Achieving objectives:

When we were a smaller company, I used to feel that values were fuzzy, intangible concepts that mattered less than, say, achieving the business milestones. However as we grew, I came to realize that the only way of achieving other objectives, such as the business milestones, were by following a certain set of values.

At the early stages of growth, everyone knows everyone and everything in the company, which makes it easy to keep things consistent. However, with growth comes distance and anonymity in the organization, so the only way to ensure consistency is through clearly-defined values.

Promoting values

Let me explain with specific examples.

One of the values that is dear to us is innovation. To us, innovation means constantly thinking of new ways of doing something. It is not just in terms of the products we make, but also in terms of how we support it, or sell it, or promote it, or track our progress. Although our company has had a near-death experience, yet innovation helped us fight our way through it and survive.

When our first product didn't take off, we experimented with a couple others and one of them achieved substantial traction. We pioneered the worlds largest mobile community (used by 50 mn users) and a powerful marketing platform for businesses (used by 25,000 businesses). When our direct sales approach didn't work well initially, we innovated and built out a large, nationwide indirect sales channel.

When we didn't have advertising resources, we developed the viral features of our product that drove it to over 50 mn users. When our support team was overwhelmed with repeat queries, we built self-help tools for customers to diagnose and fix their own issues. To us, innovation is essential not just for growth, but even for survival.

Another value that means a lot to us is entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship means being able to take risk, dealing with uncertainty, making decisions with incomplete information, and being resourceful. It sounds nice, but is hard to implement. It requires both the ability to march forward before all information becomes available, as well as, sometimes, the ability to withdraw when the new information negates that course of action.

It also means letting employees take a chance on new scenarios, and not penalizing or second-guessing them when it doesn't work out. Even as new processes and structures are introduced in a growing company, there should always be a room for resourceful and creative problem-solving. In the tech space, the risk of doing nothing at all is often greater than that of doing something.

The third value we live by is customer focus. We make the customers point of view central to everything we do. We always ask ourselves how is what we do benefiting the customer.

Clearly, every business is good to its customers, at least before the sale is closed, else it won't be in business very long. However, to us, being customer-centric also means admitting fault when were wrong, making amends wherever possible, refusing a sale if we don't think we can deliver, and always focusing on the relationship, not just the transaction.

Few companies are willing to admit fault, and even fewer will make amends, so customers really appreciate a simple sorry, combined with a make-good that reflects a genuine desire to prevent recurrence of such issues.