Our Values: Why we geek out about things like collaboration, generosity, and fun.

Nate Tower November 25, 2024

If you’re like most business owners, you care deeply about what you’ve built—and even more than that, you care about your employees. If and when you sell your business, you want a buyer who shares similar values. After all, you’ll be working side-by-side with any new buyer for at least a few months, and possibly longer. So beyond “would I get a good deal,” you might be asking “could I get along with these cake guys?”

✨ Our values

After having worked at IDEO for a combined 16 years, we’ve deeply internalized IDEO’s values, and they still guide our behavior every day. We’ve both seen firsthand how IDEO’s unique culture drives outsized impact, so we’re excited to apply the same mindset to the business that we acquire.

Here the seven values we strived to embody at IDEO, along with some definitions in our own words:

• Make Others Successful: When we go out of our way to help and support others, it creates a virtuous circle of trust which is simply unbeatable.
• Collaborate: True collaboration is about setting our egos aside in order to become more than the sum of our parts.
• Take Ownership: Individual ownership supports collective responsibility. When we see that something needs to be done, we get in there and do it.
• Talk Less, Do More: Five minutes of tangible work trying out a solution can prevent five hours of circular discussions.
• Learn from Failure: Trying to do something new doesn’t always work the way we expect. It’s only a waste if we don’t learn from it.
• Be Optimistic: We identify needs to be addressed and prototype solutions because we believe that a better future is possible and that solutions exist. Our process is inherently optimistic.
• Embrace Ambiguity: When we’re in new territory, there is no map. Our job is to use every tool to navigate through the ambiguity and find our way.

🤠 Bonus values

We think there’s also an unwritten 8th value at IDEO, which is core to our own value system: Be Generous. From customer relationships to employees, we believe in being generous with our time, attention, opportunities and resources. All because we believe in prioritizing long-term value creation over short term value extraction.

Finally, if you couldn’t tell from our name, website or general attitude, we value Fun. We believe we can take business seriously without taking ourselves too seriously. After all, it doesn’t have to cost anything—so why not have a little fun?!

🧭 Values are a compass

To us, values are more than platitudes that you frame and put in the break room. Values are an internal compass—something to point you in the right direction and get you out of a storm. When we’re undecided, or trying to fight through the fog of ambiguity, our values are always there, helping us pivot toward what matters.

In fact, we think values are so important that we shared ours with prospective investors, so they would know who we are and what we stand for. As a result, we’re backed by a fantastic group of investors who are aligned with us at a fundamental level.

Well, that’s us in a nutshell. But what about you? Are you pointed in the same direction? We’d love to hear all about what’s important to you. Schedule a chat with us or drop us a note anytime!