We love principles.

We are doing so many new things as a company. What is possible is changing so quickly. Taking the existing playbook simply does not work. We must break down problems into their most fundamental elements, create principles, and then build up from these elements.

Principles force different parts of your brain, different parts of a team, different ideas to come into coherence with each other, and eventually reality.

Principles allow us to think clearly together as one organization, both humans and AIs.

Principles allow us to generalize today's work into something that compounds to all of accounting and compounds to a generational company.

On a micro-level, you can even have principles for a product (e.g., there are 3 rules of how this product works). On a macro-level, you can have principles for the whole company (e.g., this document on Operating Principles).

To compound is to make every unit of effort a multiplier for the next.

By design, Basis is itself a compound business. To win, our organization must compound as effectively as our strategy. The company must scale at a ridiculous rate, and the only way this is possible is if each of us can scale ourselves with the company. To do this we each:

Constantly improve. There is always room to improve. And, even if you are the perfect team member today, the company will have scaled by next week. Seek out feedback. Share feedback. Enjoy the process of improving.

Build systems. Help scale the company more than a linear function of your efforts. Think in systems. Better yet, think in systems that compound. Don't lose sight of the long-term for short-term results.

Reinvent our craft. Being the best engineer of 2024 is not the same as the best engineer of 2026. As AIs improve, constantly figure out how you can rethink how you do your work. Given how fast what is possible is changing, the opportunity for and rate of improvement is greater than ever.

Our mission is ridiculously ambitious. There is too much to do. We hire extremely talented people who crave ownership and give them agency and room to run with things.

Be a driver. Not a passenger. Agency stems from the belief that you have the power to change things and the will to follow through. Don't wait for someone else to notice. Take initiative, run through walls, make your own luck, just figure it out.

Go where you are needed most. The mission is too big and the terrain shifts too fast for anyone to stay put. The people who thrive focus on mission impact over their job description. Adaptability is what will make it possible to build something extraordinary together.

Own outcomes. Ownership means the buck stops with you. Ownership means you deliver outcomes. Most importantly, ownership means you feel the company's success and pain as your own.

It is not someone else's job, it is always yours.

When someone says "next week", ask "why not today?"

Left alone, organizations slow down. Meetings multiply. Urgency fades.

We win by moving the fastest and being the smartest. You may think you can either do it faster or do it better, but you can do it both faster and better. There is always alpha on the table. We just have to find it.

We cannot build generational overnight. We cannot arrive at the perfect idea today. But we can always get more done than we think. Urgency is a choice we make every day. It matters; speed compounds.

We believe there is often a best idea. You can feel when you have found the right abstraction. Relentlessly seek out the right idea, and do not settle for less.

The best ideas are almost always arrived at through discourse and interrogation. Take pride in getting to the best answer, not having the best answer. This team is composed of amazing people. Our collective brain power is more effective than any individual's.

Being right yourself is great. But it is an order of magnitude better to figure out how to get the right idea to emerge. Get good at the latter.

We succeed or fail as one team. To win, we must move quickly and compound together, which leaves no room for politics or zero-sum thinking.

Internally, reject scarcity. There's more ownership to go around, more problems to solve, more credit to share than any of us can capture alone. Reject the idea that for one to win, another must lose.

Externally, we do not view the economy as fixed. We are not here to replace either labor or software; we are creating an entirely new segment that expands the possibilities for accounting and economic decision-making.

Expand the frontier.