 I'm going to go ahead and get started. It's about quarter after. Hi. My name is George DeMatt. I'm the founder and CEO of Palantir.net, which is a full service web design development and strategy firm based in Chicago. Many of you have no doubt heard of another company named Palantir out of Silicon Valley. They are not associated or affiliated with us in any way. So welcome to finding your purpose as a Drupal agency. This is a session about how Drupal service agencies and firms can weather challenging times by focusing on their core values and purpose. This is a session not just for people who are in the business of Drupal, who are involved in running Drupal agencies, but really for anyone who's interested in helping define vision and purpose within their organization. If you saw my talk on architecting Drupal companies that are built to last from Drupal on Barcelona last fall, this is kind of a sequel to that presentation, but you don't need to have seen it to appreciate it, much like you don't need to have seen the original Mad Max films to enjoy Fury Road. So think about it that way. So this is actually our 20th year in business, and it's been a pretty exciting ride so far. When I started Palantir back in 1996, this is what much of the web looked like. For those of you sitting in the back, that's amazon.com in 1996. So for a lot of people, it was really hard to see the potential that the medium had to offer. But there were a few people who did get it. In February of 96, two Morgan Stanley analysts, Mary Meeker and Chris DePoy, wrote this massive report on the internet, writing, the market for internet-related products and services appears to be growing more rapidly than the early emerging markets for print publishing, telephony, film, radio, recorded music, television, and personal computers. Here we are two decades later, and the internet has not only pretty much destroyed all those industries, but completely transformed the world in which we know it in ways that not even the most wild-eyed visionaries could have predicted at the time. And I think all of us in this room are pretty lucky, because we're all involved in various ways with Drupal, which for the last 15 of those 20 years has emerged to become, as Dries said in his keynote yesterday, the leading platform to assemble the world's best digital experiences, wherever they are, desktops, laptops, phones, tablets, watches, cars, light bulbs, you name it, right? We're able to use technologies like Drupal to help connect people technology and information in ways that have never been possible in human history. But it hasn't always been a smooth ride. There have been bumpy patches along the way. So this was a slide that Dries showed in his keynote at DrupalCon Barcelona talking about a slowdown in business that some Drupal agencies and service firms experienced in 2015. He attributed this phenomena to the Osborne effect, where consumers know that a new version of a product is right around the corner and they hold off on purchasing the current version, leading to a drop in sales. And I think there's definitely something to that, but based on the conversations I've had with other Drupal agency owners over the last year and what I've personally seen in the market, I think the situation is a little bit more complex than that. So in preparation for this presentation, I reached out to a whole bunch of agencies in the Drupal ecosystem, ranging in size from well over 100 employees to very small, five person or less companies. I ended up talking to people from over a dozen companies based in the United States, Latin America, Europe, and India to really try and get a feel for what they were seeing in the market. And some of those folks got pretty real with me, which was pretty awesome. So as we get further in the presentation, I'm gonna attribute quotes, but for the first part, I'm gonna kind of anonymize some of them because I'm not really sure even though folks were mostly happy to be on the record, I'm not sure they would necessarily want some of these quotes associated with them. So when I asked various firms about the challenges that they experienced in 2015, I got an interesting mix of responses. One said, this question made me pause. Maybe it's because I've been out of the USA. Maybe it's because I've been lucky. But 2015 didn't seem slower challenging. Another person said, we've been feeling the price pressure and coupled that with the unreasonable and my humble opinion, salary inflation that top Drupal talent is receiving, it doesn't leave much margin for operating the business. Someone else said, I agree that 2015 was tough. However, I disagree with the implication that 2015 was particularly tough for Drupal companies. Our problems had nothing to do with Drupal, its commoditization, Drupal H shenanigans, and so on. Another person said, 2015 ended up being, ended up as the best year in our history, so hard to comment about rough times last year. There are tough times out there, we can feel that. Project diversification has moved out the rough spots. While we had positive revenue growth in 2015, the sales pipeline was soft. The bottom suddenly dropped out of the Drupal 7 market in Q2 and few clients were ready yet to invest in Drupal 8. And finally, we've experienced the chilly winds that have blown across the Drupal sales ecosystem over the last few months, which has resulted in a slowdown in getting lucrative new projects. So overall the consensus seemed to be that like, while there was still plenty of