CULTURE

If you want a friend on Wall Street, get a dog.

We buy things we don't need with money we don't have to impress people we don't like.

Culture compounds just like capital. Good culture builds value over decades. Bad culture destroys it faster than any financial mistake.

Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with passion.

A small team that cares deeply about craft will always outship a large team that doesn't.

Ship fast, fix fast, improve fast. Speed is our moat.

Mediocrity is a disease. And it's a communicable disease. Mediocre people hire mediocre people. Urgency is a muscle — exercise it.

If you're not comfortable building weapons, don't apply. We don't pretend we're doing something else. We build tools for people who defend freedom.

We named the company after Aragorn's sword because it was broken and reforged. American defense innovation was broken. We're reforging it.

Every new employee at DoorDash does a delivery shift. Including engineers. Including me. You can't build for Dashers if you've never been one.

People wave at our vehicles. Kids chase them down the street. That's how you know autonomous delivery is going to work — it makes people smile, not scared.

Every bride in America has a Pinterest board. That's not a user base — that's a cultural institution.

Our top sellers make six figures a month opening Pokémon card packs on camera. That sentence would have made zero sense five years ago.

We named the company after the seeing stones in Lord of the Rings. Tolkien nerds building surveillance technology for the CIA. Sounds about right.

A company without a culture is a company without a soul. Culture is not about perks or parties — it's what you do when no one is watching.

Tony taught me that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff follows. That's the most important thing I learned at Zappos.

Culture is not a soft concept. It's what happens when the founder leaves the room.

Jay-Z, Meek Mill, and I throw a Super Bowl party every year. People think it's just a party. It's actually the most efficient networking event in sports business. Every deal I've done in five years started at that party.

I slept on a beanbag next to my desk at the office. People thought it showed dedication. In hindsight, maybe it showed that nobody was watching.

Sneaker culture used to be niche. Now it's a $6 billion resale market. We didn't create the culture. We just built the infrastructure it needed.

We run the entire company asynchronously. No meetings. Everything is written. We have 50 employees across 10 time zones and nobody needs to be online at the same time. It works better than any office I've seen.

Germany is a nation of savers, not investors. We want to turn savers into investors. That is a cultural shift, not just a product.

Most brokerages treat agents like disposable commodities. We treat them like the business. Because they are the business. Without agents, a brokerage is just a logo on an empty building.

We have never had an office. Not because of COVID — we were remote from day one in 2011 because we were in Missouri and could not afford San Francisco rent. Turns out that was a competitive advantage, not a limitation.

We are fully remote with team members in over 40 countries. We did not become remote because of COVID. We were remote because the best open-source contributors are not all in San Francisco.

The hardest part of building Loom was not the recording technology. It was convincing people that sending a video was not weird. In 2016, recording yourself talking to your laptop felt awkward. Now it feels natural.

Ask a developer. That was our internal mantra. We did not build what executives wanted. We built what developers wanted. And developers wanted an API that just worked.

We named it after Solana Beach because that's where we surfed. Naming your blockchain after a surf spot is either charming or ridiculous. I'll let the market cap decide.

People say our culture is intense. It is. We are trying to replace a trillion-dollar industry. That is not a 9-to-5 job. If you want comfortable, go work at a bank — the ones we're replacing.

Champagne was a white luxury market. I made it hip-hop. That is not disruption — that is culture creating demand.

I am not a tech expert. I am a culture expert. I know what regular people want before Silicon Valley figures it out.

We went from know-it-all to learn-it-all. That single cultural shift is what saved Microsoft.

Israel produces more cybersecurity companies per capita than any country on Earth. When your national survival depends on cyber defense, you learn to build security tools differently.

In this company we do not fire people. We graduate them.

Happiness is the most underrated business strategy. Happy customers tell friends. Happy employees build better products.

I wrote letters to the parents of my direct reports thanking them for raising such wonderful children. Not one CEO I know does this.

Zoom-free Fridays. If we cannot protect one day a week from unnecessary meetings we have a bigger problem than strategy.

Selling clothes on Depop is self-expression. It is not eBay. It is not a garage sale. It is your curated identity.

All-remote isn't a compromise. It's a competitive advantage. We hire the best people on Earth, not just near an office.

We started as two guys with pseudonyms making cartoon apes. Then the apes took over the internet.

200 million users playing fantasy sports during every IPL match. That's not a feature. That's a cultural movement.

You can learn more about a company from its culture than from its balance sheet.

Culture determines commerce. If you can make something cool, the specs are secondary.

Tech otaku saves the world. That's literally what our name means in Chinese internet slang.

Los Angeles makes games differently than San Francisco. We understand entertainment because we live in it.

I named the fund Atreides because the Atreides family in Dune played the long game. That's what we do.

We don't hire Wall Street people. We hire scientists. There's a reason for that.

We were always the underdog. Uber had more money, more aggression, more everything. We had a better culture.

The Apprentice made "You're fired" the most famous catchphrase in America. Whether that's a good thing depends on who you ask.

I believe that the softest pillow is a clear conscience. I want every Infoscion to sleep well at night.

Our assets walk out of the door each evening. We have to make sure they come back the next morning.

We've always known that profits are important, but we've never thought that profits were the purpose.

The business of business is people — yesterday, today, and forever.

Fun is a stimulus to human creativity.

Your employees come first. And if you treat your employees right, guess what? Your customers come back, and that makes your shareholders happy.

The rarest thing in this business is someone who sees where culture is going before it gets there.

We keep our headquarters in Lancaster, Pennsylvania because our costs are lower, our people are loyal, and we do not need a fancy office to ship restaurant equipment.

Huawei is like a wolf. We hunt in packs and we do not stop until we catch the prey.

If you want to understand a country, eat their food. If you want to do business there, sell them yours.

Our number one priority is company culture. Our whole belief is that if you get the culture right, most of the other stuff will just happen naturally.

The UAE's success comes from the willingness of its people to work harder than anyone else. That culture is what we must protect.

I believe that culture is the new luxury. If you own the cultural conversation, you own the brand.

Discovery has always punched above its weight. We do more with less than anyone in this industry.

My father always said: take care of your customers, take care of your employees, and the business will take care of itself.

Tom Izzo taught me that culture is not a poster on the wall. It is the behavior you tolerate and the behavior you reward. That is it.

I want this team to reflect what Detroit is — tough, hardworking, resilient. We are going to build something the whole city can be proud of.

Detroit is a resilient city. It has been through things that would have broken other places. That resilience is in the DNA of this team.

At Facebook I learned that engineering culture is the product. If your engineers are exceptional, the decisions they make will be exceptional too.

Safety is not a number you hit. It is a culture you build. If people are not going home safely, nothing else we do matters.

Dad built this company on the idea that if you take care of your associates and customers, everything else takes care of itself.

The principles my father established — respect for the individual, service to the customer, striving for excellence, acting with integrity — those aren't just posters on the wall. They have to be lived every day.

We are proud to be a family company. That is a strength, not a limitation.

Meritocracy means that the best people rise, regardless of where they came from. That is the culture we try to build everywhere we operate.

Art is not decoration. It is a record of how people actually think and feel at a moment in history. That is why I collect it and why I believe it should be shared.

The people at Facebook live in their own bubble.

The biggest change we have done, and the biggest change we are doing, is cultural change.

Our people and connected culture are at the heart of value creation.