BE CURIOUS

Slushers are some of the most curious people you will come across. We ask a lot of questions. We have strong opinions, but we are curious to hear reasons why we might be wrong. We refuse to act on the information we don’t fully understand. Many of us read voraciously. When we meet new people, we delight by being genuinely interested in them. Internally, we share what we’ve read and learned. Some of us have personal interests that border on irrational.

This is important for three reasons:

1. Slush is a workplace that gives young people more responsibility than any other. What we lack in experience, we must make up for in curiosity.
2. In our efforts to build a one-of-a-kind event and community, we have ventured beyond where any other event organizer has gone. No playbook exists for the work we do. Every day, we must answer questions that haven’t been asked before.
3. Slush is not a destination it’s a launchpad. While we truly care about the work we do at Slush ultimately, we recognize that the measure of our time here will be everything Slush helps us do down the line.

TRUST BY DEFAULT

At Slush, trust is not earned, it can only be lost. From your first day as a Slusher, every person believes in you more than you believe in yourself.

We show this trust in ways that set us apart from most workplaces:

• At Slush, decisions should be made by the team member who owns the corresponding domain. We trust each other to seek out the necessary perspective to make an informed decision.
• We share all information openly. We believe that ample access to information results in the best work, and trust our colleagues to do what’s best for Slush with this information.
• We are remote-first and highly flexible in working habits. We trust and encourage our team members to arrange their work in a manner that maximizes their productivity and well-being.
• At Slush, leadership is a division of responsibilities, not an expression of hierarchy or a command chain. We trust every Slusher to act as if they were the founder of their own domain.
• From Day 1, we trust our colleagues to be exceptional spokespeople for Slush.

Importantly, a company operating at this level of trust can only ever work if each of us tries hard to live up to that trust. In doing so, we are guided by our other eight values.

NEVER SETTLE

At Slush, we believe that only those who never settle thrive. In the past decade, we’ve built the world’s leading startup event with a group of students and volunteers. However, we are only getting started. We will never stop asking “what next?” and “how could this be improved?”.

In fact, we work in an ecosystem that was designed to dethrone incumbents. Therefore, we, if any, should know that category leadership is transient. Getting here was the easy part. The hard one is that which stretches out ahead.

The startup ecosystem reminds us that legacy and creativity are hard to reconcile. While we build on the great work we’ve done over the years, we must constantly evaluate that work from first principles, as if nothing had come before us. Equally, we don’t hire people who can execute a checklist, we hire those who can throw it out the window and redefine how to get to their goals. At Slush, every day is Day 1.

EXCELLENCE IS A HABIT

Attention to detail compounds over time. Even in startups, excellence is nothing more than a habit. For that, we have high standards for ourselves in doing the basics right:

• We respect the intense struggle of the entrepreneurial process. When dealing with our community, we always show up on time and communicate promptly.
• We respect the time and effort of our colleagues. We stick to commonly agreed routines and aim to put our progress out there to ensure our team has full information at all times.
• We always close the loop – both internally and externally. If we are unsure, we say “I’ll figure it out and get back to you.”
• We understand that there is always more work to be done than hours for doing it. To achieve our objectives, we actively take time to prioritize, de-prioritize, and plan our work.

By being consistent with the basics – even when no one is watching – we create an environment where we can expect the same from others. That, in turn, preserves our headspace for solving hard problems that deserve our attention.

STRIVE FOR CLARITY

We are a complex company. Very few organizations of 30–50 people have 17 teams, 4 main products, and thousands of customers. Even fewer employ a team whose average experience with the company is less than a year.

For these reasons, we try to be very clear in the following three actions:

• Communication. Unclear or insufficient communication is a common root cause of failure. Therefore, we communicate succinctly, ask the right questions while providing ample context, and question our colleagues when we suspect we’re being asked the wrong ones. We put extra effort into documentation.
• Decision-making. Every Slusher owns nearly all decisions related to their domain. Even after a heated debate, once a decision is made, we expect our colleagues to stand behind it. Therefore, we seek ample perspective before making a decision, reason rigorously, and then communicate clearly. At Slush, a decision isn’t considered made before it has been communicated to everyone who it might affect.
• Leadership. As leaders, we recognize that our most important job is to reduce complexity. We set goals that clearly communicate what we expect of our team members and by when. Subsequently, we help our teams do intentional, clear, and specific work. We ask “why?” over and over again. When a team member gets really stuck, we are there for them with clear guidance.

Each of these modes of clarity is underpinned by a clarity of thinking. That is one of the core traits we look for when hiring.

Lastly, it’s worth mentioning that clarity and complexity can rarely be reconciled verbally. Therefore, in pursuing clarity, we default to writing.

CARE DEEPLY

We care deeply for our work and about our colleagues. We are curious to get to know our team members and proactively ask how they are doing. Even if in a hurry, we take time to pause and listen.

Work at Slush is about us, not me. We win and lose as a team and help beyond our own responsibilities. We own our failures and embrace them as a collective opportunity to learn. Moreover, we make sure to celebrate everything from the tiniest wins to major achievements.

We give and ask for candid feedback to help each other grow. We steer clear of gossip and encourage giving feedback directly by asking, “have you said this to…?”.

When encountering something uncomfortable or against our culture, we don’t close our eyes but run towards the pain.

DEFAULT TO ACTION

Like the startups we work with, Slush works best when we execute early and iterate rapidly. While we value rigorous thinking and thoughtful plans, we acknowledge that we rarely know the final solution before starting to work on it. We believe everything is a “work in progress” and therefore share our work openly for feedback, both internally and externally, already before it’s ready.

We recognize the difference between half-done and half-thought. While the former is acceptable and part of the iterative process, the latter is something we try to avoid. We aim to think-share-improve instead of making our colleagues do the thinking for us.

We are frugal like a startup, and default solving problems with creativity over budget. Whenever it makes a difference, we are ready to get our hands dirty and do things that don’t scale.

Slush trusts you more than you do. To complete our work, we first ask ourselves “can I do this myself”, and only then ask for help. More often than not, we learn something very useful along the way.

STAY HUMBLE

Slush exists to help and create founders to change the world. To pursue our mission, we actively put founders first in everything we do.

We acknowledge we’re not (yet) founders ourselves but make an effort to understand the founder mindset by going out there to ask, listen and read.

At Slush, all founders are equal. It does not mean that we serve every founder similarly, as founders’ needs differ based on where they are in their journey. It means that we obsess about solving founders’ problems at all stages.

We recognize that, while we’re at Slush, we have been put in charge of a project that is not our own. Ultimately, we know that doing what’s best for Slush translates into maximal personal learning for ourselves.

REDEFINE ENTREPRENEURSHIP

At Slush, we believe that entrepreneurship is the most efficient way to change the world at scale. Right now, perhaps more than ever, we face pressing problems to solve.

For these reasons, we feel a sense of urgency about shaping a brighter entrepreneurial future in Europe. We believe that it requires three axes of systemic change:

1. We need companies to be built by diverse individuals that build in collaboration with the rest of society, including academia, governments, and the arts.
2. We need those companies to take extraordinary risks that, if successful, change the future beyond recognition.
3. We need them to pursue the most pressing problems of our time.

We call this Entrepreneurship Redefined.

We cannot enact this change unless we as a company live up to these same virtues. Therefore, diversity, inclusion, and sustainability are core to the way we build Slush. While we think deeply about the ethical questions inherent in technological progress, we strongly believe that better tech creates a better world.