中核的価値観

Chander Ramesh This was a speech I gave to Motion employees during a company all hands in November, 2024.

By this time, we had finalized our 2025 headcount plans, and I was increasingly worried about the impact on Motion’s culture if we hired so many people all at once. Thus, proactively, I re-did our company core values. This speech provides a useful framework for how to choose core values, and what core values really are.

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From the outside, incumbent companies seem like vast empires - infallible institutions that will go on forever. These are nameless, faceless, forces of nature that are unending. But we know this isn’t true. Even the East India Company, the most powerful company to ever exist, fell apart.

History is filled with examples. eBay, which was supposed to be Amazon, is only valued at 29 billion at the time of this writing. Yahoo, which was supposed to be the online portal for all of China and all of search, was acquired for under 5 billion. Kodak, which was once worth 60 billion, is now barely 400 million.

Institutions rot. Empires decay. And companies that once seemed like behemoths wither and die. The average age of a company in the S&P 500 is only 21 years3. But why is this?

p]:mt-0 [&>p]:mb-0 [&>p]:text-muted-foreground"> More companies die due to indigestion than starvation

In other words, companies die more often due to their own failings than the competition.

For startups, this is obvious because there is no competition. By their very nature, startups are taking a contrarian stance: the market has not yet addressed a need, and they want to prove it. Competitors are not going to swarm because they don’t believe the thesis; after all, they are the market, and there’s a reason they haven’t already built the product the startup is building.

But what about growth stage companies or established incumbents?

It’s tempting to think that as a company succeeds and becomes large, competition becomes the primary killer. Competition certainly makes for the best stories, but this is often a narrative fallacy: telling a simple tale to make sense of an infinitely complex world.

The data suggests that these later stage companies also die mostly of starvation. An entrepreneur’s death wipes out sixty percent of the company’s sales. These companies have a twenty percent lower survival rate1 than companies in the same industry whose founders are still alive. What is so magical about the founder?

Of course, nobody can provide the single definitive explanation, but this case study by Bain is quite compelling: when the founder leaves, the culture is forever changed. The desperation of the early days is lost, and along with it, the willingness to be bold and take risks. People take for granted the success that got the company to where it is, and the subtle shift to incumbency mindset takes hold. Often, the very traits that got the company to success are vilified.

My favorite example of poor culture drowning a successful incumbent is eBay’s venture into China.

p]:mt-0 [&>p]:mb-0 [&>p]:text-muted-foreground"> [A]fter a series of site outages that had damaged its reputation at home, eBay had become obsessed with the stability of its platform. eBay pushed ahead with the China migration anyway… [sic] Some senior executives within eBay already knew that migration would be a mistake—the company had already seen the damaging impact in Taiwan—but bizarrely eBay managers in Taipei were blocked by migration-obsessed managers in San Jose from sharing their experience with the team in Shanghai. As predicted, as soon as the China site was migrated and integrated into the global site, the impact on EachNet’s traffic was disastrous: It dropped off precipitously. Customers in China started to experience long delays and time-outs on the site. Why would they bother to wait for eBay in China—a site that charged fees—when Taobao was available instantly and for free? Migration was also costly for eBay because the company typically carried out maintenance of its servers every Thursday at midnight on the West Coast, ahead of the peak traffic of Friday. But this meant the disruption happened at the peak of China traffic, fifteen hours ahead of San Jose. EachNet tried to adjust the maintenance schedule but with no success. Meg Whitman had made China a key priority for eBay. But when migration caused traffic in China to plummet, no one told her. She found out only a month later on a visit to Shanghai, and she was furious at not having been kept informed.

— Alibaba: The House that Jack Ma Built

From the outside, eBay was a giant with infinite resources. People were harassing Jack Ma for even having the gall to try and compete. But is it any wonder eBay lost with such a broken culture? This single disaster, which could easily have been avoided by just listening to their own employees, cost them 70% of their m