59: איך יוצרים תרבות באמצעות מעשים (English)

Hi everyone, you reach Startup for Startup, the podcast in which we at Monday.com share knowledge, experience and actionable insights among startups. Together with me are Eran Zinman and Roy Mann, co-founders at Monday.com. And we're going to talk today about culture. So we'll start by discussing and describing what is culture in our perspective. And the second part will be dedicated to the six values that are at the very core of our culture here at Monday.com. So what is culture for you guys? I see it as one single most important asset in the company. And that's what defines all the decisions we make on a daily basis. The culture we have is what people do, how they think, the decisions they make. And I think even before going deep into answering that, we need to understand that every company has culture. It's like, it's not a thing that we either have or don't have. It's like every company makes decisions. Every company has a lot of people and those people behave in a certain manner. OK, and what works for some person will not work for someone else. And then people find, you know, that they fit for a company, they like working there or they feel comfortable operating in that company. And that's the culture. Eran, what's culture for you? It's easier for me to define what culture is by saying what it's not. It's not a poster on the wall. I've seen a lot of companies do that, like sit down and try to figure out what they want their culture to be. And then they print a bunch of posters on the wall. And then it's the reality and what's written on that poster is not the same thing. And people call bullshit, like super easy, because at the end of the day, and this is where I get to what culture is, culture is how you act, how you act on your day to day, on small decisions, how you act on bigger decisions, what kind of role model you are and the managers and everybody else in the company are to new people that join a company. And people see that in minutes, and align or don't align, but at the end of the day, it's about action. Let's go one level deeper. What are the actions? If I want to understand what's a culture in a company, what do I look at? Some things are felt when you walk in the door, how people treat you, how they treat each other. Those kind of things are more obvious. But the things that are less obvious and are actually, it defines a lot, is as Netflix put it, it's like who you hire, who you promote and who you fire is the places that you are measured the most. I can give an example. It's like if you meet in an interview a super talented person, like can really push things forward, but you understand they don't really work well in a team. They will put others down and take credit. I don't know. You understand it's not a fit. We all understand that kind of person. Yeah, not a fit for the team, and you choose to take them anyway because it'll promote you in the short term, and you don't see the longer term, then that's a decision you made, and that's what will define the future of the culture. And as you have more people like that, this will be the culture, less teamwork, more ability. Yeah, and I just want to add, because when you're saying it now, it sounds like you're judging this kind of decision. And for some companies, these are the people that they need. Like this is what they want. Yeah. For some projects, it's not like right or wrong that we're trying to say here. You're right, but I am judging. So talk about it. Because first of all, you can look at it, and maybe it's a personal perspective, okay? I think, and that's like our belief here, and there are a lot of researchers that show that as well, that a team works better when everyone is pushing towards the same direction. No one likes working in a place where they don't feel comfortable in, they don't feel they contribute, and you have like someone that is like constantly saying that they're great. Now you're painting a different picture. All I'm saying is that like for, let me try and be very concrete, maybe early stage of a startup, you don't have teams formed yet, you need someone just to take something and push it forward, and you found an excellent person, and you know that later, they might not be the best team people. You might make the decision.