work out there for companies in the Drupal ecosystem, over the last year or so sales been a little harder than they used to be, particularly for firms that were set up to handle larger sized projects. Clearly something has changed, but what? Was it the Osborn effect? If we saw a sales slowdown in 2015, leading up to the release of Drupal 8, we should be seeing sales pick up now that the software's been out for six months, right? And certainly there are lots of people out there building sites in Drupal 8, as Drew's again mentioned in his keynote yesterday. There are twice as many Drupal 8 sites at this point than there were at a similar point in the Drupal 7 lifecycle. He pointed out that it can take up to a year following a major Drupal release before the number of new projects really takes off. And again, I think there's a lot of truth to that, but again, I think it's only part of the answer. The folks I've talked to are seeing some challenges in selling Drupal 8 projects, in part because of the additional overhead required to port necessary modules. We're in the midst of 3D8 projects and they're all going over budget because even basic aspects of Drupal are broken. It's not just a learning curve thing, it wasn't ready for market, and the community doesn't seem to have the time or the will to port major modules. D8 sales are tough right now, but not impossible. We are not allowing D7 to D8 module upgrades to be a blocker in the sales process. We port most modules for free. We will not do this forever, but right now we are actively continuing to invest cash in the D8 project and porting modules so we gain the needed traction over the next few months. We wanted to get ourselves out there as experts before the marketplace gets cluttered with competition. Getting D8 out the door in October made that goal easier. Now I can start convincing clients that they can build their sites in D8. I don't have to juggle D8 community contribution time with off hours, we just do that contribution as part of paid client work because the client needs that functionality. So again, based on the conversations I've had, there's currently, it feels like there's roughly maybe a 25% additional overhead cost associated with a D8 project between module upgrades and the learning curve. Now, most firms are absorbing at least some of that cost and it will certainly go down over time, but right now it's making D8 a slightly harder sell for many customers. And if it really is gonna take at least another six months for D8 to really hit its stride, on top of the extraordinarily long development cycle that we've already seen, I think it's certainly worth asking how many customers are gonna decide that D8 isn't worth the wait and move on when it's time to upgrade their site. I mean, a worst case scenario, we could see a long slow attrition of D8 customers, much like the ancient Roman Empire, which was in decline for literally hundreds of years following its peak in the first century AD. It's very easy for us to look back now and with the benefit of historical perspective to see when and where the empire started its decline, but because it collapsed so slowly over an incredibly long time, things were still pretty good for most citizens of Rome during most of that time. So the question is, how will we know when or if we reach peak Drupal? How do we know it hasn't happened already? What metrics do we use to measure the health of the Drupal project and its business ecosystem? So the Drupal Association put that question out there a couple months ago, talking about the metrics that they currently track, as well as the things that other open source projects do to track their health. Activity on Drupal.org, like comments and commits created each month, are tracked and reported as is project usage and statistics from third parties like built with. When you look at those statistics, you get some interesting, if frustratingly incomplete data points. So Drupal core project usage has steadily climbed over the last few years, but traffic and activity on Drupal.org has slowly declined since its peak in early 2012, year after the release of Drupal 7. But, maybe that decline is being offset by increased activity on third party sites like GitHub and Stack Exchange. We simply don't know. Likewise, North American Drupal con attendance, after skyrocketing over the first few years has been pretty much flat since 2012, hovering around 3,100 to 3,300 to 10 days. But, maybe some of those folks are going to other events, like the large regional camps, bad camp, nice camp, mid camp, et cetera, that have sprung up around the country. Maybe they're going to industry specific or marketing events. Again, we don't really know. And, well for many years, we've looked at these kinds of community oriented statistics to get a sense for the pulse of Drupal. What if what we're seeing right now is that Drupal is actually doing really, really well, but it's being increasingly used and adopted by organizations who don't participate in what has historically been understood to be our community. Regardless, it seems pretty apparent that we're no longer seeing the kind of hockey stick growth and community contribution that the project experienced between 2008 and 2012. Things have leveled off. And, the challenge at this point is to continue to ensure that we're continuing to see new talent entering the Drupal ecosystem at a level sufficient to keep the project moving forward, innovating, and not stagnating like the Romans did. So, in my