In today’s episode, the owners discuss what we call the foundations and pillars of Infinite Red. You’ll learn why they’re so important to us, and how they've helped us establish our culture.
Connect with the owners on Twitter!
• Todd Werth: @twerth
• Jamon Holmgren: @jamonholmgren
• Gant Laborde: @gantlaborde
Todd Werth: Welcome to Building Infinite Red. My name is Todd Werth and I'm CEO, founder of Infinite Red. Today, we're going to be talking about something we call foundations and pillars, which is a mission statement without all the eye-rolling and the silliness you get at most mission statements. It's basically what makes us, us? What makes our culture, our culture? What is the IR way? We always use IR for Infinite Red. We're going to talk about that. Joining me is Jamon Holmgren-
Jamon Holmgren: Hey, everybody. Nice to be here again.
Todd Werth: ... and Gant Laborde.
Gant Laborde: Hey.
Todd Werth: Let's start off and let's talk a little about what are the foundation and pillars. Jamon, could you give us an overview of what that is?
Jamon Holmgren: Yeah, sure. I think it was about, I would say, two years ago or so. Not quite two years ago. We started talking as an ownership group about coming up with some common short words that really were a framework around the why that we're doing things, how we make these decisions, why we're making these decisions, how we make them. At the time, we do a lot of meetings. We discuss things a lot and we make a lot of decisions together. There were a lot of situations where it felt like, "Well, maybe it's unnecessary. We talked about this stuff all the time," but putting it down in words felt like it was the right move at that time.
Jamon Holmgren: We got together, I think, it was in California at the time we got together and Gant was there. This was, I think, a little bit prior to Gant becoming an owner, but he was still there as an executive. We started discussing like, "Okay, what are the things that really, really, really matter to us?"
Gant Laborde: I'll say that one of the things that was key is we were growing as a company. As we're growing as a company, it's hard to get that IR way into everybody's mindsets. One of the things we've decided that we need to do is we needed to show people what we valued. Because as long as people know where the value is, then we can trust them to do things without us absolutely observing every piece of it. It put the challenge back on us. People say, "Well, what is the thing that you value?" and that became the thing that we had to figure out for the foundation and pillars.
Todd Werth: It also gives the team as well as us an opportunity to look for things where we're not living up to our values and to mention in a very specific way. For example, we might do something and one of the team members might be like, "You're not exhibiting this particular pillar. That actually happens. It gives them something to say and then you say, "Yeah, yeah, you're right. I'm sorry," and then you redo it. That's powerful. I do want to say that I'm the kind of person who worked for, say, a big company and stuff and I passed the mission statement on the wall and whatever the mission statement said, it was either incredibly eye-roll inducing or was exactly the opposite.
Todd Werth: For instance, if you work for a company where they really didn't care about quality, I guarantee you their mission statement said something about quality being number one, which meant it was completely the opposite. I resisted doing any kind of mission statement just because as an employee, the way I reacted to it, I didn't want that to happen. I do feel after all the discussions and stuff, what we came up with is an accurate representation of what we already do. There's a few things that were probably a little aspirational and it is an accurate description of what we want to do in the future.
Gant Laborde: That's a really good point because I've worked at those places too. I wonder, those listening, do you have a mission statement that's just on the wall and words only or is it something that people look at or do you have as the values in the foundation and pillars for your company as well? I'm always interested in hearing that because it seems like there's no middle of the ground. Either you have one of those companies where they've identified what's important and that's not what's important to the company or they actually get it right and everybody marches to the beat of the same drum, understanding exactly what the vision of the company is.
Jamon Holmgren: That's a scale too I think you've alluded to, Gant, previously where we can't be everywhere, make every decision as the company grows. This allows people to have an idea of at least the guiding first principles of what we're trying to do here. Now, they're not like super specific. They have evoked more of a feeling and a general sense. We didn't really intend it for it to be extremely specific. It's not a business plan or anything like that. These are values. We broke them into two pieces. We started off like, "Okay, let's just do like a core values type of a thing," and we wrote down a bunch of stuff on like a piece of paper or an easel, started throwing out nouns and adjectives and stuff.
Gant Laborde: Actually, I want to jump in there. That was actually really fun. I thought it was a little weird when we went, but all of us said, "We need to go buy a giant piece of paper." It wasn't like our original thought process.
Jamon Holmgren: Right.
Gant Laborde: That was by far the best thing, all of us staring at this giant easel and paper. We started hitting a stride real fast.