On that day, and later on, two years later, you'll never hire this person because it won't fit anymore. Okay, but then, so in that place I'm not judging, and I think a lot of managers, leaders, learn along the way what they are willing to carry on their backs and what they are not. Okay, and it sometimes is hard, because at the end, let's say two years in, they figure out, you know what, that's hurting us, they might need to fire that person, because they hurt every other person on the team. Okay, so it's like a tough call towards like, different day, like either I keep hurting everyone, they come in the morning, and it's like someone sucks all the oxygen out of the air, or I hurt them by firing them, or sometimes it's a positive thing for everyone. So you end up owning and getting the results of the decisions you made, and I think that's part of shaping the culture. The decision you make and the mistakes you learn from, and where you want to show yourself, but at the end, the culture are the people. Like the people in the company are the culture. It's not like you, it's not the poster on the wall, it's not like only management, it's everyone together, and that's what gets shaped. I like to look at it from a perspective of a new person joining the company, and as a new person joining, imagine that you walk into the office, and you're very alert about everything. How people greet you, what's the atmosphere, are people smiling, what's the dynamics like in a meeting room? What's the information that is being given to you? Are people being transparent? Are you talking about problems? Is it based on hierarchy, or people get to say an argue in front of their manager? A lot of small details that dictate to you as a person, because people adjust. Most of the people, assuming that during the interview process, we identify that this person is a good fit for the company, and I agree with the saying that there isn't a good culture or a bad culture. There is a culture, and there's people that fit the culture, and there's some people that might not fit the culture. It doesn't mean that they're bad in any way. It's just a matter of fit. But I think that people, when they actually are in the company for a few days, a few weeks, obviously there's things you find after a few months, they get all the small details, and then they know if this is a culture that… The culture that actually happens matches the culture that the company kind of says it has. How is the culture formed? So you said one way is for people to sit down and think about it, and then just tell it, communicate it to everyone else. What was our case? I think some of it is based on the character of the people that start a company, which is the founders, but also the founding team. So you can still say it ties to the people you hired. I always say that the first 20, 15, 20 people have a huge effect on the culture of the company, not just the founders. Those people play a very significant role in shaping the culture of the company. And looking back at us as a company, back in the days, we didn't sit down and said, look, let's try to define our culture. We just acted in a very specific way that made sense for us. And then later on, we found out that we had a culture. So it was very genuine, you could say. We acted how we believed that we should act, and it was true to our values. And then people started to say, oh, you guys have a good culture, or identified things that we should fix. And then we did a reverse engineering process where we tried to normalize that and say what our culture is. Is a culture essential for success? Like for the success of the company? Culture is required for you to be successful. But I would say having only a good culture is not an indication for a successful company. You might have an amazing culture, but the company will fail. But I think that every company that is successful, thanks to a brilliant product, an opportunity in the market, whatever it is, if it doesn't have a good culture… It won't last. So again, we're saying good or bad, but I think good is for a specific market or industry. So for us, as an example, I always feel fortunate that every person here, because of the scale, it's a cloud software.

It's like we build the company around the product and we care mostly about the product, that every person can make a massive impact on the company on their own. It's not true for every industry that any person that joins the company can change something that makes, I don't know, 10% increase in conversion to paying. It's not, and here it happens a lot. I think if you look at it from a business perspective or from a success perspective, as you said, is the culture here fit to meet the challenges of what we're going to face? You can look at other, let's say, cultures of people climbing the Everest. They need to be of a certain type of mentality to be able to go through that. So I think in, let's say, startups in the beginning, uncertainty is definitely something you need to work with, while in other industries, certainty is what you need to work with. Right, so let's formalize it. So for us, culture in Monday.com is ownership, inclusion, being product-centric, being customer-centric, being impactful, and doing things with a certain speed. Actually, I think the first one we started with, and that was clear for us, is product-centric. We started from the point that we wanted to make a great product, products people love. This is where our passion started for it, and we said how, and I remember all the decisions we've made since the beginning was around how do we put ourselves in the position as a company that we will be forced to create a good product. I'll give an example. So in the pricing, in the early pricing that we set, we didn't do a free tier, and we didn't want to do sales in the beginning. Why? Because we knew that if you started to have a really successful salesperson, they will sell things you don't have, and then it would be something that a good deal, a big deal, and you'll feel compelled to create those