Thread Culture Deck

Hi.
Let me tell you a story.
Kieran O’Neill, CEO & co-founder, Thread

It was 2012 and myself and my co-founder Ben
and I were in the process of selling our
company. It had done pretty well, growing to
1.5 million users, and we had multiple
companies interested in buying it. Lucky for us
this was the second time we’d had a successful
exit between us.

During the sale process we went out for a beer
to discuss the future. What should we do next?
Start another company? Take a break? Build a
non-profit?

Somehow the shine of starting another
company “just because” had worn off. The first
time founder's dream of making the front page
of TechCrunch, raising funding or “going viral”
had lost its appeal.

Reflecting on the times we’d been most
fulfilled, there were three things that were
always present: 
1) Working on an idea that was audaciously
ambitious, that solved a problem we had
personally and could have a huge impact on the
world
2) As part of a team of people who were so
good we genuinely felt lucky to be there
3) Where the values of the group aligned with
our own, and made us more like the people we
wanted to be

As we finished up our drinks, we resolved that
we would start another company together. Not
to make money or because it’s cool to be a
founder, but to create an environment that
matched our idea of excellence: working on an
important problem, with a world-class team,
aligned by a shared set of principles that made
us all better.

Thread is that company, and we’re loving it.

We decided to make this culture deck not
because it’s trendy to do so, but for two
reasons:
 
1) To outline clearly what we uniquely stand for
as a company
2) To attract those who share our values, and
repel those who don’t
 
We’ve structured this deck into three parts to
align with the three key things that we found
made us fulfilled.

An audaciously ambitious mission

My co-founders and I are pretty normal guys
when it comes to clothes: we want to dress
well, but don’t really enjoy shopping. Being
honest, the thought of going to a busy
shopping street on a Saturday afternoon is
enough to make me shudder. The queueing,
overwhelming choice, pushy sales people…
Audaciously ambitious mission

Online is just as hard: with millions of options,
the choice is overwhelming. Which things will
suit me? Or fit the best? Or go with what I
already have?

We realised that some people out there loved
shopping and had amazing taste—stylists—so
why not connect them to normal guys so they
can dress better and avoid all this pain?

Clearly the challenge is scalability.
We had a crazy idea, though. What if you
combined human stylists with machine learning
algorithms to create an experience that was
better than a human could provide by
themselves?

Better?

Yes, by taking the best bits of each and fusing
them together.
 
Humans have taste, can understand what
would suit you from seeing a photo, and can
answer your questions. 
Computers, however, can look through millions
of options to find the best ones, always
remembers your preferences, and scalably
observe and learn from your behaviour.

If you did that, you’d be able to give every
person on the planet their own stylist to help
them dress well without the hassle of going
shopping.

You could create the new default for how
hundreds of millions of people buy clothes.

And in the process you’d help people to feel
happier and more self-confident, which acts as
a positive lever in improving all aspects of their
life.

Reshaping a trillion dollar industry using stylists
and AI, and helping people to feel more self-
confident in the process, certainly qualified as
audacious.
We were hooked.

A team so good we felt lucky to be part of it

Everyone says they hire the best, right?
Incredible team

It’s funny, then, that when you ask them
how they recruit they say the same
things that everyone else says. Surely if
you do the same things as everyone
else then you’re by definition average?
Incredible team

One of our founding goals with Thread
was to be part of a team we felt lucky
to be on, so we’ve given a lot of thought
to how to be different.
Incredible team

Here are five things we do differently
than most other companies.
Incredible team

Research excellence
Rather than guessing at what we think
good looks like, we research who are
considered to be the best in the field
and meet them. We interview them to
understand what makes them special.
1

We seek to truly understand what
would make someone right for our
particular role, at this particular stage
in our company’s development.
Research excellence

We then write that down into a Hiring
Spec document, and boil the ideas into
a short, 4-8 point list of the most
important things we need.  
 
