Intro

The people we hire and their behavior will eventually shape everything in Unit’s journey.
Everything: our processes, tools, product, relationships, brand, happiness, reputation, revenues,
threats, opportunities, exit.

We say “their behavior” where other companies may use the word “our culture”. We believe that
culture is our team’s behavior. Our culture isn’t a grocery list that we dictate from top to bottom.
Our culture is the sum of the actions and behaviors of our team members, whether we’re a team
of 5 or 5,000.

We are fans of companies that talk the talk (share expectations) and walk the walk (live up to
them at scale!). Some of our favorite examples:
● Stripe: turpentine culture
● Amazon: Day 1 culture
● Netflix: freedom and responsibility culture

Like these companies, we hire and evaluate by our 5 values and the expectations we set here.
People who don’t make the cut don’t get to join the team, or don’t get to stay.

In this evolving doc, we wanted to share our own philosophy and the behaviors we think will
drive the best outcome for Unit. Step 0 is hiring the right people. Step 1 is setting expectations
with this doc. The next 1000 steps are continuous evaluation and holding each other
accountable every day.

Action and impact

“Impact” is a word you’ll hear a lot at Unit. As a company, we have top priorities at any given
moment in time. You will be trained on them when you join and retrained on a refreshed version
when they change.

Your actions and our actions as a team should have a direct impact on achieving those top
priorities. If it doesn’t drive impact, don’t do it. If you see someone working on something that
doesn’t drive impact, call them out. You will have to master 3 skills quickly:

● Decide on the actions that have impact

● Communicate them to people you manage, your manager and your peers
● Complete them

These are 3 different skills. You need to master all 3, and require them from others. Which ones
are you good at? Which one do you need to improve on?
Why active end-customers is our north star KPI

All KPIs are imperfect. In our search for a main KPI (“north star”) for Unit, we believe that we
found the best answer in the number of active end-customers that Unit serves. This section
will explain why this number would make a very effective north star, even if it’s imperfect.

The idea makes intuitive sense: as an infrastructure company, we are only successful if our
clients are successful. This is true to every infrastructure company (think Twilio), but it’s even
more true to a company that helps other companies offer new products to their customers.
End-customers need to buy these products for us to be successful. It’s that simple.

Adopting a north star that we don’t control directly seemed a little scary. But the more we
thought about it, the more we realized that (1) this number actually captures our mission, and
that (2) we actually have a lot of influence over it. Let’s explain these two things.

1. It captures our mission. From the moment we started Unit, we believed that the lives of
individuals, freelancers and small businesses can be improved by the experiences and financial
products that tech companies- large and small- offer with our help. Unit has a chance to be a big
and important company only if we’re right about this :) (we still believe we’re right!)

Skeptics have always asked us “but why would end-customers leave their bank?”. Today we
believe we know the answer a little better: they’ll leave their bank for the superior experiences
that live inside products that know and serve them well. But we also know that people don’t
have to leave their bank completely to use one of the products we power. It’s enough that the
end-customers try a product that was built on Unit, maybe even for a month. And maybe as one
of several accounts. End-customers are smart. In today’s world, they have options. Over time,
they will deepen their connection with their favorite option. We want our client to be this option.
And every time it happens, our active end-customer count increases by a healthy one :)

Tracking active end-customers as our north star will hold us accountable for actually giving
value to end-customers. Making them try, use and choose our clients. The better we are at it,
the bigger the dent we make in the financial universe, and the bigger Unit will be as a company.

2. We have influence over it. Every single team within Unit should execute with the primary
goal of increasing the number of active end-customers. Here are examples of questions we
should be asking ourselves every day. There are many more that you can think of.

1. Marketing: how can we get better at educating established companies, with a large
customer base, on the potential in financial features?
2. Sales: how do we prioritize deals with established companies that can really succeed
with their new product? How do we make sure we work with the most promising
startups?
 3. Success: how do we educate clients about features and upgrades that could make them
grow faster and be more engaging? How can we encourage them to launch valuable
features first, ahead of other features?
4. Compliance: how do we design our fraud screening to help our clients approve more of
the right end-customers?
5. Product, platform, engineering and design: how do we extend our product to be more
attractive and more engaging to the end-customers? For example, can we provide
excellent front-end components that make our clients convert more? Or introduce a new
integration like Plaid Exchange that makes people’s accounts more usable?

