Why talking about values?
Values is the « how »
At Shotgun, values are the “how”: how we do things, how we work, how we speak to people, how we recruit, how we party… At times of crisis, especially crisis like COVID - during which the “what” of Shotgun became nothing in a matter of hours - the how reveals itself more clearly than ever: values take over from operations.
Values v1
Back a few years ago, after our first round of financing - basically when we started to recruit people - I wrote our very first values manifesto. The three values I decided to depict back then were:
Be a Warrior
Be a Nexter
Be Ignorant
We’ve learnt to love them, to explain them and to share them with new comers. They were our default values; as in they were required behaviors for us to survive during the first years of our startup life. They are still deeply anchored in each one of us. They are our raw DNA.
Evolving context
Over the years, context has changed. The team has expanded, the ecosystem has evolved, the business has been transformed.
As a consequence, what defines Shotgun values has also changed. Values are now less raw, more complex. They’re not just words. They are micro-paradigms. Also, and it’s both an organic and a rational process: they are much more inclusive.
Values v2
(i) From resilience to antifragility
Antifragility is the ultimate step of resilience - value on which Shotgun was born. The COVID crisis has revealed how Shotgun benefits from crisis. Crisis and shocks make us move faster, create more and grow tenfold.
The day confinement was announced, we started working on a new product: Disdancing. 2 weeks later, the beta version was out and running. And a couple days after that, the first event on the platform was announced, generating the first €s in revenue. As of today, Disdancing is now the main virtual music event solution in France. We’re also present in Brazil, India, Sweden, Colombia, Chile, Belgium, Italy, Netherlands, Argentina, Syria…
We went from idea to revenue in 3 weeks. And from client 1 to international in 2 months.
Furthermore, for Shotgun, Antifragility is the mother of all values:
Not only we don’t complain about crisis, but we enjoy them
Warrior spirit is a given: whatever happens in the world around us, we just keep going
We « next » crisis to build something out of it. « Nexting » - one of our core historical value - is a creative process
And nothing happens without the most fundamental element: humility. After years of growth, fundraising and traction, it took us a few minutes to start from scratch. Once again. Talking to first users and getting feedback as if we were back in 2015. And we loved it.
(ii) Agility is a combination of deep vision and extreme execution
Those two pillars are what make us move and grow fast. It took a team of 6 people to grow Shotgun from 0 to 500,000 users and reach €25 million cumulated GMV. Our bias towards daily execution and operations is as extreme as our will to understand events, music and the young generation we serve in deepness and in details.
We rely on a double execution. First, a technical execution that impresses prospects and clients in an ecosystem where most solutions have zero agility. Second: sales-execution. We do have a new-client-bias. Sales execution is extreme. And for a simple reason. Sales is the main growth driver of our industry. Product is what makes people stay at Shotgun. But nothing has beaten sales as an acquisition channel yet. We’re working on it though :) (a message to all engineers out there)
And at the end of the day, during sales meetings, what matters the most is not the product demo. It’s the vision. Our vision. When we started, we didn’t even have a simple ticketing software. My cofounder Romain managed to recruit the Showcase, the Rex Club, Peacock Society, Marvellous Island and so many others… with a vision of the future. A vision we’ve been working on since 2015.
(iii) Serendipity through smart kindliness
Serendipity is a counter-intuitive idea. Serendipity is what happens in the wild randomness. Here’s how we integrate it in our value set:
Ideas are useless. Ideas are just a medium; a pretext to start building something, as fast as possible.
Why? Because the only truth that exists lies in the real world. Only reality can give us a sense of true or false. Debates are zero-sum ego-games.
This why we build things: to get an echo. Building things anchors us in the real world. It serves a feedback loop purpose, a necessary exposure to the “market”.
In the end, we make a radical choice out of 3 simple options: iterate, dump or scale.
Serendipity is amazing in the sense that it gives you the only result that matters: the result you didn’t expect.
And why kindliness? Not just because it’s nice to be nice. But also and mainly for functional reasons: anybody can be right; anything can be true. Kindliness is the only way to let serendipity do the work for us.
That’s why we love to recruit kind and brilliant people who hate debating as much as they love making things happen and move forward.
(iv) Freedom & responsibility
Both are necessary for the first 3 axis to work. And for Shotgun to grow, as a business and as a team.
Freedom is radical by essence. By choosing to make it a core value, we know it can only be 100%. Freedom is not a given. It’s a permanent job. It’s a process. It’s a permanent revolution. We know it. That means we’re not perfect, and we know that too. Freedom is a never-ending collective paradigm construction.
For us, responsibility means 2 things. First, at Shotgun, there’s no such things as management. We can’t and don’t want to manage people. We want people to have maximum ownership on their area of work. Second, we only expect insane results. We don’t care about the rules, about the format, about the hours. We don’t care where you work from. We only care about real things.
We love to recruit people who get and embrace our vision and then execute on it without having to be told how to. We love individual who surprise us both with ideas and results.
At Shotgun, my role as a CEO is to create and nurture a paradigm of freedom where vision is shared and understood permanently so that individuals have leverage and can experience serendipity executing their own experiments.
#NoJudgement
Last but not least, on a personal note: a quick conclusion about judgement. I recently realized that judgement was the original poison. I’m talking about judging other people for what they do, what they say, what they look like, what they love, what they’re interested in. Sarcasm, irony, scathing comments… basically observing other people to give an opinion has no place at Shotgun. I find insane gratification in discovering people in the deepest possible way; and insane pleasure in understanding the most complex parts of their personalities. I call it people serendipity :)