Jamon Holmgren: We did it in person. This was something we felt that was ... We're a remote company. We don't have any problem recording a podcast episode, for example, thousands of miles apart, right, Todd?
Todd Werth: Millions.
Jamon Holmgren: Millions. At the same time, there are some things that you really need to be in the same room. I think actually the very first thing that we did, not that this matters too much, but very first thing we did was actually make the decision, "Yes, Gant is buying in," because that was something we needed. It was hanging over our head, "Is Gant an executive? Is he an incoming owner? How do we handle this situation?" It was unanimous, "Yes, Gant is coming in. This is happening." Then once that was out of the way, then we started really working on this, which meant that Gant got a chance, even though he wasn't necessarily part of the founding owners, he got a chance to weigh in on something extremely near and dear to our heart, the company as a whole.
Jamon Holmgren: Then, we did split it up. As we started going, we started realizing some of these are more important than the others. I shouldn't say it quite that way, but some maybe are more core than others. They're all important, but some are more central core, very specific to who we were and we ended up with three foundations and then we envisioned it like a building and came up with, I guess, it was four pillars then beyond that.
Todd Werth: The difference between the foundation and the pillars is the foundations are never going to change. The pillars, although they're pretty solid, may change and that was the line we drew there. It's funny and we'll talk about this in a little bit. One of the pillars I came up with actually at the beginning, everyone didn't want on there at all. At the end, that is one of the foundations that we got agreed on, which made me very happy.
Jamon Holmgren: It's also, I think, the one that is referenced by the team the most.
Todd Werth: Correct and we'll talk about that in a few minutes, but it's interesting. The other thing we had to do, this wasn't ... There were certain disagreements over the years between the owners on certain aspects of the pillars and foundations. There was disagreements. This was an opportunity after many years to finally agree and make certain stands on where we see the things going in and what actually we do value. There's an old joke, "Don't me the values of your company. Show me your budget and I'll tell you the values of your company." It's super important that this actually represented what we actually did. Otherwise, it would be nothing. It would just be an exercise in futility.
Gant Laborde: Todd had confided that he was very afraid that once we got there and we start to put these things together, that there might be an unmoved mover. There might be this one thing where two people simply cannot agree. That's an absolute real difficulty. As long as it's not spoken, there can't be a real disagreement, but you can't be held accountable either. As soon as it's actually put down, "So let it be written. So let it be done," it gets a little scarier.
Todd Werth: I think that that's true, Gant. I think at first there was that worry.
Jamon Holmgren: Even though Ken obviously left the company and we talked about that in in another episode, even he was really aligned with what we came up with too. In the end, Todd didn't have to bring out his baseball bat. It actually ended up being alignment on pretty fundamental things in a way that was between all four of us that, really, I thought was great. I came away with a lot of positivity from that meeting. It was exhausting. It's difficult because you have to dig deep. You have to really think deeply. These things matter. Not that we couldn't change it down the road, if need be, but if you're working on your house, doing something to your foundation is expensive. You don't want to do that too often. For us, we wanted to get it right. I feel like we really did.
Gant Laborde: Naming things is hard. We started off explaining some concepts and then you get shorter words and more descriptive words and sometimes you combine two ideas or one person argues that that's not nearly as accurate of a word because that includes too much and that's not part of what we are. We actively refined and threw ideas out there. What's really funny is it was a lot of yes and that was happening. That wasn't by design because we were willing to go ahead and stand our ground. As Todd mentioned, he puts something out there and we're like, "Oh, I'm not so sure about that." It not only stayed on the board, it just kept getting more and more inclusive on what the idea of what we wanted was.
Todd Werth: Truthfully, to be honest, I didn't have a baseball bat. It was more of crying, a lot of crying, on my part. Let's not delay anymore. Let's just start going into what our pillars and foundations are. Gant, could you do me a favor, pick a foundation and let's talk about it?
Gant Laborde: I think that one of the ones that we were especially looking at right then was IR controls its destiny, that we're not just sitting there having things happen to us, we're a very proactive group and that we call our shot and we go after it. That's something that's very fundamental to us. That's the one I would call out first.
Jamon Holmgren: I think this goes back if you're following along the actual foundation is IR controls its destiny, IR being Infinite Red. This is a collective Infinite Red. It's not just us owners, but it's the company as a group. I think it goes back to, I guess, our pasts. We had worked at companies where we didn't have a lot of agency or in some, I know and maybe Todd would want to talk about a previous agency where he was reliant on maybe too few sources of clients and bigger whale clients where they had overt influence on what his company could do. There are things ... Even investors, investors then bring in their own level of being able to influence where they think that the company should go.
