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I decided to bring to this talk a theme that has been with me since the beginning of the creation of Angry Ventures – What is Angry Ventures?

First things first. To put it into context, in 2013 is when I came up with the intention to create a new organization – what we now call Angry Ventures.

What do smart people do when they want to do something but don’t know what to do or how to do it? Exactly. I went to Google. And I asked him:

But then I thought to myself. I am smarter than that. What do smarter people do? They google the same way, but they improve the question they ask:

And suddenly I had my first Aha Moment! To create a “good” company you just need to create a company with a “Corporate Culture”. Here’s the answer, I got it. Let’s do it!

Google again:

Perfect. It doesn’t even cost much. I have “tips” and “steps” – there is a lot of information about this. It looks easy.

The first links that came to me talked about how to implement a corporate culture in 8 or 6 steps. By the way, which do you think was the link I chose? The first or the second? Of course it was the second one – 6 steps is faster than doing 8 steps. Let’s do it! More Google:

I copied everything there was to copy and voilà! I created a company with an Entrepreneurial Culture.
I kept reading more and more on the subject and was always amazed at the stories I was told. Wow, having a company culture is really what makes the difference. This corporate culture thing is the last coca-cola in the desert. Why don’t more organizations have and create one?

The point, as with anything new that we learn, is that we dive into the layers of this knowledge and we realize that in this case some things don’t add up. There are loose ends that are not connected, such as it was only me who defined this corporate culture. Selling the idea that we “had” a corporate culture. Selling the idea that we have a corporate culture.

And suddenly, with the rereading of a book by Simon Sinek, everything changed. In Start With Why, Simon mentions that “Your company doesn’t have a culture.”

I went into shock. Fock, now what? I thought I had found the last Coke in the desert and suddenly I’m a fraud? Angry Ventures is a fraud? What I “sold” isn’t real? Exactly.

The truth is that we don’t have something. We are something. It’s not a goal or rule. It is a consequence. It is the difference of having and being. First we have to be, and only then, by consequence, do we have.

“Your company doesn’t have a culture. It is a culture” Simon Sinek

Aha Moment! And now what? What do I do? Where do I hang on?

Again by imitation I went to do what smart people do. Google:

Suddenly a common denominator emerges in the surveys. Values. Yes! What did I do again? Let’s copy:

Me in the year 2015: Guys, what Angry Ventures has is values after all. I’ve been doing some research and many companies use them to be “good organizations”. Look at these examples:

Also in 2015 we made our Angry Book to celebrate this discovery.

Cute? Yes. Idea copied from Facebook’s Red Book.

Last Coke in the desert? Better. With this discovery we felt (or at least, I felt) as if we had discovered gunpowder.

Yay! We don’t need to think about it anymore. We have the Angry Book, we can close this topic. Good job guys!

Wrong.

Why? I read this:

And then suddenly:

“Companies don’t have values.”

Fock! Fock! Fock! We already had this subject closed. Now what?

“Companies don’t have values. People do.” Ben Horowitz

And suddenly we start putting everything that is values into question and we realize that values, in fact, have no values at all. And yes, it’s not companies that have values, it’s people. And the organization is the set of people.

Moreover, the truth is that values don’t tell me what to do. They don’t help me make a decision and take action. They don’t help me make a decision in case of a deadlock. They are static. And nobody wants to be static. Everything that stops dies. Everything that stagnates doesn’t grow.

More than that, we also started to realize that if we need to preach, it’s because we don’t notice it. And that’s what we did with values. We preached that we were transparent, among other things. The truth is that preaching is not enough. We really have to do it.

Now, how, for example, can an organization of 600 people have a value like transparency? For some people, that value may be real, but certainly not for all 600 people. Further, what is transparency for each of the 600 people? Is it the same? People can have different definitions for the same value. There were certainly people who had an easier time animating some of these values than others.

Fock. So if they have no corporate culture, no values, what do organizations have? What should they have?

I’m smart, right? And what do smart people do? You already know! Yay! Google:

Google for this one couldn’t help anymore. Not panda Google algorithm, not Hummingbird Google algorithm, not anything.

Suddenly, in 2016 something new appears in my life. Through Luís Martins Simões I discover what principles are. Fundamental principles. Also that year, I reread Stephen Covey’s “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” released in 1987, and suddenly everything becomes clearer – at least in my perception.

What are principles?

Stephen Covey defines principles as beacons, which govern the progress and happiness of human beings, natural laws that intertwine, which form the social fabric of all civilized communities in history and encompass the roots of every single institution and family that has survived and prospered.

For his part, Ray Dalio, in 2017, releases a very interesting book that allows for changes within Angry Ventures, also defining what Principles are:

“Principles are what allow you to live a life consistent with those values. Principles connect your values to your actions.”

The main catalyst for this observation was Luís Martins Simões. His definition is stronger, in my opinion, because it is based on the etymological root of the word. Principle is what is done first and produces results. PRINCIPLE – from the Latin principium, “origin, proximate cause, beginning”, from primus, “what comes before”, from the Greek prin, with the same meaning.

Always from the inside out.

And that is how, not wanting to discover more gunpowder, we consequently discovered what – among all of us – we would like to be. We would like to be what each one is – with the values that each one animates – and with a set of principles practiced by all that help us to be what we are, as a group. That make us who we are today and that, in case of deadlock, we use to continue on our way. The idea is not to preach. It is to practice. If we need to preach, it’s because we don’t notice it.