One of my formative career experiences was working for Dave Thomas at OTI (Object Technology International). Dave was, like all good CEOs, very demanding with very high standards, but unlike most of the Silicon Valley CEOs I’ve met since, a very caring and empathetic human. He imbued in all of us a strong culture of people-first team-work and as a result, we did amazing things. I have strived to build organizations in his image ever since with sometimes more, sometimes less success (in the end, the culture of a company is set by the CEO and it’s impossible to deviate too much). Recently I found this slide about corporate culture on the internet and thought to myself “yeah, right on!”, and only later realized that it had been written by an ex-OTIer about OTI. I’m not sure I can pick a favorite principle, but a few that stand out are the focus on shipping (“He who ships gets to speak”) and the focus on people (“People, not organizations, ship great software”).

Our culture