Jamon Holmgren: To all of us, the idea of having agency and being able to say, "This is where I want the company to go. Hey, we want to do this thing," and to be able to just make the decision and not have to go to someone else and ask permission, so not have to go to some other place and hope that they rule in your favor. Those are just things that weren't all that interesting to us. For us, if we're going to go through the risk and the hard work of building a business, we want also the ability to make decisions and enact change.
Todd Werth: Well said. I don't really have much to add. I do want to emphasize that this also applies to the team.
Gant Laborde: I'll jump in here and say one of our designers that we had hired, she came in and she was like, " You all are going to end up hiring me." It's like that's the best thing that could have happened. Most of the people who are movers and shakers, I tell a lot of people at Infinite Red, "It's a place where you're going to end up where you want to be. It's what you're taking step towards. We're a great place to not hold you back from getting there. You're actually more of a force of holding yourself back or not knowing what it is that you want, but we send people to conferences. We help people with their ideas." I think this is something we encourage and that's foundational.
Todd Werth: I want to clarify that, but we're not elitist. We're not looking to hire the very best people who are fully baked and already know everything. We're very happy with someone slowly going towards a goal as long as they're going towards it.
Jamon Holmgren: This level of agency and determination over your destiny can be scary and it can be something that not everybody particularly wants or enjoys because it also means that there's also a lack of certainty. We're blazing a new trail. We're making decisions. They carry a certain amount of risk and risk means it can backfire. It can come back to us and actually not work out. We've had some things not work out and that's fine. That's just part of the gig. We would rather have the ability to take those leaps and not have someone else holding us back.
Todd Werth: This is the reason franchises are so popular. They're actually a bad deal financially and the people I've known who've had franchise for a long time wish they didn't do it. At the beginning, they tell you what to do and they have a business model and they have everything and it's a very easy way to do a business. A lot of people enjoy the franchises that they've built, so don't get me wrong, but controlling your destiny like Jamon said is also a lot of responsibility.
Jamon Holmgren: A franchise is like the counter, exact opposite of what this pillar means or this foundation, I should say, means. We could never do a franchise because it would just totally violate this foundation.
Todd Werth: Correct. That's a good one. Jamon, which foundation do you want to talk about next?
Jamon Holmgren: Let's talk about significant positive impact. You notice, as we list these out, they're not going to be one word things. We're going to have some, modifiers there, but this one floated around a little bit as we were talking. We want impact. We want some ability to make a little dent in the universe as the cliche, but it wasn't just make a dent in the universe. There's plenty of people who've done that in a negative sense. There are plenty of people who've done that in such a small sense that you'd never know about them. This is significant positive impact.
Gant Laborde: Well, I think that we're in a weird world with software. Right now, I'm sitting in a room by myself staring at a lightbox talking into a wire. The truth of the matter is, the big part about this is that it's going somewhere and it's affecting other people is the reason why we record this podcast. I think it's a big key aspect of what we want to do and what everybody at our company wants to do. We keep hearing that from them. They want to do something and they want it to be important and they want it to help people. That's something that it's not going to happen by accident.
Todd Werth: For some people and maybe some people on our team even, this is not ideal. For example, a lot of startups have very sexy products. They're impressive. When you tell your mother or you tell someone at a dinner party, "It's impressive. You're changing the world as it were," but the truth is if you make truckers lives much better, you're going to have a much bigger impact than optimizing stock exchanges. True, but that may not be true. That's just an example. My point is often when making a positive impact is not doing the sexy thing for sure.
Jamon Holmgren: We have a lot of different ways that we do this too. It's not always the client work that we do. Although client work is what pays the bills and we do have an impact there. I would say that a lot of our significant positive impact happens outside of the client work that we do. There are lots of examples of this. Chain React is a very good example. It's our React Native conference in Portland every July. It impacts not just the developers that attend the conference, but also the speakers that come and give talks and a lot of them are first time speakers or giving them an opportunity to raise their profile.
Jamon Holmgren: There are videos that we're putting out on our YouTube channel from Chain React that help influence the conversation around React Native and change the industry hopefully for the better. Beyond Chain React, we have open source that has impacted thousands and thousands of people. I actually remember with one of my early open source projects, the one that both Gant and Todd got to know me when they found out about it, a ProMotion. I remember one time I went to a conference and there was a guy. I was hanging out with a guy and he then heard my talk the next day and he came up to me and said, "Oh, I didn't know last night that you had created ProMotion."