(Nothing is truly understood until it can
be expressed concisely.)
Research excellence

Crucially we agree on which strengths
in particular we’re looking for, and
where we’re prepared to accept
compromises. Nobody is a fully-
formed, perfect being. You will make
compromises. Smart hiring is about
accepting that and ensuring you get
deep spikes in your most critical areas
with acceptable trade-offs elsewhere.
Research excellence

It’s hard to judge excellence looking
upwards. If you’re trying to hire
someone who’s much better at
something than anyone in your current
team, you’ll struggle to differentiate an
8/10 candidate from a 9/10. To get
around this we use our network to find
someone who’s at 9/10 and embed
them into the recruiting process.
Research excellence

Beyond interviews
Using the clarity attained above, we
design a series of exercises that will
give us a true picture of good someone
is at each of our key criteria.
2

Few jobs actually resemble the
experience had in an interview, so why
do most companies use them as their
primary assessment tool?
Beyond interviews

At Thread, every role—no matter if
entry level or c-level—begins with a
remote exercise. You’d be surprised,
but this rules out 80% of candidates,
allowing us to focus our in-person time
on people who are likely to be a strong
fit skill-wise.
Beyond interviews

During the interview process, every
interviewer is assigned one or more of
the criteria and asked to assess and
then grade the person on it. These
include our values (more on them later!)
Beyond interviews

No deadlines
We don’t have set deadlines for hires
(“applications close by…”) but instead
keep the role open until we find
someone exceptional. We’d rather have
an empty seat than someone who’s
merely very good.
3

Our longest empty seat is over a year.
This involves significantly tradeoffs.
(Think of the impact a very good person
could have had in that year?) But we
think it’s worth it.
No deadlines

Market mapping
Every role is headhunted. We map the
market, like an expensive executive
recruiter would do, but for every
position. Once we’ve determined who
the best candidates are for the role, we
pursue them with everything we’ve got.
4

You resource what you value
A test of how committed you are to
hiring the best is visible in your team
structure: Do you have someone who’s
focused on that and nothing else?
5

We hired our first in-house recruiter as
employee 20 (most companies hire one
at 75-100 employees). And as you’d
expect, we went through a rigorous
phase of researching excellence,
bringing clarity to the assessment
process, starting with work samples
and waiting until we found the right
person, no matter how painful (and it
was).
You resource what you value

Values that align with our own—and make us better

There would be nothing more tragic
than building a company that
succeeded but where you no longer
enjoyed working
Values that make us better

But almost as if it were a universal truth,
as companies grow they usually
become worse. The magic that was
there at inception becomes diluted. The
spirit and fire and energy that got the
company started starts to fade away.

This terrified us. The worse outcome of
all would be to invest ourselves into
creating something special, only to
want to leave when we succeeded. We
needed to find a way to avoid this.

The solution we found was to clarify
from the start what you stand for as a
company, and fight like hell to maintain
that as you scale. You’ve got to be all-in.
Values need to be your bedrock, they
can’t be an add-on or nice-to-have.

From the beginning we’ve had clearly
defined values. Everyone we’ve hired
has been assessed against them
according to whether we think they’ll
make us stronger. We’ve let go of
otherwise strong functional performers
people because they made us weaker
values-wise.

Every Friday at 12pm we have a 30
minute all-hands to retrospect on
whether we’re getting stronger or
weaker at living them. Our regular 360
feedback sessions focus on what we do
well values-wise and where we can
improve. And we provide training for
new hires on how they can make us
stronger.

When deciding what you value as an
organisation you are required to make a
hard choice: which few things do you
value above all else? Valuing everything
is the same as valuing nothing.

For us, ultimately, what we value is
impact and excellence. This is distilled
into 7 values: 
1) User experience obsessed
2) Uncomfortably fast
3) Extreme clarity
4) Candour
5) Relentless self-iteration
6) Act like an owner
7) Enjoy the journey together

We believe the only way to scale to
hundreds of millions of people is if your
product is 10x better than what existed
previously. There just aren’t enough
adverts in the world to get there with a
product that’s only slightly better.
User Experience Obsessed

The only way we’ll get to a 10x
experience is if we’re obsessed about
every step in that journey. From the first
time you hear about the service, the
signup flow and usage, through to the
delivery, unboxing and returns
experience. We are obsessed about
deliberately crafting each step.

Rather than churning through a list of
site features, we think deeply about
what job the user is hiring Thread to
achieve and design flows to deliver
that.

We experience what our users
experience as much as possible. For
example, we don’t offer staff discounts
on clothes to avoid distorting their
experience, we run regular user
research sessions, and everyone in the
company gets customer service tickets
each week.

