Integrity
Doing the right thing when nobody is watching, and standing behind the result when it turns out wrong. Trust is a courageous payment in advance, and integrity is what pays it back.
Our foundation
Six values. One word.
These are commitments: to the people who will trust us with their data, to each other, and to the work itself. We wrote them down so we can be held to them.
Mastery
The quality bar is ours to set, not the market's. Shipping something shallow early is the cheap way to be first and the expensive way to be trusted, so we would rather be late.
Passion
We are building the thing we wanted to exist and could not find. That is the engine, and it is why the hardest part of the architecture is scheduled first instead of last.
Advocacy
We are on the side of the person using this, and not of whoever would pay more for their attention. Choice, privacy, and the version of the product we would want pointed at our own lives.
Collaboration
No solo runs, and no quiet failures. What holds that together is how we treat each other when something goes wrong. Two ways of seeing the same truth:
The assumption that someone did their best, and showing them understanding from that place.Jupp
Even when you know they did not do their best, showing them understanding anyway.Tim
Transparency
Proactive honesty about things that matter, things that are difficult, and things we would rather avoid. It is the tool that keeps quality alive over time, and the foundation of a healthy culture around failure and error.
Where to check them
A value you cannot point to in the code is just a poster on a wall.
Every line on the right is a decision that costs us something, and together they are the shape of the product. That is the only place a value can be checked.
The ordinary way: Free, because advertisers are the ones paying.
Ours: Paid for by the people who use it. Nothing about you is sold, and nothing feeds advertising.
The ordinary way: What other people wrote to you, mined for what it says about them and built into a profile of them.
Ours: Only your side of it: who you spent a day with, who you had not called in a while.
The ordinary way: Your words train the model by default, and opting out is a settings page.
Ours: Nothing trains anything unless you offer it, and then only as anonymous features.
The ordinary way: A support desk that can open your account, so anyone who can compel them can too.
Ours: We hold no key. There is nothing for us to open, for a court, a buyer, or for you.
None of this is a policy that a later version of us could quietly change. It is architecture, and which parts of it are built is set out claim by claim on the privacy page.
In practice
Transparency is why our privacy page says what we have not built yet. Advocacy is why nothing about you is sold and nothing feeds advertising, even though that is the ordinary way an app like this gets paid for. Integrity is why we name the risks in our own plan rather than waiting for someone else to find them.