Jamon Holmgren: The library actually gave me the confidence to continue and actually learn to build iOS apps. I was ready to give up before then. This was something I didn't even know the impact that I had. It was a positive impact. Like Gant said, the amazingness of software, it allows it to be significant because it scales so amazingly. You have a way to distribute this throughout the world. We have people in many, many countries that are using our open source and reading our blog posts and watching our videos all across the globe now with some efforts that Gant's doing. It's starting to impact in other parts of tech that we hadn't even been involved with before.
Jamon Holmgren: These are all examples of situations where we're having a positive impact on people's lives, a lot of developers specifically. That's how we're oriented right now, but we have other ways too. Remote work is a good example. People, I heard the other day, for example, InVision is internally using a system that we invented on this podcast in season one called our hand queuing system, our finger queuing system that allows for us to take turns and know who's going to go next on a video conference call. InVision the company uses it internally now and they read about it on a blogpost that I wrote. These are the types of impacts that we like seeing.
Gant Laborde: I think you hit the nail on the head with our Chain React Conference because that's one where we constantly have people coming up to us in person afterward and they talk about how welcome they felt. They talk about how comfortable they felt. One of the things that Jamon does at the very beginning of Chain React is he announces the code of conduct to everybody and he makes sure everybody has read it and make sure everything is cool because that's the positive part. We want everybody who ... You could choose a lot of different professions. You could choose a profession solely based on money. You could choose one on ease.
Gant Laborde: A big part of what really works out here is that we want people to be nice. We want people to be friendly and that's what the positive part of it. I think that's actually a pretty good transition to our third foundation because it's at the core of all of these. Definitely, Todd, if you could go ahead and bring that one up?
Todd Werth: Yeah, absolutely. I do want to interject one thing really quick. We're not saints. We're a for-profit company. We're not a nonprofit. We do try to maximize our profit. We want to give our team a good standard of living. We want to give ourselves a good standard of living and we are trying to collect as much capital as possible because then we can work on more and more interesting projects. I just wanted to bring that out. I don't want to get the idea that-
Gant Laborde: Back in there though, there's a spot where that stops and I think that that's what the foundation stops that up. If we wanted to get a ton of money, we could get investors and just get a lot of investments left and right, but then, we wouldn't have control over our destiny anymore. We could take money from the predatory businesses out there. A lot of tech companies do, but then you won't have a significant positive impact.
Todd Werth: We could take advantage of our team and we can do a lot of things. It does limit that in. I would say I hope we're building an ethical, honorable capitalist company who does make profit, but I just wanted to not make us out to be saints. That's all.
Gant Laborde: Not you, Todd, of course.
Todd Werth: Not me.
Gant Laborde: Jamon and I, we're already there.
Jamon Holmgren: You mean St. Jamon and St. Gant?
Todd Werth: Simply by tolerating me, you both are saints. My wife tells me all the time.
Gant Laborde: That's our first miracle.
Todd Werth: It does dovetail well into the next and last foundation. It's also the one that I brought up at first and that everyone pooh-poohed, and then after the discussion that day, it ended up being not only a pillar, we became a foundation. That one is one word. It's the only one word we have, and it's bonitas. This is a Latin word. There really isn't an English word for this. You could translate it to kindness, but it's not really kindness. Kindness, friendliness, benevolence, blamelessness, this kind of stuff. It grabbed a hold of most and I think it most represents our culture. Kindness is not exactly right. It's really hard to explain. We try to do it in our day-to-day interactions with our clients, and internally. We push bonitas out into our conference, and I think a lot of people see that. It's strong kindness, right?
Jamon Holmgren: Yeah, I think benevolence actually is probably a little closer to it where it's the application of kindness with strength. We have the ability to impact people, we know that and we have the ability to impact people in a negative way or a positive way. Bonitas is taking responsibility for that and saying, "We're going to use this in a kind and benevolent way," but also in a way that as people look at it, it's like, "Yeah, that's a good way." It's a very hard word to define in English, which is why we use the bonitas. Is that Latin you said?
Gant Laborde: Latin.
Todd Werth: Yes, Latin.
Gant Laborde: One of the other definitions that you'll see under bonitas is blamelessness. I think that leans into what Jamon was saying earlier. It's about being strong. It's about owning up. It's about not pushing your problems out on other people. This all is essential in order to run a successful and trusting remote company because I saw on Twitter the other day they are making office toilets tilted at angles now so that people can't like go in there and get on their cellphones anymore.
Jamon Holmgren: Oh, man.
