Notes on values
The principles that guide how we build MilkStraw and work with our customers.
Quality is the best business plan.
Our team, investors, and products. Everyone involved in MilkStraw AI is part owner of the company’s greatest asset, its quality.
Every interaction with us must be excellent, it’s contagious.
Everything associated with MilkStraw AI has to represent quality.
Be wrong, as fast as you can.
If you are in a battle & faced with 2 hills, unsure which one to attack.
The best thing is to choose one, fast!
If you are wrong, turn around & attack the other one.
The stupid way is to run between the 2 hills. Get to the wrong answer asap.
Make it not suck.
Everything starts out terrible. Everything we use today (apps, software, hardware) started out terrible, and this is as it should be.
Early on, everything we build will suck. That is the truth.
At some point we will get lost in the process, it is the nature of things when taking on creative, innovative projects.
Our job is to make it not suck.
The new needs friends.
“In many ways, the work of a critic is easy. We risk very little yet enjoy a position over those who offer up their work and their selves to our judgment. We thrive on negative criticism, which is fun to write and to read. But the bitter truth we critics must face, is that in the grand scheme of things, the average piece of junk is probably more meaningful than our criticism designating it so. But there are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new. The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations, the new needs friends…”
Making something great is the goal.
Being efficient. Automating processes. Increasing output.
Those are things we aim at, but they shouldn’t supplant the ultimate goal. Good processes exist to fulfil our goal. If we aren’t careful they can become a proxy for the ultimate goal we want.
We will stop looking at outcomes & just focus on doing the process right.
“Problems are opportunities in work clothes” Henry Kaiser
If we don’t have problems, we should be worried, that’s a dangerous place to be.
Iterative trial & error has long recognized value in science.
Why don’t we apply it in business?
The beauty of taking trial and error into the business world is that we can learn to fail without guilt.