When you’re working at a startup, pay attention to the company’s Sun. What are the 1–2 functions that have a disproportionately large influence on calling the shots? 

The Sun is always derived from the founders — the founders’ biases, experiences or what they’re good at. In the best case, founders take an unabashed and authentic stance around where power lies. In the worst case, the founders are half-assed about the identity of the company. 

Successful companies have been built with all kinds of Suns. Airbnb, mirroring its three designer co-founders, has been a design and user experience-centric company from Day 1. Podium is a sales-dominated company located in Utah’s Silicon Slopes, known for its great salespeople. 

What matters is not so much what the Sun is. It’s how strong the Sun is in a company, and how this knowledge is propagated into the wider organization.

Dare to be clear

If it’s clear what the Sun is, then team members can go in the same direction to build the same company together. For instance, if everyone in Airbnb clearly knows that Design is the Sun, then there’s no confusion about how to make decisions that require a sense of how the company should be built. A clear Sun is also an effective way to attract aligned team members. Airbnb is uniquely Airbnb because of its perspective that user experience is at the crux of the company’s vision and culture. For those who can’t get behind that, it’s not the right place to be.

Assuming that founders know what the Sun is, one reason they might not clearly articulate it is due to discomfort. In an environment with a clear Sun, 1–2 functions are the Chosen Ones — at the center of what the company is striving to be — and everyone else orbits around the center. The Sun intentionally creates inequality in power, and the hard stance could be alienating.

But employees are quite good at handling the truth. When I was at Instacart in 2015, it was evident that Engineering was the Sun. This dynamic showed up in how the Operations Team interacted with Product and Engineering — they were unquestionably secondary when it came to anything product-related. Instead of being defeated, the Operations Teams put in the work, creating well-articulated business cases to get their needs heard. Many even learned SQL to directly get in front of engineers. Instacart was dedicated to being an engineering company — to scale infrastructure and growth through software and algorithms, not people internally. This was the way, and everyone was committed. 

It pays to be you

With the halo effect around Silicon Valley tech startups, a funny phenomenon has emerged. It’s not uncommon for founders to claim that the Sun is Product or Engineering, when they neither have the skills nor orientation to build a product or engineering-first company.

Aspiration can be good, but an unrealistic Sun is just as bad as an unclear one. Why are we saying that this company is product-led, but Sales effectively determines what gets built next? How is this a “software company” when the CEO only asks for marketing updates? Eventually, the internal dissonance catches up. It’s too obvious and confusing when a company is trying to be something that it’s not.

Glossier, a successful e-commerce beauty company, is an example of a company where Sun aspiration went wrong, resulting in multiple years of expensive hiring, firing and cultural dissonance. Around 2018, the CEO of Glossier, Emily Weiss, deliberately began to evolve the originally brand and community-focused company towards being a software company. She aspired for software product to be the company’s Sun, and hired a host of tech PMs and executives to transform the company. A few years later, most of the software people left, the culture was fractured and Glossier moved back to their bread and butter of community and brand. “We are not a tech company,” they stated explicitly.

Glossier suffered by taking on an unconvincing and artificial identity. The new Sun had no connection to the DNA of the founder, and didn’t play to the strengths of the company and employees. While the moral of the Glossier story isn’t that change should be avoided, it does signal the real danger of toying with something as culturally symbolic and meaningful as the Sun. Things tend to fall apart when a company’s Sun becomes too separate from who the founders are and what the company wants to be. 

Culture and values come up as important things to think about in company design and management. But the Sun is rarely brought up, despite how this point of view deeply shapes a company’s identity and decisions. A Sun that is clear and radiating is a powerful force. Companies similar in their offerings, but that are Sales vs. Product vs. Operations-first turn out to be different in 5-years time, with different P&Ls, hires, strategies and ideas for how they want to bring their visions into the world.

If you asked people in your company, “What is the function that fundamentally matters the most to the company?” would all of them answer in the same way?