features that they promised. And that, for us, this kind of way to create a product is not the best way to create a good product people love. It's a way to create a good, sellable product. So we wanted, in the beginning, not to have that. What I'm learning from what you said now is that decisions is a good framework to look at your culture. So you just said, okay, how do I know that I'm product-centric? The decisions I have to make around that will have to be aligned with what I want my product to be. And if you made a different decision, then it's not your culture anymore. So that's like for anyone who's listening to ask, what decision do I have to make? And then if I take a left or a right, now I know what's the culture I picked. And it's not one decision. One decision is kind of like a small step into the future decisions. And if you either make a mistake, it's fine. You can correct your course. But eventually, if you step enough time towards a certain direction, that's it. This is who you are. And then you need a massive amount of energy to change course. To change, yeah. And it's, again, not a mistake all the time. It's like change course. The culture you have, yes. And this is, by the way, what makes a company fit for a certain area. And then the conditions in the market change, and their culture is not fit to handle that sometimes. Eran, what other decisions have we made in the past to support our culture of being product-centric? So we touched on the big decision that we made, but I think a huge part of it is about a lot of small decisions that we make. Everybody here in the company, first of all, is the type of people we hired. The developers that we hired and the product people that we hired and the designers that we hired, when we interviewed them, we looked for people who have had

…empathy toward users that care about user experience, that care about the actual people that will use the product. And that's a critical part of that. And then, you know, during every discussion, every time we had to make a product decision, you know, should we do this or that, we never look at what will maximize revenue, what will, you know, make people buy the product more. We always ask what's going to be better for our users, what's going to be more delightful for them, how can we make this experience better for them, how can we make the product more beautiful, and how can we minimize the amount of work that people do in order to get value from the product. So a lot of decisions, a lot of discussions around that are really shaped by what people think about features and how they deliver new stuff into the product today. And also I think a huge part of that is the fact that our success as a company, our main KPI is WAP, which is Weekly Active Paying People. And I think this is a message for everybody in the company, is a huge thing to say the product is the most important part of it. We want our customers to use the product and enjoy using it on their day-to-day. So I think this is very tied together with another value that we talk about, which is being customer-centric. So why don't you just continue to the next one? Yeah, and I think that customer-centric and the product-centric is like… A reflection. Yeah, the product, Monday the company and Monday the product is with the same value. So we had some examples of bureaucracy in the product. I tell you in the UI, don't go here, go there, because it's… Why? We don't want that. So that's also within the company itself, we don't want those things. At the end, a lot of our values in the company went into the product itself. And customer-centric is also something we've decided in the very early beginning that we wanted people as part of the product to feel that there are people behind the product, that we're not just letting them deal with it and there are no people behind it. And we chose deliberately the support and customer success and everything we do around that is not a problem we need to solve. It's something we believe in, we want to do, we want to talk with customers, we want to help them solve their problems, and I think it shows. And this is the decision we've made in the beginning, we hired the right people, and then we ended up with that team building the best KPIs for customer success in the industry. We answer within 10 minutes on average. We try to exceed what they expect and really help, and we care about that at all, like every problem they have. So I think that's something we kind of like… That's the fruits of making that investment in the beginning. Yeah, it's also investment, like you'd say, in money, in hiring, in being intentional about it, but it started with a value, because otherwise we wouldn't make that investment. The way I look at it is that at the end of the day we want our customers to be satisfied and to have a feeling of trust, to feel there's a person on the other side that they have somebody to talk with, and they're not left alone with their problems, either with the product or with their own company, their own processes. We want them to feel this, you know, Monday is a person they can talk with, you know, any time at night, during the weekends, whatever they want. So we build the company in a very specific way that the message that we deliver to everybody here in the company is, you know, we invest in this, we want to hire as many people as we need, and we want to do what's best for the customer, not what's best for saving costs or optimizing our, you know, bottom line as a company. You know, a few examples of, apart from the fact that we want to answer it in a very short time, we want to be available 24-7, is also the way we coach people in customer success and in sales. And one of the main messages that we say to everybody that joins the company is, listen, if you are in a customer success team and somebody reaches out because they're not using the product anymore, they want to get a refund, even though they don't qualify in the 30 days refund policy, let's do that, because we want them to be satisfied, even if they're not a customer anymore. It's not just about customers. We look at it as a long-term relationship that we create with them. Everybody's an ambassador of the company and the product. And the same goes for the sales team. Part of how we coach people in the sales team is never sell something