Gant Laborde: I just remember just this whole world out there of people who don't trust each other but have to work together and it's totally not where we want to be.
Todd Werth: Man, evil is so creative. I love it. That's so ridiculous.
Gant Laborde: It is.
Todd Werth: The responsibility goes along with that. Let me give you an example. If you have a coach, doesn't matter what sport you're doing and you have a coach, their job is to help you improve. That's literally what a coach does. If a coach always tells you how wonderful you're doing, they don't care about you. That's being nice.
Gant Laborde: True.
Todd Werth: That is not having your best interests at heart. A coach's job is to help you find the next thing to work on. Now, you can be a pretty big jerk in that situation if you do and that would not be bonitas. For example, we try to set up a culture where people, they don't feel threatened by bringing up things they need help on. The blamelessness too isn't there. I've been in companies where we have a 45-minute meeting and it's all about who to blame. It's like I used to just say, "Hey, blame me. Now, can we work on getting it fixed? Let's take responsibility. Something went wrong. Let's work on it." Through the working on it, people who were to blame are going to learn lessons from that as we've tried to work through it as a team. Blaming others to avoid work is not really acceptable here.
Jamon Holmgren: I think that really goes into one of our pillars. We're beyond the foundations now, those three. Just to recap, Infinite Red controls its destiny, significant positive impact and bonitas. What we were just talking about there with regard to bonitas goes into the high-personal support which is one of our four pillars. High-personal support is the manifestation and application of that bonitas. We care. We really do care about our employees, about our team members. We want to provide not just high support in their job, just like, "Okay, you need help with your job, so I'm going to help you out," although that's a big part of it, but also having high-personal support.
Jamon Holmgren: There might be a situation, someones pet is not feeling well, or they're just having a little bit of a rough week or something like that. Maybe their stress level from something personal is pushing their stress level to work high. We try to do things that give them the support and understanding that they need. Because we understand that they're whole people. They're not just who we see at work, but they lead lives beyond that. Maybe someone just needs more sleep. That's an aspect. When I don't get enough sleep, I get a little grouchy. I'm human, and we try to understand that. We're not perfect about it, but this is a pillar. This is something we try and strive for.
Gant Laborde: That's something I found. I'll just say it is absolutely the core of how we do things every day. You run into this a lot with software or very scientifically minded work and people forget that you need to do a little bit of soft skills. I've seen Jamon come in and see somebody who's like ... Do you remember that Saturday Night Live episode where the guy who fixes computers, he's like "Move," and he would just push people out the way and fix their computer? When you get too scientific, you can start to lose your humanity and that's something that we come back and we hold people accountable and said, "I know you give this person those answers already, but it's okay to give it to them twice to give them that high-personal support. Maybe they didn't hear it the first time."
Gant Laborde: Jamon, you actually do a great job of that here. One of the other things I want to let everybody know is that you message everybody and ask them what their stress levels are at consistently so that way we can get early indicators on whether somebody needs some high-personal support and I'll say another thing is I saw Todd earlier today talk to a team member who had reached out and said they're having trouble with a particular thing and Todd volunteered a plenty of his time to go and help that person. It's really a nice place to work.
Jamon Holmgren: Whenever I tell developers this, they're like, "Oh, you could write a Slack bot for that." I'm like, "Yeah, okay. I think you missed the point here. Yes, I could write a Slack bot to direct message every person and ask what their stress level is, but it's not that hard to copy and paste or even just write it out for every person in the company at the size we're at." Some people will just tell me like zero to 10 and that's what I asked them and some people will just tell me, "Oh, I'm at a three," and I know that their baseline is a three. They just never really go below a three. "Okay, cool. Well we'll keep an eye on it," or sometimes it's a seven and their normal is to two.
Jamon Holmgren: "This is a little bit of an issue. We need to talk. What's driving that? Is there anything I can do to help? Is there anything anybody else can do?" Part of it is just being a remote company. You don't really pick up on the body cues and things like that, but I think it goes beyond being a remote company. I think even if you're not a remote company, you should be asking people this. I don't know how common it is. It doesn't seem like it's super common.
Todd Werth: I do want to say this also applies to things that people are doing that are less than ideal. For example, one person is saying something. Another person is getting irritated by that person. They may have a perfectly valid reason they get irritated by it and they get snippy with that person. That's a situation where I might say, "Look, I completely understand why you did that. I could see how that could be irritating, but what we're not going to do is be irritated of that person, ignore them or just go off and rant about it to someone else." Sometimes, ranting is fine, like, it gets off your chest.
