Eight companies, one culture deck
Read enough of these documents and they start to rhyme.
Amazon has 16 Leadership Principles. Netflix has a Culture Memo. Google scores you on “Googleyness.” Meta has six values it rewrote after retiring “move fast and break things.” Stripe calls theirs Operating Principles. Anthropic and OpenAI, the two companies betting the most on what comes next, each wrote their own version too. Apple didn’t bother writing one down at all.
Strip away the branding and most of these documents are saying five things.
Obsess over the user. Amazon calls it Customer Obsession. Stripe calls it Users First. Anthropic calls it Be Good to Our Users. Apple never named it, but “best user experience” has been the whole company for a decade. Different words, same instruction: start with the person on the other end, not the org chart.
Move with urgency. Amazon: Bias for Action. Meta: Move Fast. Stripe: Move with Urgency and Focus. OpenAI, in its leanest current form: Intense and scrappy. Every one of these companies is telling employees the same thing: don’t wait for permission, don’t wait for consensus, don’t wait until next week.
Hold a high bar. Insist on the Highest Standards. Be Meticulous in Your Craft. Great and Always Better. Apple’s whole design culture runs on this without ever printing it on a wall.
Own the outcome. Amazon’s Ownership. Netflix’s “use good judgment” as its literal core precept. Apple’s DRI model, where one person is directly responsible for every feature and has to defend it in review. Different mechanisms, same bet: trust people to decide rather than build process to control them.
Stay humble, keep learning. Learn and Be Curious. Intellectual humility. Act with humility. Curious. This is the one value that shows up almost word-for-word across every list, which tells you something about what actually breaks teams at scale. Not laziness. Certainty.
That’s the shared spine. Five behaviors, worded eight different ways, because “be humble” doesn’t sound proprietary enough to put in an S-1.
What’s not shared is more interesting than what is.
Amazon turns its principles into a literal interview rubric. Each interviewer gets assigned two or three, grades you against them, and a Bar Raiser can veto the hire regardless of how the rest of the loop felt. Netflix built a “keeper test” and describes itself as a pro sports team, not a family, on purpose. Google scores “Googleyness” as a fourth hiring signal alongside raw cognitive ability. None of these are decorations. They’re enforcement mechanisms.
Then there’s the one nobody copies: Anthropic is the only company on this list whose stated values include the option to slow itself down. Its Responsible Scaling Policy can pause a launch for safety reasons, which means “move fast” isn’t even in its top six. Every other company on this list treats speed as close to sacred. Anthropic wrote a values document with an explicit off-switch.
OpenAI’s list, meanwhile, has changed more than once in the last few years. It went from six values (Audacious, Thoughtful, Unpretentious, Impact-driven, Collaborative, Growth-oriented) to a leaner set built around AGI focus, with a line on the careers page that reads almost like a warning: anything that doesn’t help with that is out of scope.
And Apple just didn’t write one down. No single “Apple Values” document exists. Instead you get secrecy treated as a craft, need-to-know compartmentalization built into how teams talk to each other, and a design obsession that functions like a value system without ever being formalized as one.
Here’s the pattern underneath the pattern. A values document isn’t a description of the company. It’s a description of the failure mode the company is most afraid of. Amazon is afraid of slow decisions, so it built 16 checks against slowness. Netflix is afraid of mediocrity tolerated out of politeness, so it built a test to remove people. Anthropic is afraid of moving too fast toward something dangerous, so its values include a brake. Apple is afraid of leaks, so its culture is quiet by design.
If you’re building your own version of this for a company, team, or even just yourself, that’s the actual exercise. Not “what do we value.” Everyone values the same five things. The real question is: what’s the one failure you’re most scared of, and does your list actually defend against it?
Appendix: full lists and sources
Amazon - 16 Leadership Principles
Customer Obsession, Ownership, Invent and Simplify, Are Right, A Lot, Learn and Be Curious, Hire and Develop the Best, Insist on the Highest Standards, Think Big, Bias for Action, Frugality, Earn Trust, Dive Deep, Have Backbone; Disagree and Commit, Deliver Results, Strive to be Earth’s Best Employer, Success and Scale Bring Broad Responsibility
Source: amazon.jobs/en/principles
Anthropic - Core Values
Act for the Global Good, Hold Light and Shade, Be Good to Our Users, Ignite a Race to the Top on Safety, Do the Simple Thing That Works, Be Helpful and Honest.
Source: anthropic.com/careers
Apple - no single published document
Working culture principles compiled from public reporting: DRI (Directly Responsible Individual) ownership model, need-to-know secrecy, design and craft perfectionism, privacy as a design constraint. Separately, Apple’s official investor-facing values: accessibility, education, environment, inclusion and diversity, privacy, racial equity and justice, supplier responsibility.
Source: builtin.com/company/apple/faq/culture-values
Google - Googleyness
Intellectual humility, comfort with ambiguity, conscientiousness/bias to action, collaboration, user focus, enjoying fun, courageous/interesting life paths. Grouped into six interview areas: thriving in ambiguity, valuing feedback, challenging the status quo, putting the user first, doing the right thing, caring about the team.
Source: resumeadapter.com/companies/google/googleyness
Meta - Core Values
Move Fast, Focus on Long-Term Impact, Build Awesome Things, Live in the Future, Be Direct and Respect Your Colleagues, Meta, Metamates, Me.
Source: resumeadapter.com/companies/meta/values
Netflix - Culture Memo
Four principles: The Dream Team, People over Process, Uncomfortably Exciting, Great and Always Better. Eight Dream Team behaviors: Judgment, Communication, Curiosity, Innovation, Courage, Passion, Candor, Selflessness (Netflix’s own materials list eight or nine depending on version).
Source: jobs.netflix.com/culture
OpenAI - Charter and current careers values
Charter (2018): broadly distributed benefits, long-term safety, technical leadership, cooperative orientation. Careers page (2026): AGI focus, Act with humility, Feel the AGI, Ship joy, Intense and scrappy.
Source: openai.com/charter and openai.com/careers
Stripe - Operating Principles
Users First, Move with Urgency and Focus, Be Meticulous in Your Craft, Seek Feedback, Curious, Macro-optimistic.
Source: stripe.com/jobs/culture