to a customer that they don't need. So never suggest a tier that they don't need, never suggest more users that they don't need, because at the end of the day, it's a long-term play, and we want them to be happy. And we, in a way, optimize what's good for the customer over what's short-term might be good for the company. Yeah, I think this ties really nicely to ownership. Ownership, yeah. Let's take it there. If I had to put it in one sentence, it is to give people the power and ability to make their own decisions. So we're talking about ownership that people within Monday has to make decisions, make mistakes, make decisions, basically decide on their own. And move, by the way, just behave. Yeah, in order to move forward. This is a tool in order to move forward faster on their own and take ownership and responsibility for what they do. And I think this is a very strong value for us in the company, wherever you are. You might be in R&D, sales, marketing, wherever you are. Our goal is that you will have autonomy to make your own decisions, make your own mistakes, and be able to be successful on your own. And for us, this is a critical part of the company when it was small, but I think it's become even more critical as we scale the company because I think what slows company down, as companies scale, is the fact that decisions need to go up in order for people to move forward. And it's always bureaucracy, it's always slower this way. And it's less empowering because you feel it's not up to you and somebody else made the decision and you just need to comply. So the way we build the company, the way we structure it, the way we use measurements and KPI is to enable everybody in the company to make their own decisions, good or bad. And the message that we convey here is we trust you. We hire good people and we trust you. Some people manage huge budgets in marketing, some people can deploy code that affects all users, and some people can make decisions for huge customers. But the message is we trust you and we give you the tools to make your own decisions. And that's actually autonomy, which is a big part of ownership. And I can give an example, another example of ownership, which would be what is not ownership. If I'm doing something that someone else thinks is right and I disagree but I have to do it, then in the beginning, in a conversation, a meeting, whatever, I might think I understand what they wanted, but at the end when I come to a decision that I need to make, I wouldn't know what to do. I'll be dependent on them. So the way we built a lot of the things we do around here is around, and I know it's a different value, it's like inclusion but in order to get ownership. I need to persuade you, I need to explain what I want for everyone to be aligned so they can take it from me. So a lot of time, I'll give an example for like where do you make mistakes all the time and it took me a while to get the hang of it. We talk about something, everyone get excited, great, we go and do it, and then they come to me with a question and I answer it. Boom. They didn't understand the answer, but they thought, okay, it's probably good and went on and do it, and then I become the bottleneck. Every time they need something from me, then they come to me, they need to come to me, and I become the bottleneck. I own it. So I see they're going down a path that I think is wrong, and that's hard for managers. Let's say I have more experience, I know how to help them. What is the difference between guiding someone and helping them evolve and learn between telling them what to do? For me, ownership is one of the biggest things here at Monday. I know I had a big transition to go through when I came here, so just to share my perspective, two things to add to everything you guys said. First, that it's across the board. It can be a person in the company for two weeks that are now owners of something and they can make and gather the information they need and make other people work, whether they're in the company for five years, whether they're the VP of something. So if you're an owner of something, you're the person to drive it happen. And I think this is something that really…

It crosses all hierarchies and departments. It doesn't matter if this person you're going to work with, they might be from a different department and you've never talked to them in the past. You're an owner of a project. You're going to make it happen. And it comes also with a very big sense of responsibility. And I think that it's very confusing in the beginning when you're an owner of something, it doesn't mean you're doing it on yourself and by yourself and alone. You can be a part of like 10 people team, but this meeting that you described before that everyone's talking about something and we leave the room. So the way at Monday to make it happen is that someone will look at someone else and say, so you're the owner, right? Like someone's looking at someone and making sure that there's someone that will go to sleep at night and care about it. Because if we're all just talking in the room and we leave it together equally, it's not going to happen. So it became a language. So it is a language, right. And going back to Aaron's point that it comes with trust. Like sometimes, again, I see it many times when there's a new person to the team, but they're an owner of something and you don't know how they're going to execute and you got to trust them on big stuff. And that's why I think in many areas that we can, we build like confidence level within people. We give them ownership on something that is like small and can be guided and okay. And then like bigger and bigger things. Because like, again, that has to do with scale. Like for something that someone used to do