Todd Werth: If people go out to drinks, I hope they're spending half the time making fun of me. That's what I would do. It's a healthy outlet as long as it doesn't get ridiculous, but the high-personal support and the bonitas for that is this person doing something is irritating you. No one here wants to irritate other people. We don't have those kind of people. We don't hire those kind of people. If we do accidentally hire those kind of people, we get rid of those kinds of people. By you just getting irritated or maybe badmouthing them behind the back or whatever, you're not giving them any support. It's not easy, but we need to let that person know what they were doing literally is irritating and help them through that.
Todd Werth: If someone's not comfortable doing that, well, that's my job. They can tell me and I can help them. Gant is really good at this by the way. He can come in and say something pretty negative about something they're doing and make you not feel defensive about it. He's much better at that than me.
Jamon Holmgren: Yeah, he is. He's a lot better than me too. A really good example of this was one of our senior developers messaged me yesterday about something I had posted in our general engineering channel. I had just made a comment about how our GitHub repositories were inconsistently named and what I said was, "Can we use a reasonable naming standard going forward?" He private messaged me very nicely and he said, "I think they were probably reasonable to the person creating them at the time. Probably, wouldn't want to make that assumption, that we were just being unreasonable," and he was totally right. I apologized. I edited the message and changed it to, "Let's use a standard. Let's just use a standard, right?" and we didn't have one.
Jamon Holmgren: Of course, the next question is, what's the standard? I had to go do some work and create a standard, but then we were better off because of it, but he said it in such a way that it was not at all offensive to me, but it also got the message across that what I had said was maybe just a little irritating.
Todd Werth: What Jamon just described there which is fantastic, the only way that works is if people are comfortable enough doing that and they feel that they can be vulnerable, especially coming to one of the owners and we have a process. If they are uncomfortable coming to the owner that did it, they should go to the other owners and then that owner will break it to that owner, especially-
Jamon Holmgren: That's a pretty big deal.
Todd Werth: ... if something that might trigger that person. Everyone has triggers. We try to learn people's triggers and we try to avoid them.
Gant Laborde: A big part of this is scalability and that that has to be embedded in trust because they say, "One hour of planning saves you three times that an execution." It might seem to people that, "Oh, talking about people's feelings can slow down a company," not as much as when everybody gets upset, but they don't tell anybody. Then, they're all just sitting around doing nothing. What's great about the example you just had, Jamon, was someone who was able to reach out, fix the situation and that little bit of time got everybody on the right track, and then, you came up with that standard, you started researching it.
Gant Laborde: I've seen companies where the problem is a person won't go back and edit. A person won't ... They'll stand their ground emotionally. They'll feel attacked emotionally or other people who normally, "This would've just gone fine." The next thing you know, that meeting is happening for three hours on how to have a basic conversation and no one's looked up a standard. What's really funny about it is by being very mindful of each person and by holding each other accountable, this really helps out. I think that ties into the fact that we're looking at that longer term picture anyway because it does feel like a little bit of extra, but another one of our pillars is a long-term viewpoint and that comes back to IR controls its destiny, but it's the embodiment of that.
Gant Laborde: One of the things that we happily call each other out on if somebody has a short-term opinion of something, we try to say, "What's the long-term viewpoint of that? How does this actually play out?" A lot of the plans that we make, we ask that question a little bit more now. That's why I'm really happy that's one of our pillars.
Jamon Holmgren: That was smooth transition there, Gant. I was pretty impressed.
Todd Werth: I like it. I almost believed it.
Gant Laborde: High-personal support, Todd.
Jamon Holmgren: This particular pillar also informs how we make decisions. An example of this, someone might come to us and say, "Hey, I'm not really sure how I fit into the vision for Infinite Red," for example. We try to put that into place. That's something we really care about, making sure everybody understands how they fit into the vision. One of the things that's important for them to realize that we are taking a long-term viewpoint. We're not in this to build this to a certain level and then exit. Our exit strategy is, well, very long term. I'll just say that.
Todd Werth: Death.
Jamon Holmgren: Death, right. We're not going to make decisions that benefit a particular short-term goal. It's going to be something that fits into a long-term goal. Some things can be short term like, "Hey, we need to move quickly in order to make this thing happen, but they're always in the context of a much longer, longer timeframe. You see this happening with things like how we've moved into React Native and built up a community there and become a part of the community. This was part of a vision that we had when we founded the company and we've been executing on that ever since and it's worked. It's been a big core piece of who we are, but four years, that's nothing. That's no big deal. We're going to continue doing this for quite a while.
