On the mind.

This is my 10th newsletter — thank you to all of you who have been following along!

I’m in Seattle this week celebrating two 5-year work anniversaries for team members here at White Rabbit Group. One is for our longest-serving project manager and rockstar, Michelle Le. The other person we’re celebrating is Adam Weil, an owner of White Rabbit Group, whose company we acquired five years ago.

Time flies, and I am so grateful to work with these two incredible humans!

One thing that really struck me during my current trip is the importance of company culture and building a team of friends.

I’m on a work trip, away from my family, and I thought about how many people go on work trips without feeling excited.

For me, I’m really excited to be here with the team. There are five of us from White Rabbit Group here in Seattle celebrating, and it does not feel like a “work event.” It feels like I’m with a group of friends, having fun, celebrating them, and this amazing company we’ve built. It feels this way because it’s true. The people I work with are some of my closest friends.

It’s a reminder:

• I’m grateful for the team I get to work with every day. It makes my work more fun and significantly more enjoyable, knowing I work with good people.

• Our culture matters. The feeling we have here is really important, and we need to keep retaining it.

• The people we hire really matter. We’re not just going to hire someone because they have the job skills; they need to be a good culture fit too. One bad egg that doesn’t care about the work we do or isn’t aligned with our culture could ruin it for all. The reminder is to hire slowly for the right fit and fire fast when necessary.

• Continue to build a culture where people are excited to come to work. We spend a lot of time at work — for some people, we spend more time with co-workers than with our own families or friends. One thing I’ve always pushed for in our culture is the idea that we build a group of people who genuinely like coming to work every day. When we open our computers as a group, the feeling should generally be positive. When you build a team like that, anything is possible. I understand that not every day will be perfect, there are highs and lows, even for me, but I can’t comprehend anyone who dislikes going to work each day. It’s a waste of your life to work somewhere you dread. And on top of that, the group of people you work with can sense it.

• I come in authentically as myself every day. I can truly be myself around the people I work with, and I’m really proud of that. Not every founder builds a company culture they’re proud of or feels comfortable in — I’ve heard horror stories.

I believe we’ve achieved a lot of these goals for our culture. I’ve conducted many yearly reviews and exit interviews. I consistently ask, “What is the one thing you like most about White Rabbit Group?” and almost every single response is the same: “My favorite part of White Rabbit Group is the people!”

It’s not all positive, though. There are some challenges I’ve noticed with this type of culture over the years. First, I’ve sometimes overlooked performance because of the friendship component. While our closeness is a strength as a team, at the end of the day, we also need to deliver for our customers. Second, when people leave or get fired, it can be emotional, and sometimes deep bitterness lingers afterward.

Additionally, the culture we’ve built isn’t a good fit for everyone. Whether it’s about passion for what they do or forming genuine relationships with co-workers, some people simply don’t want that connection at work. They just want to get the job done and return to their lives.

At the end of the day, I’m incredibly grateful for the group of people I work with. I will continue to push for a culture where people have real, authentic connections and enjoy what they do because I believe we all deserve that type of work environment — one that values building a team of good people who genuinely enjoy each other’s company and the work they do together.

Business.

This week, our Director of Engineering, Mukesh, and I had a conversation about having our engineering Architects and Leads dedicating R&D time to AI implementation.

We already know how to implement AI tools, like ChatGPT, but we discussed continuing to research third-party integrations like these, as well as exploring more complex custom machine learning integrations into custom apps.

The truth is, we haven’t seen a strong demand for complex integrations yet. While it’s true that AI is driving a huge trend in the current market, as a service company, we haven’t encountered many complex AI projects because the market doesn’t seem mature enough. Right now, the investment and use cases are primarily coming from much larger corporations looking to implement their own strategies into their apps (like Google or Microsoft) or individual startup companies trying to create new products (like ChatGPT or Anthropic). Other clearly benefiting companies are hardware companies that process the data (like Nvidia). So, while there are winners in the “AI” space, there isn’t a market to hire a team like ours for complex solutions at this time.

For now, as a service company, we’ll spend some R&D time on third-party AI integrations, but not much more than that. No complex machine learning integrations for us — at least for now.

That’s it! Just wanted to share this update with our team and provide my current thoughts on AI as it pertains to the services we offer.

Side rant! I’m not a fan of the current industry using the term “AI” because, in my opinion, nobody is really using true Artificial Intelligence (AI). It depends on your definition of AI, but many examples out there seem to be using “AI” as a buzzword. In reality, they’re just employing machine learning techniques that have been around for years. For example, ChatGPT is a trained language mode — it’s still programmed, filtered, and controlled by humans. It’s not true AI.

One pic.

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Thanks for following along!

The Weekly is a newsletter that goes out each week written by Greg Bellinger, currently building and CEO of White Rabbit Group and The Labs.

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