(Note: I solemnly swear this letter was not generated by AI.)
Dear Friend of Without,
Sanjay (pseudonym) walked into my office and said, “I have not been able to sleep for the past two days.”
A promising young engineer on our team, Sanjay had texted me at 1:07 am the night before that he wanted to have a quick chat.
“Why have you not slept, Sanjay?” I asked.
“After our performance review, I feel like I have been treated unfairly,” he said, exasperated and nervous.
I sat there a little confused.
Sanjay had been killing it. He had just gotten a very good review, a premature raise and additional ESOPs.
I explained my confusion to him, and to that he responded, “I’m used to being the best among my peers, and I want to understand why I got a ‘Very Good’ and not an ‘Excellent’. Here’s a 12-page deck on why I deserve it.”
At Without, we practice a version of radical transparency in pretty much everything we do. So much so that everyone can see everyone else’s salaries on our internal HR systems.
Gutsy, right?
Yes, it seems uncomfortable initially, but so far, it has resulted in an elevated level of fairness across the organisation. I need to be able to justify why person X is getting paid A, not just to my board, but to the entire team.
That changes the way I and we hire – for the better – no shortcuts, higher accountability on me and a higher accountability on the highly paid.
Anyone at any point can ask me to explain why Person X is getting paid A, and why Person Y got an ‘Excellent’. Plus, there’s one less thing for the team to gossip and speculate about.
And in the curry of that transparency, Sanjay wanted to know why he was not ‘Excellent’.
I explained my thinking and held my ground as Sanjay battled internally through the war that was going on between his emotions, his expectations and reality.
He expressed himself deeply and vulnerably, catharsis in motion, allowing his emotions to seep into mine as my eyes welled up too.
He left my office saying, “Give me 2 months, I’ll be excellent.”
Meanwhile, the rest of the team sensed the discomfort and rallied around him in what seemed like a little family coming together – not judgmental, just wanting the best for each other.
I saw and felt all this, overwhelmed as the chemistry of life worked its magic on the team, compounding the good, while embracing that competition can actually be healthy.
And simultaneously, like a spectacular bittersweet cocktail, I also felt scared.
I keep telling everyone that we are not a family – that’s dangerous. You can’t fire a family member, you can’t abandon your family.
I keep saying we are more of a sports team, in this to win together.
But every good team I have played on has felt more like brothers and sisters than just teammates, so what do I really know?
I can’t help but feel the same way for the team that’s growing here, and that fills me with so much joy. Maybe that’s a little dangerous, but it’s friggin’ beautiful too.
And maybe, like Sanjay, I’m also fighting my own war between my emotions, expectations and reality.
Maybe we all are.
*****
All that familial team building has also led to our engines humming.
There’s a momentum and intensity wrapped around the pressure that’s building, and we’ve had quite a quarter.
The science team is especially purring. Recent breakthroughs have resulted in a 7x increase in the rate of our patented process. I don’t think we’ll realise the 7x gains just yet, but it’s pretty exciting as we inch closer and closer to this being financially even more sensible.
We replicated our recyclability study, and it’s still a little hard to believe. Basically, our proprietary material, VerdiFLX can be recycled ten times without any change in mechanical properties. It seemed too good to be true the first time we did it, but then it just replicated, so it’s all a little nuts.
Our technology also works on post-consumer, torn, rejected, soiled mixed textiles, where it can cleanly extract the polyester out of them trashy rags.
So yes, we are hopping onto that textile-innovation bandwagon a little. It might seem like a distraction, but we are not really building anything new for this – in fact, the pilot plant we are building will be able to handle this at a decent scale.
We’ve also found a cost-effective way to purify the terephthalic acid we extract from multi-layered plastic, and it’s scalable – we think so, at least. But before we get carried away, we still need to uhh, prove that out.
So yes, many of our fingers are currently crossed.
All this also means we might have a couple of patents in the pipe, which should signal to potential investors that we are not just a bunch of singing and dancing “impact” hippies – we are impact hippies with patent (s), without the need for ‘shrooms.
While that engine roars, our now-fabled pilot plant is taking its own sweet sputtering time. All the machines have been ordered, but they don’t seem to be arriving.
There’s progress but it’s slower than we would like. So slow that I am now practising the age-old tradition of Buddhist meditation as a coping mechanism to prevent the Anger emotion in my Inside-Out brain from exploding.
On the business side of things, we ended the financial year with a little more revenue than last year, but that’s not saying much. I’m still holding on to the excuse that we didn’t spend any money on advertising. It’s true, we didn’t.
But we did reluctantly try selling sunglasses last year. It’s a bit of a catch-22 because revenue was really not the main game. That changes this year – we’ll need at least a little revenue. So, the pressure is on, and the microscope is out.
We are getting creative, too.
Sunglasses might be sexy, but buttons and signage might be more sensible. We think we sold our first set of recycled buttons made from packets of chip (there might be something interesting brewing there). And who thought wayfinding signs needed a green revolution? Well, we did, or we are at least pretending to.
But seriously, come talk to us if you’d like your office signs to have a deeper meaning, or your buttons to be greener.
Meanwhile, we have also been experimenting with 3d-printing our material, because yes, we have nothing better to do.
If you go back to the first few letters I wrote, you’ll see that we actually dreamt of converting chip packets into 3d-printed products. We found out two things while trying: 1) it’s hard, 2) 3d-printing is overrated.
But, I still think some form of 3D-printing is the future. And we have now successfully printed from the worst, most inconsistent type of plastic waste – your favourite packets of chips. We are going to do a special Trash3d series soon, so keep an eye out for that, especially as you’ve made it this far into the letter.
We are also placing long-term bets on computational chemistry to accelerate our research and might be dropping white sunglasses soon because I still don’t understand why sunglasses are black when black absorbs sunlight, not reflects it.
And at this point, if you’re still with me, you’re probably half impressed but also half thinking, where’s the focus, man?
I think about that a lot, too.
As impatient as I think I am, the progress we’ve had so far has been a product of divergence-then-convergence thinking, and that requires patience.
Divergence in the molecular world takes time, and so does convergence, and we are converging, I promise.
I just don’t want to converge too quickly, and not when I have a little time until I need to. Because we are in this for the long term, and our long-term goals have always been focused.
A good hunter never rushes, right?
Yours,
Anish
