THE TENETS OF ATHENA
To know more about our culture
We’re a work in progress. As a company and as people, we don’t claim to be perfect. But we do and always will aspire towards ideals. We’ll keep evolving and getting #BetterThanYesterday and so will this document!
We aim to be a powerful force for good. We find our purpose in making lasting, large-scale contributions to society.
This compels us to disregard boundaries and synthesize what others may try to balance or simply dismiss as opposites: art and science, capital and impact, truth and compassion, theory and practice, Eastern and Western perspectives, ambition and humility.
With every challenge we face and overcome, we improve our capability and resolve to make a positive impact.
This document outlines the ideals we believe in and what we appreciate in the people we work with.
If you’re seeking to work and grow with us, we encourage you to assess how closely you can align yourself with our culture. We look for people who can understand and adapt to things that are great, and work with us to improve things that aren’t.
Excellence & Harmony Both go together. We do not compromise one for the other. Both go together.
We do not compromise one for the other. We model ourselves after an orchestra. We believe the work we do is like a great composition. We bring together people who are individually extraordinary at their craft and highly effective in producing a symphony when working together.
Every great ensemble needs great players on every instrument. Our team is an intellectually diverse ensemble of people who bring their own skills, aspirations, and priorities.
That said, we know what distinguishes improvisation from amateur play is great craftsmanship – a deep understanding of the craft and command over one’s tools. We hold ourselves and everyone to high standards of craftsmanship and performance.
Collectively, we hold incredible respect for individual time, effort, and talent. For example, deadlines for us are sacrosanct. We treat each deadline like a public performance at a global orchestra. Missing deadlines as individuals means we slow down and hold up the entire team.
We’re building an identifiably humane organization – a team of individuals who find their success in the success of the company and hence care deeply about it. When such people need us, we also go out of our way to make exceptions for them.
Growth: We’re young and understand that skills and early efforts compound over time. We also consider work as the most incredible instrument of self-development.
Hence, we’re hungry to do more and to do better. We wish to accomplish multiples of what a typical large organisation would in any given time. Think about staging a performance at an elite stage in a month, while another orchestra would take a year.
And we believe in being absolutely ready before we put on a public performance. This manifests for us and our team as accelerated growth and personal development.
We are conscious of the trade-offs here – we work hard, and sometimes we practise our craft beyond the designated rehearsal hours.
That said, we disproportionately reward disproportionate performance. And we provide disproportionate opportunities to disproportionate potential.
Thinking Long Term: We think long-term. That means discipline and effort today in the service of a successful future. We understand that thinking short-term means getting swayed by trends or relying on luck.
We’re also an optimistic bunch. We understand that people who think tomorrow is going to be worse than today would not delay gratification, which means they do not put in their best efforts in the present.
We love the process of discovery and making mistakes in rehearsal. We use our judgement to balance speed and perfection. This means we start early, work through limited information, and ambiguity to consistently converge on clarity over time.
In any human enterprise, some people end up performing better and growing further than others. Over time, every culture is able to reflect back and articulate what has made some people thrive.
This section outlines what we love in people we work with.
Drive toward Mastery
We love people who understand their part in the ensemble, are committed to mastering their craft with discipline, dedication, and extreme ownership for themselves. This translates into a deep-rooted ambition to be exceptional at what they do.
We love a combination of capability, commitment, and creativity. We demand a combination of capability and commitment. If you’re consistently short on one of the 2, you will not go very far. For people who have all 3, we’re patient even if there’s a temporary dip in performance.
We love people who understand that the stakes are high. We understand that there are always constraints, and the right thing to do may not always be clear. We love people who do their personal best no matter what and who use their judgement to do the right thing every time.
A winning mindset
We love people who are excited about their work and display a “bias for action.” We understand that genuine excitement manifests as a combination of joy and a desire to do.
We love people who carry a winning mindset. This means getting better with adversity, rehearsing today for tomorrow’s performance. It’s the sole transferable skill that permeates disciplines, fields of work, and defines long-term individual success. It’s a decisive distinguishing factor in who goes further.
Humility & Intellectual Curiosity
We love a combination of curiosity and humility. If you can learn continuously even from people who you may not like, with zero entitlement, there’s no stopping you. We love people who have a relentless pursuit of growth and absorb every feedback in stride.
We love people who associate with, contribute to, and learn from other high performers, and don’t feel threatened by them. We love people who can learn fast and effectively apply those learnings.
We love people who think deeply, who critique prevailing assumptions and suggest better approaches. We’re not fans of people challenging existing practices with limited or partial understanding and without suggestions for improvement.
We love people who go out of their way to help colleagues from other teams – who look at it as an opportunity to learn something, who understand that building long-term reciprocal relationships is essential to success.
We love people who can balance idealism and pragmatism. We understand that our pursuit of ideals needs to be undertaken in the real world and that progress is more important than perfection.
Conviction
We like people who speak their minds respectfully.
We love people who demonstrate high levels of conviction toward the decisions made. It should not matter, once the arguments are made, if the decision favors their point of view or not.
We love independent thinkers – people who dare to make up their own mind and not be swayed by group think.
We love people who combine the courage and elegance of giving their peers feedback directly, who can read a room and adapt their communication style so they can work effectively with different people. We strongly discourage politics or involving people who aren’t relevant. Such people surface themselves over time and don’t go very far.
We love people who are courageous. We understand that life is unpredictable, that everyone struggles to cope at times and that everyone is afraid of something. We love people who take action despite their fears.
We know everyone makes mistakes. We love people who have the grit to acknowledge and fix their mistakes. We as a firm are equally committed to acknowledging and fixing our mistakes. We dislike willing negligence.
In every culture or social setting, a few people step up naturally. They do so not just by exceptional performance, but also through investment in others. We believe in leaders who are not anointed, but in those who emerge as obvious choices due to their contributions.
Leaders sincerely invest time and effort in coaching and mentoring others.
Leaders act first on behalf of the entire company, then for their team, and at last for themselves. This means pushing their teams without being protective, working on the team’s and their own areas of growth, and recognizing talent outside their teams.
Extreme ownership is a prerequisite to leadership. Leaders never say “that’s not my job.” It means being resourceful, enterprising, and exuding a drive for getting things done and investing in others.
A great crafts person can identify the right problems and define them correctly. A leader must marshal resources and people beyond their own craft to solve problems.
Leaders demonstrate affiliation with the company in their behavior. They independently undertake corrective interventions when a discussion isn’t productive, getting the group back on track and moving forward positively and productively.
We love open interdepartmental discussions and interdisciplinary inputs. We defer to the person with the best ideas in the room, not necessarily the designated expert on the topic. Leadership means having great ideas, communicating them well, and being able to execute them cohesively. It also means recognizing great ideas wherever they come from, and appreciating the unique intellectual gifts and lived experiences of all stakeholders.
Leaders demonstrate the ability to function independently and exercise judgment to ask for help when they struggle.
