It's tempting to say that the core of a company is the sum of its products and services offered. But, let's assume that we're a generic company and the products and services we offer are equally generic, and we're in an ecosystem of numerous, equally generic companies. The only differentiating factor between generic companies and their offerings would only be their price. We think there's more to a company than just their offering and price. Who you work with and what they stand for should matter a lot! We think our principles and how we want to do business should matter more than the offerings and prices -- offerings and prices can change, but our values should be consistent and uncompromising. We think a company is the composition of our people. A company is not a nameless, faceless entity creating generic products and services in pursuit of profits, we're a group of like minded people, doing what we love, working to make the world incrementally better, and trying to make a respectable living at the same time. That's our core reason for existing.

I often think about legacy. Let us pretend that we have all the resources in the world available to us, all the power we need, and can do anything we set our minds to. What would we do? We are all mortal humans with a limited time on this earth. There is an overwhelming number of human problems to solve. We could pursue altruistic ends as a means to immortalize ourselves in history books, but once we've died, history has no further use for us. Therefore, historical legacy is a poor motive for altruism. In truth, we work to make the world better for our children, but we also see our shared kinship with our fellow humans and empathize with them. What happens to you, could just as easily happen to me -- but by a mere twist of fate and circumstance, we find ourselves in our respective positions. If we make the world a better place for each other, we also make it better for ourselves and our children. In reality, we don't have all the worlds resources and power available to us, but that doesn't hold us back from making the world incrementally better for others.

What does it mean to "make the world a better place"? For who? And what does it mean to be "better"? We look back to the ancient Greek philosophers who established the idea of "Eudaimonia", which roughly translates into the English word "flourishing" and "well being". To flourish, is to thrive in excellence within an environment. We're naturally biased to be anthropocentric, and we acknowledge that bias as systemically problematic, but we share this world with all life on Earth. We believe there is a healthy balance to be found between promoting human flourishing and the flourishing of all life, and this can be accomplished through environmental stewardship, ecologically responsible policy making, and sustainable practices. We prioritize the aggregate welfare of all life over human interests, aggregate human interests over group interestsWe define a "group" as a subset of the collection of mankind, being nations, corporations, teams, etc., and aggregate group interests over individual interests. We can still flourish as individuals and groups, but it should not come at a sacrifice to the greater good.

The world has a lot of violence, hatred, darkness, suffering and sadness in it. This seems to be a universal, timeless truth about the nature of humanity. But the world can also tell the beautiful stories of humans who rise above their own natures and take a stand against the vices which bring darkness. It's never easy, it takes daily vigilance, and we may have our momentary failures (as all fallible humans do), but only through continuous sustained effort can we be a light in a dark world. We hope every day to lead from our hearts, with compassion as the nucleus of all our actions.

We believing in creating the work environments we ourselves want to work within. That begins with valuing and respecting each other as working professionals, and this sense of professional conduct extends outwards to our valued business partners and customers. This should go without saying, but it bears mentioning.

Some businesses get ahead by lying, cheating, misleading, stepping on the backs of others, ripping people off, and generally being underhanded in their dealings. They can be successful and thrive at it too! Business is a dog-eat-dog world afterall. At the risk of being devoured, we have no interest in being such a company. Our hearts. Our integrity. Our compassion. Our honesty. Are all uncompromisable values which define who we are, and our values are not for sale. We practice the golden rule and choose do business the way we want people to do business with us. We believe that this policy cornerstone will establish a long lineage of satisfied customers who see us as trusted partners and their repeat business allows us to operate sustainably. Most importantly, we can sleep well at night and look in the mirror and like who we see.

Success comes from hard work. There are no short cuts. Surprisingly, this fact is lost on some people.

In an era of fake news, misinformation, propaganda, uncertainty, pseudoscience, wild speculation, and wishful thinking, it's easy to delude ourselves into believing non-existent truths and basing our important decisions upon them. The outcome of all actions are based upon reality as it really is, whether or not it is acknowledged. Our actions, if they are to be successful, must be based upon reality as it is rather than how we wish it were. We believe this is the fundamental cornerstone to successful planning. We think critically about everything, apply a healthy dose of skepticism, practice scientific rigor, and verify our primary and secondary information sources for reliability and accuracy. We value science highly.

Our decisions are made carefully based upon the best information we have at hand, using sound reasoning and logic based upon a set of true premises, and the diverse range of past experiences shared by our staff. We believe this to be one of our key competitive advantages which gives our projects higher chances of success.

Our decisions or actions may enjoy success or critical failure. It's easy to take credit for successful outcomes, but hard to accept failures. Failures will happen inevitably, and when they do, we accept them with humble maturity and do our best to right our wrongs. But beyond just accepting responsibility for failure, our attitude is to see it as an opportunity for learning, growth and improvement, as well as a time for self reflection and a humbling reminder of our human fallibility. Failure is a part of the learning process, and we have grown to accept it as readily as we accept success. The sooner we can learn from our mistakes, the faster we can fix them and the less costly their downstream impacts.

In some companies, the customer comes first. "The customer is always right!" they say, in slavish service to their customers every ridiculous whim. In our company, our staff comes first and foremost. We believe in taking care of our staff and keeping them happy, even if it means we may have to turn away some customers. Customers will come and go, but after the customer has left, we still have to take responsibility for the health and well being of our staff. Do we burn and churn our staff, working 80 hour work weeks until we just can't anymore, just to make customers happy and meet their impossible deadlines? Or do we enforce sustainable working practices accomodating to the needs our our staff? In our experience, taking care of staff and looking after their well being is more productive and in alignment with our long term business objectives than a "customer first" policy. We believe that happy customers are an emergent result of a healthily run company.

We believe every member of our company is a valuable investment, and with continued investment, they become more valuable to us over time as effective team members. We love doing cross training and cross disciplinary collaboration as a part of our personal growth processes. We believe leadership is not an innate attribute of a person, but a trained attribute which comes from mentorship, experience and feedback. Leadership is not something that can be assigned by designating a role or title, but something natural leaders will fall into through the natural course of their work in environments which allow their leadership styles to flourish. We're passionate about developing the positive leadership styles we all want to work with (ie, no tyrants, micro managers, etc), and delegating authority downwards instead of upwards.

This is the ideal to strive for. A persons actions, ideas and skills should be judged exclusively on their merits.

We value diversity, not for the sake of political correctness or out of legal mandate, but because we all have individual blindspots and a diverse group composition is complementary to our individual strengths and weaknesses. If everyone thinks and acts exactly the same way and comes from the same backgrounds, it's a red flag indicating deeper systemic problems which manifest in harmful ways. Diverisity is a key mechanism of checks and balances to mitigate risks.

We're not perfect; Nobody is perfect. Perfection is an unreachable asymptote, but it is an ideal to strive for and get arbitrarily close to. That means there is always room for improvement. We're always looking to expose the flaws and weaknesses in everything we are and do so that we can grow and improve. Our perpetual improvement loop is a core component to thriving and flourishing.

Our values are the soul and spirit of our company. We will never compromise our values in exchange for profit and comfort, because that would be like selling your soul to the devil. We believe it's possible to conduct business ethically and still make respectable profits.