Exploring my personal values

Clearly, you would want both the functional expertise and alignment with mission and values. But I would think that all other things being equal, if you've got somebody who's perfect and functionally expert, but doesn't align on values or doesn't really care about your mission, they're probably not a good fit. If you maybe have 60, 70% of the functional expertise required but you do align on mission and values, then almost certainly that's going to be the preference, to hire that second example. And if you recognise that as a candidate, then it is actually quite easy to demonstrate that.

If you're going to share a role with someone and particularly in a role like this, it doesn't stop at 5:00 PM. It's not all consuming, but it is all encompassing. And it does touch a lot of aspects of our lives and our roles are completely broad reaching across the business. So having a joint view on the business, a joint vision for the business, what we're working towards, what we're trying to achieve and making sure to check in on that every so often as well, and to make sure that we're on the same page on that front, or maybe we want to tweak the vision because we have learned some new information or tweaked the longer term plans for the business, because we know more now than we knew yesterday or a week ago or a month ago or six months ago, which is always the case in startup. New information is coming in everyday, new understandings of the technology, new experimental results, things that will have a knock on effect for how we want to run the business.

But at the core, our values are aligned on what we're trying to do, what we're trying to build, the type of business we want to build.

Sometimes because of X or Y, Z reason, you can't always be intentional about these kind of things, or you can't always pick and choose because we don't live in an idealistic world. But, I think, the more I evolve in my career, the more I want to be surrounded by people I really look up to, the more I want to do projects that have meaning and have a really useful impact on people, and the more I want to be aligned with that internal value system. And sometimes there are still things that are in contradiction, cognitive dissonance is part of my life as well. But it's a long process to try to align all of these things and be intentional.

I moved into Health tech, and that was a deliberate decision because I was quite firm that I wanted to do something that I felt was really worthwhile and had a social impact. So I moved on to there, from there, I got an offer to work in a Legal tech company as senior engineer. That wasn't right for me. So again, I went back to my mindset if I want to work in something, that I've got good mission alignment with it. And I only targeted my job hunt at companies that were doing something that I felt were bringing some kind of social impact into the world.

[Work is] not how I live. It's one of the aspects that helps me to be useful. But if you look in my friend zone, my emotional life with my partner, in my life with family, I'm always the useful person. I'm always the one who tries to be productive with them. I'm always trying to drive them to be their best version of themselves. It's not only about work. It's a lifestyle. Work is one aspect that how I apply my motivation in general, but my life has different aspects.