What drives impact?

Here’s how we think about identifying high-impact actions.

● Make sure you understand the company's top priorities and your team’s KPIs. We
will start practicing OKRs during 2022.
● Identify today’s biggest problems and solve them. Don’t describe a huge project that
will result in getting to an ideal state (we call this “sci-fi”). Call people out when they go
sci-fi. Ask everyone to focus on solving today’s problems by taking action today.
● Avoid depending on someone else. Don’t be the person in The Waiting Place.
○ Don’t wait for a new tool to solve today’s problems. Do it with the existing
tooling, or build the new tool yourself. But today.
○ Don’t wait for another person to solve today’s problems. Do it yourself.
○ Don’t wait for another team to solve today’s problems. Do it locally, within
your team.
● Talk to clients. Talk to clients. Talk to clients. Banks are also clients (in the case of
oversight tools, for example). So are people within Unit (in the case of support and
compliance tools, for example). Just talk to the person who needs what you’re working
on.
● Assets drive sustained impact. Create an asset when solving a problem. Assets
like product features, client training docs, relationships, internal processes and blog
posts are high impact. Public-facing assets (e.g. blog posts, docs and features) are the
highest impact. When you’re solving a problem, try hard not to just solve it, but also build
an asset. For example: our first clients asked how they’re supposed to go about buying
insurance (a prerequisite for becoming a Unit client). We quickly reached out to a broker
we know, made him the “official partner” and included his details in our client onboarding
process. It’s an asset in the form of a relationship + documented process. It took a day.
● Progress, not perfection. Do not wait. Create the asset today. Create v1 of that
process today. Respond to the client’s question by including the answer in the docs
today. Ship that small feature today. Build that relationship with a partner today. If you
don’t have time today, put it on your list. Don’t be an idea person- everyone has ideas.
Avoid “we should...”. Don’t consistently fail to take action today, because that’s what we
expect from you.
 ● In that spirit, keep in mind a few principles when answering client questions. And
we mean all questions from all clients. In every topic, in every department: sales,
onboarding, success, compliance, engineering. Everything.
○ Answer with a link. Our guides and docs are a superpower. Read them,
understand them and find the answer in them. Send the client a link to the right
document or section. Do not copy and paste content. Copy and paste a link. If
you don’t answer with a link, the next 500 clients won’t have access to the
answer. You will make a tiny impact, but not a lasting impact. If you do answer
with a link, the client will perceive us as professional, communicative and
proactive. And you’ve built an asset.
○ If there is no link, write the content and then share the link to it.
○ Ask yourself: is the link I just shared discoverable enough for the next 500
clients that have this question? As we grow our complexity, guides & docs,
discoverability is something we have to keep in mind.
● Try to use as much data as possible:
○ Our goal is to make important data available across the company.
○ Functional knowledge in other people’s heads is also data. Reach out to the right
people, tell them what you’re trying to decide on and take their input. The right
1-2 people can usually get you 80% of the information you need.
● Ultimately, be OK with not having all the data. Practice strong opinions, weakly held
(think of it as “probabilistic opinions”).
● It’s OK to experiment and try something even if you’re not sure about its impact. Thinking
in Bets is a good way to think about it: keep experiments small, learn from the results
and remember that a failed experiment doesn’t mean it was the wrong experiment.
● Resist inertia and stop doing things that don’t drive impact anymore.

Customer obsessed, competition aware

We strive to understand and study the competition carefully through customer conversations
and publicly available materials (websites, docs). Over time, we’re getting better at sharing more
on the competitive landscape (richer internal materials, more discussion around positioning,
more understanding of where we lose and why).

Having said that, we don’t obsess with competitors. We obsess with customers.

Values

1. Compliance inside: Compliance is a key driver of our culture and values. We design
our products to simplify, enforce and automate it. We strive to liberate our clients from
dealing with compliance by building it into Unit.

2. Big picture thinking: We're simplifying a complex industry and making it more
accessible. We believe in specialization and attention to detail in every function without
 losing sight of the big picture and the constantly evolving ecosystem. We ask that of our
employees and provide it to regulators, banks, third parties, clients and end-users.