when we were smaller, it made a certain impact on a certain number of customers that we could fix or solve or whatever. And now like they might deploy something and you know like hundreds of thousands of people are out of a tool that they work with every day for like, I don't know, five minutes. Two seconds. It's like not acceptable. So how do we build a level of confidence and how do we do it gradually? So we need the system to support it. We need to think about those things when we hire people. What are the stages they will go through in that area? We need to invest a lot of energy into maintaining our ability to keep ownership for people and train them into the place that they are. Because we had a few years to ramp up to this situation. They need to ramp up to this situation in a month. So how do we do that within a month? So it requires a lot of energy. The next one would be inclusion. Yeah, so I think when we talk about inclusion there are a few parts to that. One huge thing is transparency which is something that we believe in as a company. We mentioned a few times before in our podcast but in essence it means that everything in the company is transparent to everybody. When we say everything, we mean everything. One exception which is people's salaries apart from that, everything is transparent. You know, numbers, revenue numbers, how much we spend on marketing, conversion rates, everything you can think of. Company valuation. Money in the bank. Yeah, money in the bank. Board meetings. Board meetings, everything. So that's one part that contributes towards inclusion because people feel they know the numbers, they know the metrics. Not just feel, but actually know. The second part of that is the fact that we try not to lend decisions top to bottom. So it ties to ownership which we discussed so people can make their own decisions but even when we try to kind of move stuff from, you know, when we try to make decisions for management, we always try to involve people. We always try to say and there's not just us as founders, it's every person in the management team and every manager and everybody else in the company try to explain the reasoning behind what we do and why we think this is what we should do and even then we always ask, what do you think? Like, do you believe in that? Do you have a different idea? It's the whole way of presenting ideas, discussions with people and the sentiment of, you know, everybody's equal. My opinion is as good as yours. Hierarchy doesn't matter here. Everybody is smart. Everybody have good ideas. So we want to include everybody. And I think this even goes, you know, behind the company itself. We also try to treat the same way with our customers. So, you know, one interesting example which I remember is when we rebranded as a company. We changed the name of the company. Yeah, we changed the name of the company from The Pulse to Monday. And then we said, how can we include our customers?

We don't want them to hear this from a press release one day on, you know, one of the news websites. We wanted to know, even if it's a few days before. So, we actually involved them in the process. We said, you know, we're thinking about rebranding. These are the options we're thinking about. What do you think? What's the feedback that you have? And we kind of risked something because they might have, you know, leaked the fact that we're going to change the name or it won't be a surprise anymore. But we want them to feel part of it because, you know, they are part of it. And we notified them a few days before. And I think this kind of shows one example of, you know, how you can include your customers as well and for them to be part of what are you going through. Two more details just to add to what Aran said before. So first, a quick example of how we give rationale to everything we do. So even a feature update that is shared with the company starts with a rationale, with a test that was made, with the reasons we have to think that this is something that is going to be meaningful to our customers. It's never like, hey guys, here's an update. Here's a future. Here's a new feature. Go and find out why. Everyone has to understand the reasoning behind something and so that they can actually come with ideas and, you know, and become part of it, I think. The second thing about transparency that I like a lot is that it puts aside or it puts outside the door this dynamics of like thinking what each person knows in the company. Like if you sit in one room and you go to a different room, you can talk in the same way you just talked now. There are not like hundreds of versions of things and politics. Everyone knows one thing and this is what we're discussing and you don't have to keep in your mind like different versions of stories. It goes to many lengths because we don't have two budgets. Like one for the company and one for the board. Like we have one truth and that's like kind of I think around data and information there is a lot of politics that are from who knows what and who's where and like once you get that out of the way you win a lot of things. But it's hard. As Ran says all the time, you're being challenged all the time because people know everything as they happen a lot of times before you know. So why is that happening? I don't know. So on the other hand it's like we don't know. Let's figure it out together and people take ownership on understanding because like we are not in charge of coming with the answers and I say we. I say like it's throughout the management of the company in every level like go figure it out. You have the same tools as I do. You know, help me figure it out. Which brings me to the last point which I get for granted, Aran. Can you talk about big brain in the context of transparency and inclusion which is a very big effort we have in the company. What we do in order to be transparent is a lot of things. We have dashboards around the office showing metrics and numbers. We have a daily SMS sent each morning to everybody in the company including our