DrupalCon Barcelona talk, I talked a little bit about the issue of commoditization, where the more similar the products or services tend to be from a buyer's point of view, the more likely it is that they'll go with the cheapest option. And, up until fairly recently, Drupal Services and in particular Expert Drupal Services commanded a high premium in the marketplace because there wasn't enough talent to meet demand. The Drupal ecosystem largely consisted of boutique firms, many of whom were able to form direct relationships with very large clients, because they offered services that larger agencies weren't able to provide. Well, those agencies eventually realized that they kinda need to get on a ball with this whole Drupal thing. And, so what we've seen now is that very large consulting firms, SIs, and ad agencies have now built up their own Drupal teams and formed relationships with offshore partners to provide capacity for their clients. Some of the existing boutique agencies in the Drupal ecosystem have merged with others to form larger agencies or have been acquired by larger players in the market. In addition, the overall quality of Drupal Development Services has increased to the point where even less experienced firms are often good enough for many development projects and customers see less value in paying more to hire a firm or a consultant with more expertise. These customers may not care whether or not the firm they hire is involved with the community. They're really primarily interested in whether they can execute on time and on budget. Also, now that Drupal has become such a vital part of the online infrastructure, so many companies and organizations, they've realized that in many cases, they need to build their own in-house teams instead of assuming the risk and expense of leaving it to an outside vendor. Again, many of those in-house teams are probably not incentivized to engage with our community. The result is that what many agencies of the traditional agencies in Drupal ecosystem have seen is that there's been a downward pressure in rates for Drupal services at the same time that rates for experienced Drupal talent has remained high. So I've been talking a lot about issues specific to Drupal, but the reality is not just Drupal agencies that are dealing with uncertainty right now. David Baker, who provides business consulting services for creative agencies of all shapes and sizes, blogged back in March that he had been getting more calls than usual from agency principals who are nervous about their businesses. So there's a few factors going on. First is uncertainty about the economy and the fallout from the inevitable burst of the tech bubble, right? Many Drupal agencies do a lot of work with companies in the startup space, and some startups like Acquia, Pantheon, PlatformSH, and others provide essential support for the Drupal project. It seems to be a pretty open secret, right, that the tech sector is way overvalued right now, and companies like Twitter are struggling to unlock their value. It seems pretty clear that the end of the tech bubble is in sight. When you combine that with a slowdown in the economic recovery that we've seen over the last few years, and the fact that other traditionally strong sectors like energy are struggling, it's no surprise that there's uncertainty in the marketplace. And then there's this guy. So you might laugh, but regardless of your political affiliation, there's no question that the fact that we're headed into a general election with a candidate who has at least a 40% chance of getting elected, and who's demonstrated that he's willing to say just about anything to get attention for himself is gonna cause some uncertainty in the marketplace, especially if the right race tightens as we get into the fall, and people start worrying about things like whether we're gonna get into a trade war with China or whether the US is gonna default on its debt if this gentleman is elected. Bottom line is that for a wide variety of reasons, a lot of people are feeling like there's a lot of uncertainty right now. And things like sales aren't as easy as they used to be. We can no longer assume that business will be just walking in the door, which means that we all need to work harder at differentiating ourselves from our competition. And I think that's actually a really good thing. It's a sign of maturity in the marketplace. Again, as David Baker says, times like this force agencies to do some really good things. One, being more disciplined in running their businesses, understanding their businesses like they never had before. How do we make money? What levers do we pull to achieve and impact various results? Spending less time on marketing efforts that don't result in a tangible return on investment. And finally, deciding why they exist. And it's that last question that I wanna spend the rest of this presentation focusing on. We spend a lot of time as companies and organizations thinking about what we do and how we do it and how we can do it better. But less frequently do we ask ourselves why we're doing it. I mean, the flip answer is right because getting a paycheck is what puts a roof over my head and food on my table. But I think we can all agree that's not enough. There's a lot of different ways to make money and I'm assuming that everyone who's in this room is here by choice. So let's talk a little bit about that. Couple of folks I talked to said that when they started their companies, one of the big motivators was to build