colleague down. My heart would beat out of my chest before heading into an exec review. There were many times that I had to grab a colleague for a calm-down lap around the office after we decided to yet again delay the launch I was sprinting towards to get that final pixel perfect. My imposter syndrome was through the roof. Once, my manager asked me to reconsider the vacation I had been planning because my team needed me. “If you go, who will cover your work?” I looked around at my colleagues who were also regularly working 15-hour days and decided to stay put. I’m proud of that choice. Call me masochistic, but I have to admit that it felt good to care about anything that much. And, to be around people who I know cared that much too.

Patrick McKenzie (@patio11): Two Years at Stripe

Probably the single biggest change in belief I’ve had since joining is that ambition properly harnessed can be an enormously productive force in the world. This is largely informed by working with people who are extremely ambitious and yet well-grounded, both at Stripe and at our customers. There is a great, great difference between “Build a credit card processor? That’s impossible.” and “Build a credit card processor? That probably involves compliance with an enumerable set of regulations and writing a finite number of lines of code.” You want more people in your life who say the second version, probably at most margins.

Jane Street

Byrne Hobart, Understanding Jane Street

Ironically, "thinking carefully" is not the origin story of Jane Street's highly idiosyncratic decision to use the Ocaml language. The origin story is that they had a crufty system built on Excel, and hired a part-time researcher to build some analytical systems. That researcher, Yaron Minsky, chose Ocaml because he liked it, and because he didn't expect anyone else to have to maintain it afterwards. But then he decided to stick around to run a research group that used Ocaml, and a few years later convinced the rest of the company to move to Ocaml, too.

Amazon

Zack Kanter, What is Amazon?

Bezos did not meticulously assemble Amazon into the collection of high-growth businesses that it is today; he ‘merely’ designed Amazon’s algorithm. His first stroke of genius was in making it unbound; his second – the masterstroke – was devising a solution to the bureaucratic complexity that would have otherwise caused it to implode. Instead of being a bureaucratic liability, Amazon’s sprawl would become a massive surface area of customer contact from which Amazon could spawn dozens of revenue streams.

Tim Bray, Working at Amazon

So if you’re the kind of person who, for example, thinks figuring out a better way to automate detecting hot-spots in back-end clusters and re-routing traffic to cool things down is interesting work, then you’ll like working here.

Stevey's Google Platforms Rant

Jeff Bezos is an infamous micro-manager. He micro-manages every single pixel of Amazon's retail site. He hired Larry Tesler, Apple's Chief Scientist and probably the very most famous and respected human-computer interaction expert in the entire world, and then ignored every goddamn thing Larry said for three years until Larry finally -- wisely -- left the company. Larry would do these big usability studies and demonstrate beyond any shred of doubt that nobody can understand that frigging website, but Bezos just couldn't let go of those pixels, all those millions of semantics-packed pixels on the landing page. They were like millions of his own precious children. So they're all still there, and Larry is not.

Anduril

Jeremy Stern, American Vulcan (Palmer Luckey profile)

“And Trae and I were joking that it would be hilarious to put dogs on quadcopters [a type of drone], like skateboarding. And Palmer was like, ’I’ve actually thought a lot about this. Here’s how you want to do it.’ He had a whole framework of how you would do it, the ethical implications of it, how it would work, and the rules of engagement. It was like a 45-minute discussion on dogs on quadcopters that Palmer had already thought about extensively. It was amazing … I mean, he’s just endless.”

Meta / fka Facebook

Facebook: Little Red Book

This sign [Sun Microsystems] came with the building—it just didn’t say Facebook yet. Instead of getting a new one, we flipped it over and painted it. The back still says the name of a different technology company, one that came before us, left as a reminder that if we fail, someday someone might replace us.

Boz, Service Oriented Organization

I call this concept the Service Oriented Organization. When someone [within your company] approaches you with a problem, simply imagine you were the CEO of your own company and that person was a client. You can’t command them to do anything, and you can only help to the degree they want your help. If you give great advice, they will come to you more often.

Dan Rose thread on Bezos and Zuckerberg

They both lived in the future and saw around corners, always thinking years/decades ahead. And at the same time, they were both obsessive over the tiniest product and design details. They could go from 30,000 feet to 3 feet in a split second.

TSMC

Viola Zhou, TSMC’s debacle in the American desert

TSMC’s work culture is notoriously rigorous, even by Taiwanese standards. Former executives have hailed the Confucian culture, which promotes diligence and respect for authority, as well as Taiwan’s strict work ethic as key to the company’s success. Chang, speaking last year about Taiwan’s competitiveness compared to the U.S., said that “if [a machine] breaks down at one in the morning, in the U.S. it will be fixed in the next morning. But in Taiwan, it will be fixed at 2 a.m.” And, he added, the wife of a Taiwanese engineer would “go back to sleep without saying another word.”

Douglas Fairbairn, Oral History of Shang-Yi Chiang

Then I began to learn his secret. If he asked you to give a presentation, he had very high expectation. He expected you will tell him the most important thing in your area and this thing is something he didn't know. That's his expectation. You probably have 30 minutes. So you began to in my-- as an engineer, I was trained when I give a paper, I began to talk about it, "Here is a problem and this is my experiment. This is my approach."

He totally has no patience for this sort of thing. So, you have to go reverse direction. You tell him, "This is the result." Then he says, "Oh." Then he thinks, "My 30 minutes already paid off." Then he will be very patient to listen to you on the details.

It passed all the criteria when the production. But when you have a large volume, we began to have a reliability problem. And we found at the last moment, after we already went to production. And then it was around the Christmas time and we immediately we tried to put the FSG back, so again we worked days and at night, no break for Christmas, no break for New Year, no break for Chinese New Year. All the way and under very high pressure, and we finally get it, it's out, and it's already late, but good. And then later on, we found that TI had exactly the same experience we had. They also used HSQ and was okay with R&D after getting the production they had a problem, exactly what we had. So, we were not alone.

Books

Private Equity (undisclosed hedge fund - probably Tiger Global Management / Chase Coleman)

Working Backwards (Amazon)

Becoming Steve Jobs (Apple)

The Little Kingdom (Apple)

Hard Drive (Microsoft)

Play Nice But Win (Dell)

The Founders (Paypal)

Amp It Up (Frank Slootman & Snowflake)

High Output Management (Intel)

Creativity Inc. (Pixar)

Softwar (Larry Ellison & Oracle)

The Nvidia Way (Nvidia, we haven’t read it yet but well reviewed here)