investors by the way. It shows all the numbers from yesterday. And the huge part of it is big brain which is our internal BI tool that all the information is available to everybody in the company or permissions, no special screens. Everybody sees the same thing and everybody have access. So basically all the information is not just that it's being transparent it's also being accessible for everybody to consume in a very easy way on a day to day basis. It ties to a larger subject of like transparency. It's not enough that the information is available it has to be consumed. It has to be like you know accessible in a way that people can understand and not just like here is a file somewhere in the you know these folders are public. So we need to put a lot of energy into explaining it to people. And then as the company scales there are just too many things and details. To the extent that we support an internal initiative that is called Data School to make sure that everyone knows how to use the internal tools we built. That's inclusion by the way. The Data School is a great initiative that was not like Was started by a designer, a product person and a programmer and like a developer. Three amazing women that just right pitched it to you and you guys said yeah go do it. Of course. Of course. No but this of course is part of the culture you know really because they spent a lot of time working on that and then they spend a lot of time training people in the company to know how to work with data. So it's more inclusion than transparency because they wanted to include everyone that were not they did not come with the background of data analysis and writing SQL queries and like really querying data.

What I said before, like there is a problem, figure it out, you have the same tools as I do, so you have access to the same tools, but you might not know how to use them. And that's the idea behind the data school. So it's like, to me, ties, after you have transparency, this is like more the inclusion part. And wait, and I think you touched on something else that is interesting to add, which is the price you pay when you choose a value. And there's another example I remember for transparency is that on our last round that we raised money, some people actually were just walking around the office, happened to talk to press, and the fact that we were raising money was leaked to the press, to the Israeli press way, way too early. And we were not ready for that in any kind of way. And the information wasn't even right. And I remember how we sat and we tracked things back and we said, okay, it happened because we let people walk around the office and they hear everything and everyone knows everything, and there are no secrets. And this is a price we are willing to pay, right? This is the conclusion we got to. Next will be impact. What's impact, guys? Yeah, so I think this kind of ties everything together. But the message here is that we as a company, this is what we optimize for. We optimize for, we want people to make an impact. And impact is a very vague term, like what is impact? It might be different things to different people. For somebody in R&D, it might be a new feature that they launched that impacted a lot of users. For somebody in the growth team, it might be that they improve a metric or the product team. For somebody in sales, it might be that they close a huge deal that we never had before, a new industry, a customer from a new industry that we didn't have before. But it might also be internal. So it might be somebody from customer success who improved one of the processes and made 60 people 10% more efficient. Or someone from the operations finding the next office and enabling our growth. Bottom line, the way I describe it is that you made something meaningful that changed the company. And I think the change part is very important because the message here is that we want you to change. To change who we are, change our abilities, change the value that we give to our users. As opposed to being very static as a company, saying this is what it is and you need to fill your role. We say the opposite. We want to change, we want to adopt, we want to be better all the time. And the way we guide you is that you need to try and think what you can do in your own domain or even outside your domain in order to make such a change. And to support that, and you say change, so what? Everyone here, someone needs to do a lot of work all the time in areas, so how do you know what impact is or not? You did hard work, that's what you're saying. Is impact meaning hard work? Also hard work. So you might do something that changed, I don't know, 10%, reduces the number of tickets in 10%, or you don't do it and answer a lot of tickets. But I don't think people can understand how to reduce it by 10% without answering a lot of tickets. You need to really work hard, but the moment you recognize something, we want people to be able to make a change and make that impact, and that's what we're optimizing for. Another perspective on that is time. Everyone can work really hard along hours. We don't believe in that. Working long hours to achieve something, you need to be fresh and smart and make smart decisions, that's way better. Something I learned throughout time with my work on Monday and even before is that there are 24 hours in the day. Surprise! Surprise. But if I work harder to achieve more, there is a limit to that. I can do that. Let's say work really, really hard and accomplish more, but there will be a limit to that. And now my question is, am I going to be on the edge of my exhaustion all the time that I need to let things go? Or if I understand that I need to let things go because I have limited resources, one person in terms of time, then why not take a step backward? And then why not take a step backward? I can be smarter a step ahead and save my time to be able to, you know, if I choose the right things to work on. If I don't just go through the motion of what I did yesterday and I rethink it all the time and try it out.