a place where they wanted to work every day. Amy at Hook 42 says, when Kristen and I first talked about starting Hook 42, we talked about why we should run our own company versus working for someone else. In a nutshell, we are both ethically sound hard workers who like to be involved with the community. We've felt the company we create should amplify and extend those values while not killing ourselves or each other through overwork. Todd at Four Kitchen says, the founding web chefs wanted to build a company that they would want to work for, a company that respects and empowers its team, a company where people are happy, challenged by their work and inspired to improve, a company where everyone has a say in its mission, values, purpose and goals, a company that helps its clients succeed, a company where we make things and contribute our time and effort back to the community as a whole. Other folks said that their core motivation was helping others be successful. Kristoff at Pranovic says, grow and help grow is our company motto. It stands for our commitment to personal development and growth. It's pretty much how we built the company, taking in young motivated people and helping them become part of a community of knowledge sharing professionals. Lucas heading at M-TECH says, the vision is to run a Drupal shop from Nicaragua, find, recruit, train and provide employment for a few nationals and provide some much needed jobs to folks while also filling the global shortage of skills, skill Drupal talent. So, knowing what you do and why you do it is essential, but so is being able to communicate that vision to others. Now understand that better, I'd like to take a look back at the 41st President of the United States, George Herbert Walker Bush. Before launching his 1988 campaign for president, a friend of Bush's had urged him to spend several days at Camp David thinking through his plans for his prospective presidency, to which Bush has said to a reply in exasperation, oh, the vision thing. As president, George Bush was widely seen as a pragmatic caretaker president who lacked a unified and compelling long-term theme in his efforts. Even though he garnered 80% of the public support after the Gulf War, the economy faltered in the second half of his term and he was handily beaten by Bill Clinton, who in contrast to Bush, ran an incredibly optimistic and visionary campaign promising a new beginning for America. As conservative columnist, George Will, wrote at the time, he does not say why he wants to be there, so the public does not know why it should care if he gets his way. Likewise, companies are most effective when we can communicate who we are and why we are here. So whose job is it to make sure that happens? I would argue that this is one of the most important things that the CEO, the principal, or the other executive leader of your organization can do. And it's hard because especially when you're starting out, the principle of a company often ends up doing everything that needs to be done to keep the company moving, essentially wearing all the hats. But as your company grows and matures, you need to be able to give some of those hats to other people and focus on a few key tasks. You probably still have to put on other hats from time to time as needed, but your job should really be to reinforce the company's vision and values, hold the rest of leadership accountable for their jobs and for the goals of the company, serve as the public face of the company and accept ultimate responsibility for the company's actions. As Harry Truman famously put it, the buck stops here. Having values, principles, and emission or vision help answer the questions of what a company does, why it does it, and how it does it. So a mission is a usually brief and aspirational statement describing what it is that the company seeks to do. The difference between a mission statement and a vision statement is that a mission statement focuses on a company's present state while a vision statement focuses on a company's future. Some companies tend to blend these statements and in most cases, that's fine. Values are the things that you believe and then prioritize in your business above everything else. These might be things like quality, integrity, et cetera. Principles, which I discussed in length in Barcelona last year, are designed to help answer the question of how a company does things and what criteria they should use to make business decisions. They are very often tied together with the company's values. So mission, vision, values, principles can take many forms, right? Companies can choose to have all some or none of them. What's important is that there's an easy way for people to understand what the company is about and its approach. It's usually part of the employee handbook or field guide, often on the website as well. And this is, to be really clear, this is different from like your tagline or your company profile. So for example, Google has a mission statement and a list of 10 things we know to be true. Amazon has a mission statement and a set of 14 leadership principles. Netflix has nine core values and then defines its culture through seven aspects as defined in a 124 slide PowerPoint presentation. It's wonderful though. Apple, do you know that Apple has no publicly defined corporate mission, vision or value statement? That's kind of brilliant though because like we think we all know what Apple's values are and why they are but they've kind of let the public decide that for them