When we published the handbook last quarter, we expected mostly silence. Most of what we'd written is unremarkable to other software teams; the remarkable part is that it lives outside the firewall.
What we got instead was a stream of emails — clinicians asking why we'd commit to a model-update process in writing, investors asking for clarification on a values entry, and several engineers asking how they could join the team after reading something specific in the engineering section.
The cost of the document is the cost of editing every entry until it's true. The benefit is that everyone who interacts with the company has a shared starting context. We think the second part of that trade has compounded.