There are people who are really good at it and there are people who need to learn it and like need to. And I've been to those places in life where I needed to put myself in the exhaustion period to understand that this is not what's helping me. OK, like for developers, we have it's a joke like after 6 p.m. you write the bugs that you need to solve in the next morning. So it doesn't really help you to stay up. To push it. Yeah, because like you're just hurting yourself. So for me, it's very clear that impact comes, it doesn't come necessarily from hard work. You can do something very small and very smart and it can be impactful, but it must be doing like the one underlying thing that I learned here about impact is that if you sit in a room and you talk all day and you understand your fears and the limits and the cost of things, this is never going to create any impact. And you're not going to understand, by the way, what's really limiting you if you just talk about it. So I think that to coach people on impact, the first thing we tell them, go and do like from the first day onboarding time, take a task and just do it. Like don't succeed. Don't think. Just go and find out what it is that you need to make it happen. And I think this is where people start understanding that it's not motion, as you said before, right? It's not like, oh, I'll be busy all the time and this is impactful. No, it's not. And it's not like don't succeed. It's like don't try to avoid failure by thinking a lot and planning. Just do things. Don't freeze because you don't know what's the next thing to do. Because like planning and again, that's true for our industry. Again, aviation, don't plan, think, and then you know, like a plane crashes and then you learn something. Not good. For us, we're able to do that. I don't think it's black and white. I don't think we ever say don't plan. We just say don't sit all day and plan and think that you're going to make impact out of that. Right. And that brings us to the next value point, which is speed that ties really closely to impact. We see speed in everything that we do as a value. Like again, like if you talk to the last example, like I can do things faster or invest less time if I think smarter. So it has to do, speed is important for the product, the first thing. Like it needs to load fast. It needs to be really quick. Like I would do a hundred more things with any system if it's really fast rather than wait even three seconds between clicks. So that's the value there. And it has to do also within what we do, like what you said, like do things. So the speed of from an idea or something I want to do to the actual beginning of the execution. So like what is the length of time that you sit around thinking about something before you did some action? Because like after the first action, you're like a hundred times more informed about problems and the real scenario than you were before. So just like reducing that gap of starting something is super important. And that's speed as well. I felt it very much when we started planning conferences for the first time last year. And people had this immediate reaction of, ah, let's plan it for six months. Why? Just because, you know, you plan big conferences for a long time, like weddings or something. And then we said, no, let's do it in six weeks. And the result would have been just as good. That's the point. We did it in six weeks. We learned what we needed to do. So for the next one that will happen in six months now, we are more knowledgeable and we moved and we actually made impact. So I agree that speed is something at the essence of everything we do. And we try sometimes to push also, I think. Right. We do challenge that on the edges. Yeah, I think it also, you know, one of our beliefs is that, you know, to be successful as a company, you need to move fast. And moving fast is having, you know, high volume of execution. And at the end of the day, you need to deliver fast. We need to fix bug fast. Everybody appreciates when you're fast because what the message you deliver is that I appreciate your time. And I think the same applies to our customers. And not only that it applies to us as a company and how we operate, we also take this to the product itself. So the value of speed is also something that we try to make sure that the product itself, the time it takes to load, how smooth is the scrolling, how fast the system reacts when you click on a button is very important for us. And it ties to the same value. We respect our customers' time. We want to be in a position where we save you time and we're not costing you any delays.