and they've been able to get away with it in a way that very few others can. So for the companies that I talked to, the same kind of thing was true. Different companies articulate their purpose in different ways. So I asked, do you have a mission, vision, purpose or values? Todd at Four Kitchen says, all of the above. He didn't really, he said a lot more than that but that's just a bit of the quote I'm giving you. There we go. John at chapter three says, yes, we have a firm set of values that we bring to everything we do. Jeff at phase two, yes, we have vision, purpose, aka mission, values. Mauricio at Agaric says, no, we don't have a written mission, purpose, values and our principles but we're a cooperative and we work under the seven cooperative principles. Paul at CTI says, yes, we have a mission, become a leading digital services group and a mantra. We help our clients succeed online. So going back to the 1992 presidential campaign, let's talk a little bit about purpose. First of all, raise your hand if you know who this person is. That's what I thought. So this is Admiral James Stockdale. He was selected by independent billionaire candidate, Ross Perot, to be his running mate. Stockdale was actually one of the most decorated veterans of the Vietnam War but he had no political experience whatsoever. Perot had picked Stockdale earlier in the campaign as kind of a provisional running mate who would be replaced before the general election but he actually never got around to doing that. So as a result, Stockdale ended up appearing in the nationally televised vice presidential debate opposite Al Gore and Dan Quayle with almost no advance notice or preparation. He had not even had the opportunity to have a conversation with Perot beforehand to understand what his political positions were. So as a result, Stockdale is best known for beginning his opening statement in the debate with the questions, who am I? Why am I here? And you know, if you've been able to provide a convincing answer to those questions, then he might have actually helped his ticket. Instead, he came across in the debate as unfocused, confused, disoriented. He asked the moderator to repeat a question at one point because he didn't have his hearing aid turned on. That didn't help. And Phil Hartman did this devastating impression of him on Saturday Night Live that weekend and in the end, it just ended up reinforcing the public perception that the Perot campaign had no idea what it was doing, which could have been avoided had it been able to provide a strong statement of purpose. So this is a little game I like to play. It's called What's Your Mission? And I'm gonna put up a mission statement. If you think you know what company's mission statement is, just like shout it out, it's fine. All right, to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Who's that? Okay, that is correct. That is Google. All right, here's another easy one. Nope, hang on, there we go. No. I've already given you the clue. You know that it's not Apple because they don't have one, right? To be Earth's most customer-centric company to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might wanna buy online. Amazon, if that's correct. To give, ooh, sorry about that. Having some slide issues. There we go. To give everyone the power to create and share ideas and information instantly without barriers. Sorry, what are they there? Facebook? Facebook, Twitter? Sorry, which one? The answer's Twitter. All right, empower every person and every organization on the planet to achieve more. I hear LinkedIn, what else do I hear? It's Microsoft. All right, here's for this. There's a delay built into the fade effect. There we go. We make the world's daily habits inspiring and entertaining. Anyone? Ha ha ha ha ha. It's not Snapchat. It's not Tinder. So, this is actually Yahoo. So, at least I think this is Yahoo's current mission statement. It was when I was putting these together, the slides together two months ago. But the thing about Yahoo is they've actually had about two dozen different mission statements over the years and so it's really hard to know for sure and if you know anything about the history of Yahoo, that makes sense, right? So, let's move on and talk a little bit about values. So, this is again another kind of guessing game. So, there was once a famous company that advertised these four core values. I won't read the whole thing, but it's like communication, respect, integrity, excellence. Anyone want to take a guess? What famous company this is? Enron. So, yeah, despite having integrity as one of their core values, Enron used a variety of deceptive bewildering and fraudulent accounting services to make the company appear a lot more profitable than it actually was, which in turn created a spiral effect where each quarter of corporate officers would have to perform more and more financial deception to create the illusion of billions of dollars in profit while the company was actually losing tons of money. Chief financial officer, Andrew Fastow, personally directed the team, which created thousands of off-book companies and accounts and then manipulated the deals to provide himself, his family, his friends, with hundreds of millions of dollars in guaranteed revenue at the expense of the corporation he worked for and its stockholders. The executives and insiders that Enron knew about the offshore accounts that were hiding losses for their company, but the investors knew nothing of this. At the same time, even though another