At Bird.i you can’t get sacked if you challenge the boss, but you will if you don’t.
The importance of defining values when you create a start-up.
I remember exactly that day, as it was just yesterday.
It was a Monday morning, just one week after the completion of my first investment round. A Monday morning, I came to work with a huge smile.
It was even better than this in fact: I had just put my house on the market without knowing if I’d sell it with that bloody Brexit; I had moved my family to Glasgow over the weekend, and I still needed to find a place to live close by a descent school for my two kids. I had left my job with half a million pound in my pockets. According to my super-startup-unicorn-soon-to-be-hockey-stick-financial-forecast, it should have given me just over 16 months of cash to demonstrate that my vision of a mass market for observation imagery could be executed.
And I was sitting at my new desk in an empty office, with no idea where to start, alone just with myself. But I had a big fucking smile, and it was a Monday morning.
When was it the last time you had a big smile on a Monday morning whilst going to work?
I was sitting at this desk and looking at the best way to start that business, the first evidence that came to my mind was that I will never be able build it alone.
I needed a team.
As I’ve said so often since, as a founder, you do not build a business, you build a team that will build the business.
So I started to get in touch with the few people I knew at the time in Scotland, asking from one introduction to another, very quickly building a real network of very valuable people who connected me to universities, research labs, associations, meetups, government bodies and other entrepreneurs. This is how in just few months, I build up a team from nothing to 6 of the best talents I’ve ever had the opportunity to work with.
I will not say it was easy since I had to compete against major financial firms and unicorn in Scotland, but at the end, Bird.i’s vision and leadership prevailed.
However, only half the work was done.
Whatever the avengers you can find, if you don’t assemble them into a strong team, then you’ll fail.
On my end, if I’ve managed to build this team, who has been executing days after days, it is because I have led them with some very strong values which are now anchored into our DNA. They had to embrace them from day one and live by every single day ever since.
I see you coming here!
VALUES are just bullshit that managers bring back from leadership seminars, pick up on others websites because they look cool, or even use to convince themselves they are doing good. They are usually printed in bold characters or painted in the form of some kind of artistic design, highly visible in the reception or coffee areas.
Yes, I’ve been working in one of that place as well.
No, at Bird.i it is different, you will not find the values on the wall or on the website and I’m even pretty sure that most of the team cannot tell them like that. But trust me, they live, eat and breath by these values every single day; and this is because I have drawn them from my own values. And if I’m here today, writing this blog post as a happy father of two, a beloved husband and an accomplished space entrepreneur, it is because I have always trusted, respected and relied on my values.
So here they are Bird.i’s values:
SHARING IS A GOOD THING
This one is maybe the most important, the foundation for the others: COMMUNICATION. Like in a couple, the day you stop communicating, you’re fucked! This is even more important nowadays where you’ve got so many means to communicate (emails, Hangouts, Skype, Slack, Drift, Yammer, Jira, Trello, Post-it…).
How often do we have Sarah, our Well Being Officer, reminding us that if we are all in the same open office, this is to facilitate the communication, so rather than asking a question with shit loads of acronyms and emoticon on a slack channel, which by the way is a distraction for the rest of the team who is not concerned, we should just stand-up and talk over the monitor to the dude who is sitting just in front of us.
In the same way, we do encourage collaboration and spontaneity by promoting an open and transparent culture - i.e. if you have achieved a wee step (“wee” means “small” in Scottish by the way), you have to share it; because on our side we might be struggling and that will cheer us up. But in the same way, if you’ve fucked up something, you don’t keep this for yourself, because it is very likely that somebody else has done a similar mistake and might be able to help. Learning from failures and successes is at the heart of what we do.
HAVING FUN IS IMPORTANT
I want Bird.i to be an enjoyable environment for everyone, so creating a fun and relaxed atmosphere is extremely important to me. My principles are quite simple: what is good for me, is good for the team.
I don’t like going out in the rain over the lunch (let’s be honest, it rains a lot i Glasgow), so let’s get it covered by the business and delivered to our door every day. I want to stand up at my desk in the morning and sit down in the afternoon; every body has a sit-stand desk to adjust the height as it pleases them. Mens sana in corpore sano is no bullshit, Bird.i is offering a gym membership to every employees who wants to do some fitness; but watch-out, there is a condition attached to it; you’re not allowed to take the lift and the office is at the 6th floor.
Not only does this make an enjoyable workplace, it also attracts partners and customers, and enhances the entire Bird.i ecosystem.
SIMPLICITY IS KEY
We are all expert of something at Bird.i. Either it is machine learning, software development, commercial strategy, satellites, products, people management… or just cool space shit; but if we don’t strive to remove complexity in everything we do, there we’re no more experts.
We started by banning acronyms and technical jargon from our language. As Elon Musk wrote in a famous memo to SpaceX employees: “Acronyms Seriously Suck. Excessive use of made up acronyms is a significant impediment to communication and keeping communication good as we grow is incredibly important.” At Bird.i, there is a piggy bank for every time somebody use an acronym which has not been authorised; and guess who authorise the acronyms.
This simplicity is maintained across the board, from the way we source our data to the way we make unprecedentedly easy to access aerial and satellite images.
UNDERSTANDING USERS IS CRUCIAL
Our goal is to increase usage of aerial and satellite images to create economic value — this relies on us developing great products that users are motivated to use. There’s only one way to truly understand the needs of our end-users: talk to them. So that’s exactly what we do. Every body within Bird.i has at some stage to pick-up the phone or meet face to face with a user to understand the WHY. Why is he/she using our product, or why he/she stopped using it. Why he/she wants more of something or less of another thing. Why the products make his/her life better… or not. All this information are important and although they are gathered in great numbers by our product team, it has a much greater impact when it is heard directly from the mouth of one of our user.
In addition, it helps to work with much greater focus. When the technical team knows by name who is the end-user, we can refer to him/her in our personas: Would Zeina need to see the images into her mobile when she is on the go?
If you think you have what it takes to work for a badass space startup like Bird.i, if these values are not new to you, then get in touch here, we’re always recruiting great people.
