We’re working to make life on earth sustainable by showing the world it can be cheaper to mine the sky for energy rather than rip it out of the earth’s crust. This is the type of thing where if we don’t force it to happen now, it may not be achieved for a very long time – or even at all.
Our culture is designed to bring this to life as quickly as possible, and built on 3 main values:
- Reasoning from the ground up. Every task and project should be reasoned from what we know to be true upwards. Most things are made-up and have unnecessary barriers.
- Speed. Often misunderstood, but (1) speed begets speed, (2) compounds quickly, (3) is the greatest form of defensibility, (4) is energising to be around, and (5) is often the best way to save money. The standard pace is for chumps.
- Accountability. (1) Be accountable for your actions, (2) take it upon yourself to find the answers and force things into existence, (3) hold others to high standards.
Here’s some examples of what those values mean at Rivan:
- Do as you say. Easy to say, much harder to do. Being accountable builds great trust amongst your team, and is a two-way street you must work hard to uphold.
- Devils in the detail. The difference between surviving or not is not in the boardroom, but in a singular gasket failing or the 308th line in a HAZOP not being considered effectively.
- We take pride in our work. This means showing up consistently, never arriving late for meetings, taking extra care in our work, and helping others when they need a hand.
- We aim to speed up and de-risk every task and project against the status-quo. Why is this the way it currently is? What needs to be true for this to be half the time and cost?
- Every person, regardless of role, should have deep technical hands-on experience.
- We don’t plan to the nth degree. Planning gives a false sense of security that the future will bend to our will. The only way to make that happen is to do the actual work. Strategy is safe, inexpensive, and slow. Execution is risky, expensive and fast.
- Building great products is extremely difficult, and necessitates intense and hard work. When we need to, we start early and we stay late, other times we rest. It’s better to be at 100% for shorter periods than dragging along at 70% all the time.
- A lot of tasks we work on are complex and ambiguous. We break them down to their fundamental constituent parts, understand them, and influence each small area until we’ve solved the problem.
- Optimise for “directionally sound” solutions with the largest new information gained, not perfect solutions. New information enables quick action, perfect is slow and inaccurate.
- Rivan is built with smaller teams of exceptional highly-technical people, paid better, with more responsibility, and greater resources. This enables faster decision making and quality, deleting bureaucracy and excessive meetings.
- We spend as much time as possible directly delivering customer value in the form of a better product. Anything else should be minimised or deleted entirely.