one of Enron's core values was we treat others as we would like to be treated, the company's traders were actively involved in manipulating the energy market in California, illegally cutting power to the state and causing artificial rolling blackouts in order to keep prices inflated. So Enron's CEO, Ken Lay, was fully aware of these practices. In fact, he bragged to the chairman of the California Power Authority that in the final analysis, it doesn't matter what you crazy people in California do because I got smart guys who can always figure out how to make money. So the point here is that despite Enron's statement of its core ethical values, senior leadership actions created a culture of greed that encouraged unethical behavior at all levels of the organization. To put it another way, the stated mission, vision and values must be aligned with the actual culture of the company or else they're just lip service. So Dave at Media Current put this really well. He said, values are a byproduct of culture. Nobody remembers values. People remember how they feel. Similarly, Michael at Duo Consulting said, you know, when they were putting together their values, we had members of the management team pick out key people that exemplify the culture and talk about why and see if those attributes are in our values, confirming those values. So at AMAZ, Michael says, leaders are onboarded by other leaders during multiple weeks so that we can better create new leaders from existing employees that they understand our values and principles from the ground up, keeping these things tied together. Chris, who I see there from Digital Bridge said, core value fit is one of the areas we evaluate candidates on formally during our interviewing process. Employees are also evaluated against each of the company values annually as part of their performance review. Jeff from Phase Two said something very, very similar. It's part of the hiring and evaluation process. Several folks said that. Amy from Hook 42, at our quarterly company meetings, Kristen and I check in with the team about how the company is tracking to the core values through our decisions. At any time the team lets us know when we need a course correct or if we make decisions that may not align to our values. So this was a cool thing we did at Palantir at the end of last year. Our team actually took a survey of everyone asking what word they would use to describe our culture and then we took all those words and put them in a tag cloud together. David at Media Current did something very similar. Hi, Dave. And another tool that we and other companies use is a service called Know Your Company, which is a really great particular for either full or partially distributed companies. It's essentially a survey that goes out via email three times a week. On Monday it asks, what are you doing this week? On Tuesday or Wednesday there's a company question. It could be anything from like, is there an ideal client that you would like us to work with? To, is there something that we could improve at the company? Friday it's a social question like this one here, which is, you know, what are you looking forward to doing outside this spring? People have the option to make their responses viewable by anyone or just the leadership team if they choose. This is a really great way of just kind of keeping kind of constant tabs on that company culture and having the opportunity to reinforce those values. I always fill this out and, you know, if there's an opportunity to bring, you know, one of our principles or part of our mission into that, I do so. So this is a really great tool for understanding your culture and, you know, making sure that, you know, you're not just a bunch of smart guys who's screwing over the state of California. So the other way that companies express their values is through principles. As I said before, principles and values are usually very closely aligned. Jeff at phase two says, we try to use our values as guiding principles for major decisions, but also when we address how we roll out major initiatives, e.g. reorganization that we incorporate. Paul at CTI Digital, everything stems from the principles. Hiring is a crucial part. In many ways we are more keen on identifying candidates aligning with our principles before considering technical ability. Paul again, we reference these principles constantly, particularly when considering the relative merits of opportunities of potential clients, projects we are looking for, work that underpins our long-term goals, right? You know, and I, we are very selective at Palantir about the kinds of clients that we work with. And if someone comes to us and sometimes, even if it's a huge, very lucrative project, if it doesn't fit with our company's values, if it doesn't fit with the culture of our company, we will say no. And that's the key. I mean, these values, these principles, they have to take precedence over everything else. So where do they come from? How do you develop these things for your company? So Michael at AMAZE says, they were created during multiple meetings with all the management members of the company, but they somehow crystallized for more than two to three years. Paul at CTI, they were produced by the senior management team, constituted of C-level and department heads, a good representative body. We did a lot of post-it notes, workshops, and quickly, two weeks, arrived at a consensus. We all kind of knew what it should be. This was more cementing it. Okay, so I apologize. I