Our values: 9 reasons why we might be the perfect fit.

Nate Tower November 11, 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 your 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?”

Back when we were raising money from investors, we shared our values with them, so they knew who we were and what we stood for. As a result, we have a fantastic group of investors who are aligned with us and our approach.

✨ Our values

After having worked at IDEO for a combined 16 years, and experiencing how IDEO’s unique culture drives outsized impact, we are excited to extend the culture that we know to be so valuable to the business that Infinite Cake acquires. Here are IDEO’s values, 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.

We were hired at IDEO—and advanced within the organization—for our alignment with these values. And values are durable. So you can expect us to operate the business that we acquire with the values that we have lived for so long, and which made us successful in our past roles.

🤠 Bonus values

We think there’s also an unwritten 8th value at IDEO, which is core to our own values: 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?!

Well, that’s us in a nutshell. How about you—what are your values? Do they align? Reach out and let us know!