Gant Laborde: I see one of the things that I've always heard and I really appreciate is, "Celebrate all victories," and with a long-term viewpoint, a step in the right direction is just as celebrated. I think that this takes the pressure off a little bit because if you've got one quarter in order to go ahead and execute an entire plan, I could tell you I came to a plan with the owners about, I want to say, a year ago and it's a multiphase plan. It was a really, really long plan. We're just starting a stage four of five. What's really great about that is I was able to do that because it's okay to have a really long-term viewpoint of this thing. Otherwise, people have to turn around and think about everything like shareholders and try to like manufacture and game benefits which is weird.
Jamon Holmgren: I think the biggest reason that we need this pillar though is because we have a long ways to wait until Todd grows up.
Todd Werth: Fact.
Gant Laborde: That is true.
Todd Werth: That was our long-term viewpoint. We have two pillars left there, creative collaboration and pioneering spirit. Let's knock a quick one out really quick. Who wants to take pioneering spirit?
Jamon Holmgren: I can take this one. I think when we were discussing this, we were down to, I think we had six at that time and it was feeling like we were just about done, but I kept having this little thing in the back of my mind like, "There's something missing here of our pillars." I really feel like we nailed it, but there was just something that it didn't really describe yet some of the actions that we had taken.
Todd Werth: This was actually slipped in at the very end. We almost forgot this one, but it's totally true about us.
Jamon Holmgren: Totally. We are going to talk about creative collaboration which is the previous one. I want to put that into context there because these ones were already there. Then, I think it was Ken who said being a pioneer or pioneering and so we came up with pioneering spirit which really fit, but that was what I was trying to get out of my brain. It was floating around in my brain that since before we were a full team, we were really focused on forging new ground, moving into cutting edge technology, cutting edge areas, being remote as one of the first remote companies or at least certainly part of the early trend in industry, being able to not just follow some predefined path, this goes back to our controlling our destiny.
Jamon Holmgren: Definitely, I love new technology. I love learning new things. I love sharing new things, blazing a trail for other people. Those are all things that were really important to us. This idea of pioneering spirit really spoke to me.
Gant Laborde: Pioneering is not a word that we throw around very often and that's the problem is there's not many words that mean that. We had a lot of trouble finding out how to mention what it is that we do in a word that really captures it. That was one right at the end, I think, talking about pioneering something, just going after it. Just not knowing what's there and being okay with that and being willing to go in and document it and identify it and bring that stuff back, that's what we were trying to capture.
Jamon Holmgren: I kept trying to say trailblazing, but they all thought I was talking about the NBA team and wanted me to shut up about basketball.
Gant Laborde: Jamon likes to throw in a lot of sports ball analogies.
Jamon Holmgren: I'll say, I'm just going to punt on this one.
Gant Laborde: Is that when the other team catches the ball?
Todd Werth: It's when the hockey team hits the puck into the punt, from the Latin word punt.
Gant Laborde: Meaning to kick.
Todd Werth: That's right. I think they use a bat.
Gant Laborde: Probably.
Jamon Holmgren: Why would they use an animal? I don't understand that.
Gant Laborde: It has to be some kind of mammal, I think.
Todd Werth: I think it's a requirement of the league.
Jamon Holmgren: According to Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes, bats are bugs, so-
Todd Werth: Well, the great philosopher Calvin has rarely been wrong.
Jamon Holmgren: It's true.
Gant Laborde: Well, now that we all know about quidditch, I think the pioneering spirit, it was something that showed up to ... I think that was the bow on top for us.
Todd Werth: Pioneering spirit is risky. It's something that we're going to do regardless if we said it or thought about it. It's just kind of in our DNA.
Jamon Holmgren: I'd get pretty bored if we didn't have that. I think it's important that we're all engaged in this endeavor. We don't get bored.
Todd Werth: The last one is creative collaboration. I'll go ahead and start this one off. This one actually is important. It's simple. We want to have high collaboration between our team. We want to have high collaboration between leadership and the team. We want to have a high collaboration with our clients and high collaboration with the community in general. That's pretty straightforward. Creative just means that we favor creativity. We're not favoring other things above that. It's not that we don't do other things. A good example is quality. You'll see nowhere in our pillars and foundations quality. It doesn't mean we don't strive for good quality, but it's not going to push out something else.