had a great quote from Todd that did not make it in. But essentially, I'll just tell you what they did. So at Four Kitchens, one of the things that they did is they had, they manage everything, everything at their company, all of their company documentation, values, principles, all that way of the web chef stuff. They actually have it all managed through GitHub. So you can actually go in and check out and edit and review and submit pull requests and all the fun stuff. And so they were working with an earlier set, and so they had those out there. They also had all company meeting where they got together and had a very big discussion about the values and principles of the company, took all of that back in, and then basically went through a process where they distilled it down, summarized it, and presented it back out to the company. And I believe they've blogged about that process as well. Sort of similarly at Palantir was really interesting. We've had our values and principles for a while, but one of the things that we were working on was the vision statement. And it was one of those things, Tiffany and I, the two owners of the company, we were having, we've been thinking about this. We knew we needed to articulate it. We knew we knew why we did this. We knew we knew where we were going, but we were having a hard time putting it into a simple succinct statement. And we went around and back and forth, and this was honestly over a period of about two years, we'd take a stab at like, is this it? Well, yeah, but not quite. It doesn't feel right. It's gotta feel right. And so finally we got to a point where we were literally just, we were bouncing back, texting each other back and forth, and we finally, we banged it out. We got to the point where like, this feels right. And then we shared that with the other members of the leadership team and the other members of the leadership were like, yes, thank you. This is what I feel like we have known forever, but have not been able to say. And it is really important as your company grows that you're able to, when you bring new people in, if when you're very small, it's pretty easy to have a shared understanding of who we are and what we do and why we're doing it. As your company grows bigger and you bring in folks who you don't know so well, it's really important to have everyone on the same page. So if we can get through these buggy slides, there we are. All right, here's what I'm gonna do because I had an amazing quote. Again, this is from Todd and what happened was it didn't get added in here. This is the correct slide with the wrong so I'm gonna read it out of here. So Todd, for folks who don't know, Todd is a wonderful, wonderful gentleman and when he was very excited when I reached out to him and he kind of gave me a novel and I really appreciated it and he gave me a really amazing poetic statement here at the end. So here's what it was. No company can succeed without a mission, purpose and values. I could rattle off cliche metaphors all day long. They're the ship's mast to which we tie ourselves to in a typhoon. They're the incantations we meditate on in times of stress, et cetera. But for me, our values are our identity. When we're stripped of everything, our clients, financial reserves, perhaps even our team, they still hold true. During times of existential threat, we must know who we are and what we stand for. A shared understanding of our purpose and direction will guide us through anything. Our values say, this is who we are. No matter what happens, we will still be who we are. Nothing can change that. Without values, we have nothing to cling to in tough times. Without values, we are merely a paycheck delivery system. If anyone starts to doubt that if the paycheck is actually coming, we become nothing at all. We will cast ourselves to the wind. So with that, thank you very much for listening today. This is a list. Thank you to all the people who helped out with responses to this. You can follow me on Twitter at GDMET. You can follow Palantir at Palantir. And I don't know how much time we have left, but I think we have some time for Q&A. If anyone wants to come up, there's a mic in the center of the room. Hi, Dave. Thank you, George. This feels really odd. Talking to a microphone 10 feet away from you. I know. But I will for the video. Thank you. So with culture, a lot of people referenced how when they're hiring, they look for people that are a fit. And I think you and I even may have touched on this. There's also, it seems like a danger with that because there's sort of a likes, higher likes, and a sameness sort of that begins to resonate throughout the culture. That becomes a lack of diversity. So how do you balance and encourage sort of diversity or what did you listen to or find? Or is that at top of mind for people that you talk to? And what are your thoughts on that? Absolutely. And I could probably do a whole presentation on that topic alone. And so what I think, and I absolutely agree. If you hire people who are like you, you're gonna end up with a lot of people like you. And we have an awareness now. We're maybe slowly starting to come to an understanding in the tech industry what a lot of other folks have known for a long time. Which is that having a diverse team is not just like the right thing to do. Diverse teams also perform better, right? And so you want to be able to have people who are able to approach problems from different perspectives and experiences. And in our case, that is something