and the startup ecosystem is like the fruit flies
of business.
We have discovered all kinds of things because
our companies have very short shelf life.
They come and go quickly.
So we've run far more experiments per human being
than is normal in any other business context.
So we have kind of,
through trial and error,
discovered a set of principles that really work well.
And it's a very important thing to do.
It's funny,
Silicon Valley,
we don't talk about ourselves as having a
management system because it feels boring.
And so we celebrate,
you know,
the wild and crazy guys doing the whatever.
But if you have an x-ray machine and you look at
how Silicon Valley style startups are organized,
they all have the exact same corporate governance.
They all have the exact same board structure.
The way that financing rounds are done with
venture capital are done exactly the same.
Venture capital firms are organized in the exact same.
Venture capital firms are organized in the exact same.
And so it's a very rigid management system
that produces this real flourishing in the ecosystem.
And it has its own principles.
I don't want to do a whole day just on that.
But a couple of them are, one,
we insist that every employee has a stake in the outcome.
Has a what?
A stake in the outcome.
And of course,
we accomplish that through equity ownership,
although in a public sector,
there are other ways to accomplish that,
not financial.
But people have a real sense of ownership over what they do.
We build mission-oriented organizations
because if you're going to underpay people
and get them to work for you anyway,
they have to really believe the mission
of what you're trying to accomplish.
They have to get a sense of satisfaction from the work.
And in fact,
the research is very clear that most
rewards for work are not monetary,
but psychic rewards.
So you're actually paying people in
a currency that they appreciate more.
And then the other thing I think is really valuable is we
have a real sense of ownership and accountability culture.
You never hear a startup,
you know,
can you imagine a venture capital firm?
It writes me and makes it invest in my
company and they call me back later and say,
oh,
the firm had a bad quarter.
Can you give me some of that money back?
It's like,
well,
it's in my bank account now,
buddy.
So no,
this is my money.
But the inverse of that is if the startup fails,
like go read startup postmortems if you'd like.
We publish them all the time.
You never hear an entrepreneur say the company failed,
but it wasn't my fault.
Some middle manager screwed me or,
you know,
this other,
it's like somebody like the fact that it was my money
and I had this final say in how it was spent gave me a very
strong sense of responsibility for whatever happened.
And this is a learning going back to
the dawn of the scientific method.
If you can't fail,
you can't learn.
So that you see second and third time entrepreneurs often
have a dramatic improvement in the way they go about things.
It's very hard to accomplish in a corporate setting because
we've built organizations where we can't admit that we failed.
To your point,
we can't even get the truth passed up through the layers.
If you can't fail, you can't learn.
And so we actually deprive ourselves of that learning.
So those are just a few of the characteristics of
the way we build organizations in Silicon Valley.
And Silicon Valley is not the 50 square miles around my house.
It's really now spread to,
you know,
hundreds of cities around the world now
that follow this way of building companies.
So you can't just copy paste,
but those principles I think we can take inspiration from.