Todd Werth: For instance, let's say we want a designer. We can hire the best designer in the world, but this person is a complete jerk and doesn't exhibit any of the IR way. We wouldn't do it. We're not placing quality above the other things for example. The creative collaboration, we do favor creativity and I think whether you're a designer, you're a developer, you're a maker of any sort, it's a creative job. Programming and developing has a lot less to do with math and a lot more to do with art than most people understand.
Todd Werth: Collaboration was a significant decision of us because it would alienate some people we might hire who really want to just be heads down. They want to go often to a corner. They want to work on some for a month. They don't want to collaborate. Just choosing that, yes, this actually is a pillar for us, is excluding an entire group of people who might fit everything else.
Gant Laborde: One of the things about this is those two words together and it sounds, I guess, to the first time someone hears it like we're going for the alliteration or it sounds cute, but I want to say creative collaboration comes out of experience. We have allowed people to be creative without collaborating. That has been an entire endeavor that we've learned our lessons from. We've had people be collaborative, but just collaborating on the same thing. One of the best parts about this and what we've taken from our experience of the company and the company was already existing, running, doing well is that we can't have one of those without the other. That's something that we strive to, that those two pieces go together.
Gant Laborde: It sounds weird because, well, you could have a person go off on their own and come back and report, but that's really alien for us and it actually doesn't work as well as it might work for, I don't know, some data science job.
Jamon Holmgren: It definitely doesn't work very well. We've had some interesting things come out of R&D projects where people have gone away and done it on their own, but generally speaking, what happens is they suffer in terms of adoption. They tend to miss the mark in ways where that mirror, the blind spots of the person who went away into their cave and tried to come up with the silver bullet and that can include us too. If I went away and tried to build something that I thought was going to be the most amazing thing, I'm going to have a hard time getting it adopted because I'll usually miss the mark. I just implemented for example Notion which is an app, a note-taking app.
Jamon Holmgren: We did it in a way that was like, "Let's start with an experiment. Here's an idea of a way to creatively make us actually a little more collaborative as was the aim, but let's do it in, let's do it in a way that brings in everybody and lets people share their ideas of how to organize things, how to share progress." One of our developers, Robin, actually created a new channel that posts ... I think she set it up to post notifications from a particular note in Notion because that was a very highly ... There's a lot of change happening to that note.
Jamon Holmgren: There were there different ideas that came around and the way that we evaluate those is like, "Let's run it for a month and then let's go back and say, 'How did it work?'" If it worked well, it's going to be obvious. If it didn't work well, it's going to be obvious. It's going to be obvious to everybody. You don't have to champion it all the way through like, "I'm going to be that person who's going to make this happen here at Infinite Red." No, it becomes obvious, but let's have an openness to discovery and that pioneering and that creativity, but then do it in a way that includes other people.
Jamon Holmgren: I just feel like going off and being creative on your own is almost always doomed to failure or at least missing the mark in a way that is very, very critical. I remember fighting for the two words together because I really felt like, because I think we had creativity on the board and creativity is really, really important to us, but I just kept remembering those situations where it was one person being creative and it doesn't sit right and it's not really who we are. Just to recap, the pillars are high-personal support, long-term viewpoint, creative collaboration and pioneering spirit. Those are the four. They're seven altogether, three of the foundation and four pillars.
Jamon Holmgren: What was very impressive to me is that we reviewed them, I think it was a year later. We still felt very, very like unified on them. I felt like they were pretty much complete in terms of what we would consider a foundation and pillar. Of course, we build on those and flesh out the rest of the house that way, but they've withstood the test of time and even an owner leaving, which is very important. I'm very happy with what we came up with there and then we introduced them to the team. Like Todd said earlier, the team has sometimes told us, "Hey, you need to live up to this pillar or this foundation."
Todd Werth: It happens a lot.
Jamon Holmgren: It's really important that they'd be able to do that. Then, we can do the same to them. We can say, "These are the things that we expect from you."
Gant Laborde: One of the things I think that's really great about this is because before it was written, we were held accountable or we were holding people accountable to things that it's sometimes it's people's first time hearing it. Like Todd mentioned earlier, we care about quality as long as quality fits into our foundation and pillars. We care about money as how it fits in there. We care about a lot of things. Just one of the problems is when you don't put these things out there, each person has their own internal interpretation of exactly what that means. That's not a company that's a group of people trying to get the same answer, but not being told.
Todd Werth: I was pretty shocked actually, how well the team took to it and how much they bring it up.
Jamon Holmgren: Hit us up on Twitter if you have any thoughts about that. Gant's is @GantLaborde, mine is @jamonholmgren and Todd's is @twerth. Let us know what you think about these foundations and pillars. We'd love to discuss them more.