3. Impact by Precision: We choose problems carefully and our solutions are elegant and
to the point. This translates into everything we do, be it processes, features, code,
documentation or the way we communicate.

4. Evolution: We never stop learning. We then turn this learning into action and impact on
a daily basis. This helps us become leaders in a fast-paced ecosystem.

5. Reliability: We are people and infrastructure you can trust, 100% of the time.

Values -> behavior -> brand

Jeff Bezos is quoted as saying “your brand is what other people say about you when you're not
in the room”.

You are the brand.

We recommend that you read Know Thyself - Branding for Founders. In a nutshell:

“Branding is all about building relationships, setting expectations and defining your
commitments. User experience is about maintaining those relationships, meeting the
expectations and delivering on the commitments in consistent, meaningful and relevant ways
across all of the brand’s touch points. [...]

These same principles apply to your customer support, your finance department, and even your
engineering team and the way they approach problems. [...]

This foundation you have built serves as a benchmark you can always refer to with
everything you do. You must always ask yourself — does this idea fit into our own story? Does
it sound like it was written by the same author? Does it follow through on our promise to our
audience? This way of thinking is necessary for maintaining your brand going forward and for
remaining authentic, honest and consistent about how you communicate.”

Communication

Have you ever sat at a table and played a card or board game with friends for the first time? You
needed someone to explain the rules to you, right?
Do you remember the feeling of starting the game after someone explained the rules to you in a
rushed, confusing or unclear way? What did you think of that person? What did you think of
yourself? Did you enjoy the game?

Do you remember the feeling when someone made it sound clear, simple and fun? You
probably felt empowered, energized and excited to play. You probably felt smart, too :)

At Unit, being customer obsessed means being obsessed with communication in words and
visuals.

Unit is helping create a large ecosystem of builders from scratch. Thousands of smart builders
who use our products are getting comfortable with building financial features for the first time.
They understand money just like you and me. They understand their industry: healthcare,
construction, the gig economy etc. They do not understand how banking and payments systems
work under the hood. And they shouldn’t.

We have a difficult and fun job at Unit: to simplify and clarify. To empower these builders to
build the best companies and serve their customers best. If we do it successfully, we will
eventually make a very positive impact on the ecosystem and the world. If we don’t, we will be
one of many fintech products that became too complex too fast. Resist this gravity.

Words

Spend a lot of time thinking about words and communication. A lot!

● Don’t use acronyms and industry buzzwords unless you have to. We are not trying
to be part of any inner circle. We are not in the business of reselling banking concepts or
impressing people. We’re just doing our job, and our job is to create access. We don’t
use acronyms because creating access requires being accessible and clear. Don’t nod
your head if someone uses an acronym that you don’t understand. Ask them what it
means, even if you’re in front of other people. If you’ve used an acronym and someone
asked what it means, learn the lesson and stop using the acronym :)
● Protect clients from cognitive overload. Give them just the right amount of
information. When they ask for more, give them more. Try to predict when they’re about
to ask for more so they don’t have to ask.
● Don’t use vendor names when communicating with clients. We love our vendors,
but our clients don’t care who is our card printer, who are our 15 fraud prevention tools
or which card processor(s) we work with. They simply want Unit to work. Also, these
tools will expand and change over time. Instead of saying “we are working on solving the
problem with CPI”, say “we are working on solving the problem with our card printer”. It’s
simple, accessible and reduces cognitive load. It will also create a pressure to improve
instead of pointing fingers at others. Our clients point all fingers at Unit, because we
abstract away the complexity of other vendors, and we should point all the fingers on
 ourselves too. If a vendor isn’t great, own it and try to improve the situation. If they’re
consistently not great, replace them.
● Be precise.
● Be simple and down-to-earth.
● Be consistent: don’t use different words for the same thing.

Words that meet customers include all the words. Everything:

● Names of guides
● Names of sections in guides
● Every single word inside those sections
● Every single word in our docs
● Every word we mention in an interview
● Every word in the UX of our Dashboard

Words & communication are actually a supply chain. The words & communication you use in
your head translate to internal communication. Then to our communication with clients. Then to
their communication with their end-customers. Stick to a simple, consistent language. It starts
in our head :)

We are not perfect but we’re on a journey to use the right words all the time, everywhere. If
you’re not sure about words or communication, ask others for advice.