Building a 10x experience is hard. The
easy thing in most situations is usually a
0.5-2x experience. To get to 10x you
need to fight for every inch. And we’re
fighters.

In a world that changes quickly, speed
wins. It’s one of the reasons startups
regularly disrupt much stronger
incumbents.
Uncomfortably Fast

“A chess novice can beat a grandmaster
if he gets to move twice each round.”  
 
— Unknown
Uncomfortably Fast

As a team we’re prepared to tolerate
discomfort by moving aggressively to
achieve more in a given timeframe.
Uncomfortably Fast

This means constantly asking ourselves
“What is the essence of what we’re
trying to achieve?”
 
“How can we get that done in half the
time?”
Uncomfortably Fast

Note: This doesn’t mean working more
hours or typing faster. It means
critically thinking through the issues to
find the uncomfortably fast way of
getting the core things achieved.
Uncomfortably Fast

During Y Combinator we set weekly
stretch goals, and continue this process
today, with every team setting their
own stretch goals on a Monday and us
celebrating or commiserating their
successes in our weekly all-hands each
Friday.
Uncomfortably Fast

In the product team we often establish
leading indicators to test against that
allow us to learn whether a new flow is
better much faster than waiting for the
full results. We also separate out
projects into Test and Delivery, with the
former aiming to run rapid experiments
to collect data, and if they succeed
them moving into Delivery mode where
we aim to make it exceptional. This lets
us know where to save and spend time,
allow us to achieve our goals
uncomfortably quickly.
Uncomfortably Fast

The astute among you may see a
tension between User Experience
Obsessed and Uncomfortably Fast, and
there is. We see that as a feature rather
than a bug. Either taken to the extreme
would be a negative; the tension allows
us to achieve the optimal balance.
Uncomfortably Fast

In a business that’s growing quickly the
only sustainable way to scale is with
extreme clarity.
Extreme Clarity

You must empower people with
information to enable them to make the
right decision without you present.
Extreme Clarity

This means there’s a clear line from the
company’s mission, to its goals, to what
you’re doing day-to-day.
Extreme Clarity

All numbers are open to anyone in the
company (the only exception is people’s
personal compensation information).
We even build custom scoreboards for
our key metrics and display them on
TVs around the office.
Extreme Clarity

We operate an open email system,
where all non-sensitive emails are CC’d
to mailing lists that allow anyone in the
company to follow along.
Extreme Clarity

We view time spent syncing up on a
project before it starts as an
investment, not a cost.
Extreme Clarity

It should be crystal clear who will do
what by when. All our projects have
one owner, the Directly Responsible
Individual, who is the decision maker.
(Hat tip Apple)
Extreme Clarity

We prioritise ruthlessly. We choose a
small number of areas to focus on at
any one point in time. When assessing
whether to do a project we build
models to analyse the expected impact
(confession: we’re still figuring out how
to do this for brand projects). The
CEO’s pet projects don’t get built if
they don’t pass impact analysis.
Extreme Clarity

One of the greatest inhibitors of
success is people not saying what they
truly feel. Tragically this has become
the norm for most teams.
Candour

For any one individual such behaviour is
usually rational. In an environment that
doesn’t value candour the risk of
speaking truth to power is rarely worth
it.
Candour

What this means, however, is that the
best ideas are often unsaid. Crucial
feedback that would help someone
develop is thought but discarded.
Pushback and debate that would lead
to a breakthrough is sidestepped.
Candour

We believe it is impossible to achieve
excellence within a team without
culture that rewards candour.
Candour

We would rather the bleakest reality to
the rosiest delusion.
Candour

Often problems happen slowly,
creeping up on you. They are like the
proverbial frog who would jump out of
boiling water, but with the heat turned
up slowly he doesn’t notice until it’s too
late. Candour is your defensive
mechanism against the slow boil.
Candour

It requires true courage to hold each
other accountable. Constructive
conflict is often the sign of a healthy,
mature team.
Candour

Acid test: It should be a non-event for
an intern to challenge a CEO in front of
the company.
Candour