And I'll give another example of speed that is like really management and how you work is that if you take a long time to plan, you get married with the ideas you have. And then you're more scared of failure. You're more attached. People argue more and you're more scared about failure because you invested more time in it. So if you just like start doing something, then people are less married to their idea. It's easier to let go of things and try them out and change and work together. You can always blame that you didn't have time to plan. Yeah, but it doesn't matter because you can just like move forward and do it again. So again, you need to be able to just move forward and be able to do it again, which we are like in anything we do, we see. And it's a question like doing billboards or buying ads on the subway. Really? You want to fail at that? So the failure is that you didn't do something as impactful, but you did it and you learned like a hundred different things and the next one is really amazing. And that's what happened for us. Which connects to something else we say about speed, which is keeping the beat and cadence. I think this is something else. Yeah, so basically for almost everything that we would do, we want to have a cadence, which dictates the amount of changes that we expect in a certain time. So just to give a few examples, we have a cadence where every week we release a new iPhone and Android version. So it kind of sets the mind of people that work on the mobile app that they need to deliver changes in the course of a week. We expect a certain quarter to deliver X or Y features through the product because this is the cadence that we set for ourselves. We have a bi-weekly iteration planning for our R&D. So all those things kind of set expectations of how many changes you expect in a specific time frame. And this sets the tone for the speed of execution. And learning as well. Yeah, and it's a great method to make sure that you keep the same speed that you want to have. And we also invent cadence where it's not so natural. Like let's say we have that conference example you gave. So it's a conference. You would expect like, okay, let's list the stuff we need to do. Everyone do it. Like we'll see the times that it needs to converge and then see it. And then what happens usually is like people are disconnected. They're not aligned. Someone did something. It wasn't clear. So how do we… Where do you understand that people are not aligned? And we did something else that we didn't really understand. So what we do usually is have like a short time that you said for executing and then meet every day in the morning. Every day you think everyone. And it's important that everyone on the team understand what everyone else is doing. And that's not intuitive. Like what do I… I do the design. What do I care about the catering? You know, what do I care about the content if I'm doing something else? So you care because you understand more. You understand what other people are doing. You understand the urgency, the importance of what you're doing. So there's a lot of value in like creating a beat every day around execution that you think in that way and that you know that whatever problem or question you have, you're going to ask it tomorrow morning and have it in the same hour. And it's kind of like creating… The beat. It's cadence and beat. And it's like… Another example that I see is that we have a project called Stories Worth Telling on which we bring to Israel to our Tel Aviv office three customers every month. And we ask them to tell the story and their journey with our product and our platform. And I think we can all say that we haven't cracked this initiative fully yet, but we insist on bringing them every month. And so the team working on that, they never stop thinking on how to improve that. It's not like something they do once a year and then, oh, thanks God, it's gone. And next year, I'll think about how to improve it. Every month, they have this cycle of having to go through this thing. So it will end up working very, very quickly. It's a good example because we set it up in a beat. And it was hard. And the people that started to do it wasn't here for a long time in the company. And they tried to make it perfect. And I tell them, we wouldn't learn the right thing, so let's just do something. And we did it within a month. And then we understood a hundred different problems we didn't think of before. And some problems we didn't understand before. But the second one was really good. And the third was better and better and better because you have a beat. I think this is it. We're very much open for any questions, right? Follow-up questions on that. So thank you.

Thank you, Lior. Thank you. Bye. Startup for startup. Bye.