Visuals

Use visuals a lot. Use whiteboards. Use scrappy visuals that you make up on the spot.

Working as a team

1. Be kind
2. Bring yourself (see “know yourself”)
3. Always go from most important to least important. When you write an email, or a list,
start with the important things. When you start a meeting, start with the important things.
When you plan your day, start with the important things.
4. Ask forgiveness, not permission
5. Async: (“asynchronous”)
a. Say you’re discussing an important task with a team member. If one of you
identifies a secondary task that could be completed separately from the important
task, you can suggest to “do it async”. It means “this secondary task will exist on
its own timeline, independently from the important task”.
b. Practice async communication and assume everyone else does. It means “trust
me to get to this once it works for me”. Trust others and expect to be trusted.
 c. Working between US-Israel means that Fri/Sun is your workday and someone
else’s weekend. Don’t be afraid to communicate in those days to do your work
and take things off your task list, but don’t expect an answer during someone
else’s weekend. Assume async communication: they’ll get to it when they’re
available.
6. If you need someone’s attention in a discussion, you must tag them and be explicit.
a. Email: “+Amanda to help with the question about disclosures”
b. Slack: “@ Amanda to help with the question about disclosures”
c. If it’s for information only and the context is clear, use cc: “cc +Amanda” or “cc
@Amanda”
7. How we think about response times when you need others:
a. If you need an answer now, call
b. If you need an answer within 1-3h, Slack
c. If you need an answer today/tomorrow, email
d. If you need an answer this week, 1x1 or recurring meetings
e. If you need too many answers of the same type, set a process or use tools
8. Guard everyone’s time:
a. Start and finish meetings on time
b. Make meetings short
c. Finish them ahead of time if possible
d. Keep attendee list short
e. Take detailed discussions offline (“let’s take it offline”)
9. Guard other people’s attention:
a. Only use “reply to all” when relevant
b. Broadcast only what needs to be broadcasted
c. Take people off email chains
10. Recurring meetings:
a. It’s OK to set a recurring status meeting while a project is in progress (e.g.
implementation with a bank). Status meetings are for updates & accountability. If
you want to make progress with a task, a status meeting is not the forum. Take it
offline with the right people.
b. Think very carefully before setting an infinite series of recurring meetings.
11. Every meeting should have a clear agenda (pre) & clear action items (post).
12. Every task has an owner. Own things. Say that you own them so that others can trust
they get done. If it’s not clear who’s the owner, call it out and ask who is the owner.
13. Every task should appear in a list. Every task list should have an owner and be
prioritized. When working in a team or between teams, it should be clear who owns the
list. Examples:
a. A pre-sale questions list should be shared between multiple teams and
managed by one person from sales
b. A client onboarding task list should be shared between multiple teams and
managed by one person from ops
14. Disagreement and criticism are important parts of a healthy, high-performance culture.
a. Praise in public, criticize in private.
 b. Be open about how others can get better, and how we can get better as a team.
Don’t wait. Disagree as long as (1) you focus on behavior, not people (2) it’s
actionable and can help us fix past mistakes or make better decisions (3) you’re
being humble (“I don’t have all the information here, but I think…”)
c. When you criticize us as founders, it’s OK to do it in public. Don’t be extra careful
about stepping on the founders’ toes- they are team members like everyone else.
d. Accept criticism from others.
e. Debate and decide what’s best for the company. You can use our values to make
an argument.
15. Training is the most important investment we can make: our vision, industry, clients,
product, competitive landscape. We train early (because learning compounds) and we’re
organized about it. Invest in teaching others and ask others to invest in teaching you, if
you feel that you have blind spots. Suggest changes to training for the benefit of the next
N employees- you will create an asset.
16. DS. DAS. What are these? You must be confused. These are Doron’s initials, and you
should be confused because initials are confusing. Don’t use your initials anywhere
because everyone will get mentally taxed for a second every time they see them. Use
your first name, or a team’s name (example: Marketing).

