How to think start-up in your daily life!

Onfido values

Today, I would like to share with you the 4 core values of ONFIDO, the start-up I work at, and how those values can help you to live your everyday life in an optimistic and positive way.

I am going to explain to you the values and then give you an idea of action that you could take, actions that my friends or I do often. I really feel that they are worth sharing and if more people were doing them, we would be living in a better place.
All core values (as defined by my company) can be easily shifted to a day to day life behaviour.

SUCCEED TOGETHER

Achieve collective impact by being generous with your time, care and expertise. Look for opportunities to work collaboratively, drawing ideas and experience from across the company in order to make great decisions. Be biased towards collaboration.

Succed Together is for me the most important of the values. It represents, for me, the relationship with my friends, my family and other people. Some persons might think about it as a unilateral action, such as people helping you with some tasks or issues. For me it is more than that, it is an exchange, something that both entities gain from it.
I could illustrate this value with a simple definition:

The efforts made by each entity individually to accomplish their own tasks are always bigger than the effort shared between entities in order to accomplish the same list of tasks

E.g: You could cook with your partner or your friends. Instead of each of you to do the job individually, why not to do it all together?
This is something I do quite often with my wife, we cook together, share the tasks and more important share a moment. It is a lot of fun and transforms the task into an easier version of it, less lonely.
I do this, also, with my friends, we are organising a Christmas party home, and everyone will bring something in order to complete the meal, we are even going to cook together in one of our apartment and we also are going to clean after the party 😜.

TAKE PRIDE

Care intensely about company success. Together, we own Onfido — and we should own our contributions in the same way. We should be proud of every piece of code, every piece of content, every interaction with a client, applicant, candidate or investor.

Taking pride, is often seen as being cocky or bragging; people tend to tell you when you do something bad or when you don’t act, so when you do, be proud of it. Coming back to the definition, Care intensely about company success I would make it Care intensely about your success. Try to act and interact in a way that you accept and make you proud and feel good, and in a way that makes the others feel good too.

E.g: I could tell you that I give money to charity, but this is not only what I did. I am proud to say that I took my time and my energy in order to share the information about the Movember Foundation, I spent a month involving my whole company into it, the weekly email made by my colleague Laura, pushing other people to grow the moustache with me (even if I don’t really have one, but all moustache count 😉), pushing challenge of 50 push-up per day during November and finally managing to get £565 for the foundation. And I have done this every year since 2012.

LEARN THINGS, SHARE THEM

Be voracious. Read, go to conferences and meetups, be constantly in pursuit of new understanding. And, when you have it, plough it back into the community — whether Onfido or something bigger.

When we talk about learning, we wrongly draw a distinction between children and adults. Everyone knows that kids ask a lot of questions, “Why the moon is round?” “Why the moon follow us when we drive ?” “How do we make babies?”… And it seems most of us are not doing that, anymore, when we grow up.
I think curiosity is a good thing, and adults could learn a lot from children. When you don’t know something try to go for the explanation, maybe not at the moment but for later on. Go to read the definitions in the dictionary or simply, type it on Google. Take 5 minutes in order to get the base details, then, if the subject is worth checking up deeper, take 5 more minutes in order to plan it or check articles and put them in your must-read list.

Follow up the first phase of learning by all means possible; you need to share your knowledge. At least in order to know if you understood it properly.

If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough. — Albert Einstein

Share it with your family, friends or others. If you see people asking for it, answer their questions, show them your best resources in order for them to learn about it faster. Why not even make a blog post that will summarise your knowledge or even at the opposite, make an article to detail the subject, if you think information is missing.

E.g: No one is fitting better in this example than my colleague Paulo. He is a big fan of wine like me and obviously food. He is THE guy, if you ask or even if you don’t, to give you the best pieces of advice concerning restaurants in Lisbon or in London, two cities he knows very well. He learnt by trying and then share his knowledge about places, always in an objective way.
Because, of course, learning and sharing are about everything. If you meet him, ask him what is the best wine from his point of view?

FIND A BETTER WAY

The assumption is: there’s always a better way. Whether you get there in baby steps or giant leaps, the only way to success is via constant experimentation. Fix what’s broken and make what works even better.

In our daily life, we are usually the users of tools, other people/companies are making things for us. House furniture, software, repairs or simply house cleaning. All of that has a cost. Sometimes it is worth the cost, sometimes it looks worth it. The idea of finding a better way is to try to see out of the box in order to win time or money, comfort, …

E.g: Some time ago, the frame of the bed from my apartment broke, it looks like I took some weight. The landlord asks a friend of him to have a look and see if we can replace the broken piece. The answer was that it’s possible but the value was high compared to the original price of the bed. We then concluded with the landlord that I will buy a new frame but it will remain my property.
In my head I had the following questions:

• Maybe should I try to repair my bed instead of buying a new one?
• Should I stop using a bed, a mattress may be enough like Japanese do (see futon)?
• Should I invest in a quality frame?

Because the frame is not the only part of the bed, except the mattress, I couldn’t just not replace it, because I would then have a problem of storage with the bed base for example. So the answer to the question number 2 is done.
Finally, I decided to try to repair my bed, and for that, I went for a walk in my neighbourhood until a shop which sells screws and other pieces of metal. Having an idea how to repair it, but never been really a handy guy, I was just hoping very much.
I finally asked the price and for 2 euros of material (I received 20 screws and 4 pieces of metal straight and 2 making an angle of 90º), I went back home and repaired my bed the best I could. And yet 2 months later the bed is still good and I sleep on it like a baby.

The whole picture

As you saw, some of my examples could actually fit the other values. This is because they are complementary, they need each other in order to work at their best. Hope you will keep in mind those 4 values, that are for me and my company so important.

Because when you LEARN THINGS, SHARE THEM, then we FIND A BETTER WAY in order to SUCCEED TOGETHER and TAKE PRIDE in it!