that we've actually incorporated into our goals when we've developed a very strong diversity statement that we use when we are hiring. So we do make that a priority, right? And we make sure, we check our values to make sure that they're not, you know, being, you know, that they're not exclusionary, right? So if I go back, and this was something I talked about in Barcelona, you know, for example, a lot of tech companies like, you know, big tech companies, you know, Amazon, for example, have these really strong principles about how, you know, they're relentlessly obsessive, you know, over achieving success. And, you know, they'll prioritize it over everything else. And, you know, so what that does, the consequence of that is that you end up with a lot of people who, you know, are in a position where they don't go home at night, right? They work long hours. And you know what, that doesn't work for everybody. If that's what you're hiring for, you're gonna end up with a certain kind of individual, right? And, hey, maybe if that's what your company goal is, fine, right? But for a lot of other companies, I think it's really important. So one of our values, for example, is flexibility, flexible, healthy workplace. And, you know, so we prioritize things like that to make sure that we're able to hire people who don't feel like they have to give us all of their waking hours, because we do believe that what people do outside of work and having the flexibility to adjust schedules, you know, for children or whatever, that's really important. And that's gonna make them be awesome when they're at work. Any other questions? Wondering your thoughts specifically on values between balancing kind of what you are currently in the collective wisdom of what everybody thinks you are versus more aspirational values. That's a really good question. So there is a way to kind of split up your values. And this is, or actually in our case, we've split up our principles, right? So we have core principles and we have strategic principles. And so the core principles are the things that never change no matter what, right? Like that's the core of who we are. And then there are the strategic principles and the strategic principles are these are the things, these are the priorities for us right now, but we're gonna revisit these every couple of years and make sure that they're still on track. So I actually, so one of the stories is like, for example, there was a company and one of the, some of the research I did, they were talking about whether or not quality should be a core value, right? And they realized that they actually didn't wanna make quality a core value because they knew that in their market, speed was going to be critical for them. And if they were always prioritizing quality over speed, it was not gonna be, it was something they aspired to, but it wasn't gonna be realistic for them. So what they did is they took quality and they made it one of those strategic values. So it's like, we're gonna prioritize these other values, we're gonna prioritize speed to market or whatever. But when and where we can, we're gonna make it, we're gonna prioritize quality as much as possible and that enables us to do things like professional development for our employees and stuff like that so we can build that ethos of quality within our organization. Anyone else? Hello. Hello, George. So question on life cycle, the companies of research, life cycle and when they started documenting some of these mission values, principles, like where in the timeframe did that happen? Cause you had a great slide that showed early on if you're the guy wearing all those hats. Yeah. Your vision might be, well I have a vision to make payroll this month. Right. And then at some further point, you can start having more of these esoteric thoughts about mission, mission values, et cetera. So where did these companies do that? Well, hopefully vision isn't making payroll every month. Hopefully that's a goal, right? So most of the folks I talked to, and I didn't ask everyone that question, but most of the folks I talked to had started out with some, you know, some core ideas, whether they were values or a vision or whatever. They weren't necessarily articulated or written down or formalized or anything like that, but they started out with something like, this is why I want to do this, right? And I think it's not a factor of so much how long your company has been around, but really how large your company has become, right? And goes back to what I was saying before, you know, you can have, you know, when your company is fairly small and everyone knows each other and, you know, and maybe you all work in the same physical space, it's like super easy to make sure that everyone is, you know, has a shared understanding of what the company is about. As you grow larger and as you're hiring people who, you know, who you don't know already, right? Then it becomes more important to have as that hiring process to be able to go in and say, look, you know, this is who we are. This is what we're about and be able to communicate that. And I, you know, I don't have like a magic number for what that size would be. My gut probably says like, you really want to start getting that together probably by the time you're around 20, but that's just, you know, that's just, I'm taking a stab, right? I think it's probably different for different people. It depends on, you know, what you do. Yeah. Anyone else? Going once, going twice. Thank you all very much.