Working with your manager

1. Your health (physical, mental) and happiness is important to all of us. If work or non-work
related things make you feel unwell, please share and your manager will always be here
to help
2. Practice continuous feedback: how are we doing? Are you making the biggest possible
impact?
3. Keep a finger on the pulse: what’s working? What’s not? Are you performing? Are you
happy in your role?
4. Processes that should always take place between you and your manager:
a. Weekly 1:1
b. Performance reviews
5. If there’s a problem, call it in real time. Don’t wait for the weekly 1x1

Managing yourself

1. Managing yourself means managing your time and tasks. Managing yourself well is
probably the single best driver of your performance. The best intro we can offer to this
topic is Controlling Time: Time & Task Management by our investor Eden Shochat
(Aleph). Many of the bullets in this section are reiterations of the principles there.
2. Every task should appear in a list. Keep 1 master task list for yourself (the tool doesn’t
matter). Prioritize it.
3. Build your day-to-day from your task list. You may want to start your days by looking at
your task list and asking yourself: what actions drive the highest impact?
4. Some of us have been following a process called Getting Things Done for years, to run
every aspect of life. We’re happy to buy you the book. GTD will teach you everything
except the most important thing: prioritization. High priority tasks should impact
outcomes and really, really move the needle. Typically:
○ 1% of your task list is important for today
○ 5% is important for this week
○ 25% is important for this month
○ 75% someday/never. Don’t do them.
5. Learn to say a kind “no” to maintain your precision and focus your energy on what
matters. We value both precision and politeness, but we value the former much more.
○ It’s OK to ask someone “is this meeting a good use of my time?” instead of being
polite and showing up.
○ It's OK to say a kind no to leads we can't serve. Not even a first meeting to be
polite.
○ It's OK to say a kind no to candidates who aren't an immediate fit. It's not
personal. Not even a first meeting to be polite.
○ It's OK to say a kind no to partners who aren't solving a big problem for Unit and
its clients.
○ It's OK to not join a meeting you're not adding value to. Not even "in the
background" out of politeness. Tell the organizer that you don’t feel you’re adding
much value.
6. You may want to reflect on it at the end of the day/week: what did I learn? Was anything
a waste of time?
7. Build habits. Stick to the few that matter. Destroy habits that don’t serve you.
8. Take a break sometimes and use it to reflect. Do it to reduce ego, gain perspective,
improve yourself, your relationships. Do it during the day, at the end of the day or on a
holiday. We recommend this interview with Brad Feld: the art of unplugging.
9. Do something small now rather than something big later. If you ever struggle with
procrastination, we highly recommend The Now Habit (we can buy it for you)
10. Some people believe that a few big things make up 90% of one’s mental & physical
health: nutrition, sleep, meditation, exercise, quality relationships with friends & family. If
you believe it’s true for you, don’t compromise on these things.
11. Know yourself: be mindful about your motivations. Your emotions. Your biases. What
makes you happy. What makes you productive (working more closely with people?
Isolating and playing chess? Video games? Running?)
12. Guard your time: spend your most productive hours in the day on complex topics that
drive impact.
13. Guard your flow: turn off any non-critical notification.
14. Don’t be afraid to make mistakes. If you made one, admit it.
15. Productivity > work hours, but work hours also matter :)
16. Observe your ego and try to tame it. It’s difficult but rewarding.
17. Get better every day.
Processes

1. A process is everything that happens N times: recurring meetings, training, checklists

2. A process should be written in exactly 1 place.
3. If a process feels too lean or too fat (for example, your own training or a client
onboarding checklist), flag it to make it better for next N employees or N clients
4. Create processes when something happens N times, but start small (now) and keep
them lean so they don’t become stale. Allow yourself to experiment before introducing a
process.
5. Process accumulates. Keep our company precise- if a process is not needed anymore,
cancel it.
6. Announcing something on Slack is not creating a process. Example: “hey sales team,
going forward please make sure to relay a new client’s funding level to the success
team”. Assume there are 1,000 employees who will never see your Slack message. A
process is a process only if it’s part of people’s training, in this case the sales team. Add
it to their training now. And then you can say something on Slack, to help the current
team understand the change. Example: “hey sales team! heads up: we have a new step
in our handover process: we always include the client’s funding level”

Tools

We don’t obsess with tools. We obsess with people and (to a lesser extent) with processes. Just
choose the right tool for the job and keep things simple. You may find this helpful.