Values @ SidelineSwap

3 min readAug 12, 2020

At SidelineSwap, we’ve always tried to be intentional about building company culture and thoughtful when it comes to defining our values.

Early on we set out to document who we wanted to be as a company… what was most important to us. We started discussing our values in 2016 as a 6- person team, shortly after we raised our first seed round. But we didn’t lock them in on paper for at least a year. Eventually we landed on 5 values: Excellence, Entrepreneurship, Trust, Communication, and Coachability.

These values weren’t just signs we hung on our walls. They are deeply integrated into our hiring process (evaluating candidates) and performance reviews (evaluating teammates). They influence how we treat each other, how we treat our customers, and how we make decisions. Ultimately, they helped us build a better team and become better versions of ourselves.

As effective as they were, we always felt like they were a bit too generic. So over the past year we set out to make these values more authentically us. Our team spent hours debating the updated values and the language we used so that they would be an accurate reflection of the culture we’ve built over the past five years and serve as a guide for cultivating the team we aspire to build in the coming decade. Below, you’ll see where we landed. We’re excited to share them publicly.