The purpose of this document is to build on what we’ve learned from leaning into transparency over the last few years and see if we can push the concept further to increase trust, reduce , and create a forcing function for more direct communication across the team.
We have a unique opportunity with the smaller, high-trust team that we have today to push harder on some of these ideas. We’re going to change a few of our policies and run some experiments to see if we can build an even higher-trust team and ensure that we can maintain that level of trust into the future.
Our first major push to be more transparent came from our memo Levels Transparency Strategy - Build in Public - February 2021, in which we decided that we would “default to openness” with our company documents. Specifically, “default to the most open classification that makes sense for your document”.
By default, documents would be “internal”, meaning “shared with everyone else at the company”, and a select few would be “public” to everyone outside the company or “confidential” to only a small group of people inside the company.
Around this time, we also made the decision to keep two kinds of information confidential, specifically:
These have been “The Two Exclusions” to our transparency goals as a company.
The next major update came about 6 months later with Principles of Decision Making - October 2021, in which we decided that we would “Record by Default” all of our meetings. This was framed as a 3-month experiment, and we made it clear that “Record by default does not mean that you need to record every conversation. It's perfectly reasonable to turn off the recording as soon as the meeting starts — or even before the meeting starts.”
There were many who expressed skepticism within the company when we first announced this change, and the first couple weeks were bumpy… but everyone got comfortable with it within a month or so — to the point where few even notice that the call is being recorded anymore.
That was the last major push we had towards more transparency. We have a unique opportunity with the smaller, higher-trust team that we have today to push harder on some of these concepts. We’re going to change some of our policies and run a few experiments over the next few months to see if we can build an even higher-trust team and ensure that we can maintain that level of trust into the future.
Historically we’ve excluded two things from “default share” with the rest of the team: Compensation and Individual Performance. Over the last couple years, it’s become increasingly clear that our policy around excluding individual performance is likely not compatible with our other goals around building a high trust team.
Going forward, individual performance is no longer excluded as information that we default to sharing with the rest of the team. That means that going forward, performance reviews, conversations about individual performance, and other documentation will all be shared with the rest of the company by default.
To clarify, this is a forward-looking change and does not apply retroactively. Any performance reviews or performance conversations that have happened in the past will remain confidential by default. However, going forward, any new content that is produced that includes individual performance will be shared by default.
<aside> ⭐ The only information that is confidential-by-default is compensation.
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Keep in mind, this is merely changing the default. If you have a particularly sensitive conversation with someone else on the team that you don’t want shared, you can always opt-out of sharing that particular recording or communication. We’re not saying that every communication about individual performance must be shared — only that it’s no longer excluded by default.
<aside> ⚠️ NOTE: "Sharing by default" does not mean that you must share everything. It's perfectly reasonable to exclude a specific conversation/recording, portion of a conversation, written communication, performance review, etc if you don’t want it shared with the rest of the team for whatever reason.
Changing the default only means that it now takes an action to turn it off instead of requiring you to take an action to turn it on.
Again, to reiterate, it's perfectly reasonable to keep information confidential if you don't want it shared with the rest of the team. This is only changing the default setting from "not share" to "share". This is not a suicide pact. Use your judgment.
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