Candour is like a muscle, the more you
use it the stronger you get. Some ways
we train the muscle are:
— Regular, named 360 feedback
sessions
— We finish meetings 5 minutes early
and end with a feedback session on
how the meeting went
— Founders and the senior team role
modelling by giving feedback
constantly
Candour

How good you are now matters less
than the rate at which you get better.
Relentless Self-Iteration

“A little bit of slope makes up for a lot of
y-intercept”  
— John Ousterhout

When you experience pain within an
organisation one’s instinct is often to
resolve it as quickly as possible and
move on. But pain is a clue that your
organisation has flaws to be addressed,
and should be seen as an opportunity
to improve things.
(Hat tip to Ray Dalio)

At Thread we place great emphasis on
improving ourselves at both the
individual- and company-level.

As individuals: 
— We give team members more
responsibility than they “should” take
on
— We let them make (reversible or non-
fatal) mistakes in order to learn
— We run company-wide hack days
— We have weekly guest speakers,
Lunch & Learn sessions and run
monthly book clubs

As a company: 
— Most projects conclude with a
retrospective to draw out any lessons
on how to improve, and most teams
have general retrospective sessions a
couple times per month
— We run blameless 5 Whys whenever
something goes wrong 
— Twice a year we have an all-
company offsite called Iteration Day to
go deeper on improving how we work
together

Rather than having to endlessly debate
subjective topics like the best
communication design for the company
(where at most companies it’s usually
the most senior person who “wins”), we
instead have a culture of running
experiments to see what a proposed
new approach is like. Anyone can run
one, only needing senior buy-in if it
changes a major company process. We
maintain a Kanban board on our office
wall of our current experiments.

Indeed, the company more broadly can
be most accurately described as the
sum of our live experiments.

Crucially, even more powerful than the
rate at which you improve is the rate at
which you improve the rate at which
you improve. Getting better at getting
better is one of the most leveraged
things to spend time on, and is a big
focus at Thread.

The bigger we get the less impact any
one individual can have. As founders we
cannot “control” the culture, only
influence it, and over time our influence
becomes increasingly weaker.
Act Like An Owner

The only way to sustain a strong culture
is if everyone in it is fighting for it.
Everyone must feel ownership of the
company. We are not looking for
passengers.
Act Like An Owner

As a member of Thread if you see
something wrong you have an
obligation to be part of fixing it. Even if
something isn’t your area, you should
still speak to the relevant person and
support them however you can.
Imagine an owner of a company
walking into his store and ignoring an
issue as it’s not “her area”.
Act Like An Owner

If you achieve this, you have achieved
magic: an organisation that heals itself.
Act Like An Owner

Similarly we want people to take action.
It is better to ask forgiveness than
permission. Decisions should be pushed
to people on the coalface, those with
the most information to make the right
call. Teams should be given KPIs but it
should be up to them how to achieve
the results.
Act Like An Owner

It’s up to each of us to create the
company we want to work in.
Act Like An Owner

Life is short. There is no destination so
sweet it’s worth not enjoying the path
to get there. You’ve got to enjoy the
journey.
Enjoy The Journey Together

Similarly, building a global company
from scratch in a short number of years
is hard. There’ll be tough times—days
you’re not smiling. What you need
around you are people who have your
back, who bring you strength and joy.

We practice this by only inviting people
to join the Thread team if we think
they’ll be travellers who’ll enrich our
journey. This manifests in kindness,
support and empathy.

You’ll notice that despite everyone’s
impressive resumes there’s a noticeable
lack of ego. Despite our ambition
people operate as company > team >
individual.

For example:
— We celebrate our successes together
(we buy silly treats to enjoy together if
we hit our goals each fortnight)
— We regularly make time and budget
available to do fun things together
(recent highlights include axe throwing,
an augmented reality treasure hunt, and
Thanksgiving dinner)
— We finish each week with time to
thank each other for help received
during the week

We are all very driven individuals and
are constantly looking at what’s next.
Sometimes it’s important to stop, look
around, and realise how far we’ve
come.

So, this is what we stand for. There are
a million other things we could have
included, but we’ve made our call and
are happy with our selection. Some
days we nail all the above; more
commonly we’re striving to achieve as
much of it as we can.

Now, your turn:
Who do you want to be? What do you
value?
If you agree with much of what we said,
we’d love to hear from you:
hi@thread.com

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