AbstractOps exists to enable our clients to move faster

Being fair is in your long-term self-interest — choosing short term outcomes is tempting, but life is long, and the world is small. Life is a multi-turn game.

We try to make fair decisions by considering the intersection of empathy and pragmatism.

In case the concept of fairness is still fuzzy, here's a litmus test. A fair decision is usually one where a disinterested third party, who has access to all the relevant facts, thinks is reasonable.

At first, we had "Ownership" here, but didn't love it, since a) it's generic as hell, and b) we realized that the precedent value to Ownership is Trust. You can be told "You're an Owner!" all you like, but if people keep micromanaging you, or if there is a lack of autonomy, it doesn't work.

You shouldn't ask for either forgiveness or permission. Instead, a trusting environment falls somewhere in the middle... ask your peers and managers for their thoughts on any thesis where you have conviction, to make sure you aren't missing anything. If so, run with it. This is the thoughtful way to break the mold.

AO becomes a generational company when you take risks and take initiative, especially with Type 2 decisions (those that are easy to reverse). We expect you to mess up once in a while, as long as you (and we as a company) learn something valuable from it.

We're enabling every startup, every company to embody kaizen; not just based on their own history and "knowledge graph" but — through transparency and better data — the experience of thousands of other companies in their shoes.

We don't reinvent the oval wheels, just the square ones. We reason from the first principles. We question current practices but without being iconoclastic. If the current "best practice" is solid based on logical reasoning, we codify it. If "market norms" make no sense, we question why it works that way by a) stress-testing assumptions, and b) coming up with a better solution.

Plus, curious people are just way more fun to be around. They're more fun to talk to, to learn from, and to grow together with.