It’s hard to believe it’s been nearly three years since we first unveiled our Core Values at Albedo. As we look back, it’s clear that while some things have remained steadfast, others have evolved significantly. You’ll still recognize many familiar faces in our team photo, though we’re excited to have a host of new ones. And no, we didn’t lose Topher — he just shaved his mustache.

Our Core Values have been instrumental in shaping and scaling Albedo through our evolution from seed stage to post-Series A startup. They have guided us through growth and change, serving as a foundation for our team’s culture and ambitions.

If you’ve paid close attention to our Core Values, you’ll notice that our Take the High Road Core Value is noticeably missing. Recently, we recognized that this value wasn’t being applied quite as effectively as the others. While it’s an important ethical principle that we’ll continue to practice internally and externally, it is something all businesses should do. A company’s Core Values should be unique in the same way its products are: a proclamation to the world on how you do things differently. Think Airbnb and how they encourage employees to "be a cereal entrepreneur" or how Patagonia shapes its operational practices to "protect our home planet".

I present the updated Albedo Core Values:

1. Humility, Emotional Intelligence, and Respect (HEIRs): We embody HEIRs and empathy in our everyday.
2. High Speed, Low Drag: We move rapidly with concentrated velocity.
3. Bold, but Accountable: We aren't afraid to push the limits, but we calculate the risks and own our failures.
4. The Whole is Greater Than the Sum of its Parts: Whether it's our team, our company, or our industry, we are most effective when we work together and celebrate the Gestalt.
5. Default to Trust & Transparency: We are optimists who assume good intent from others. We build strong relationships through being open and honest.
6. Create Leverage: 10x ourselves and 10x each other.
7. Stay in Orbit: We take care of our well-being, we enjoy the ride, and we optimize for the long run.

Thus, we’ve decided to replace "Take the High Road" with a new Core Value: Create Leverage. As a startup, we need to harness our nimbleness and ingenuity of our small, but mighty team to outperform the larger giants of the aerospace industry. We wanted a phrase that would capture the true essence of a startup: the agility to outmaneuver the bigger players and be the slingshot in our David and Goliath story.

Create Leverage is the multiplicative essence of each Albedo employee: it’s that lever arm you employ to either 10x yourself or 10x others. It’s about employing strategies and tools — big or small — that amplify our efforts, whether that’s freely sharing subject matter expertise, prepping your coworkers thoroughly for meetings, or developing command line tools that enhance our workflows. But it’s not just about actions; it’s also a mindset—a crucial one as we triage through the necessary on the road towards launch.

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