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Grit · 3 min · Sep 21, 2026

Culture values work better as actionable behaviors

Jesse Zhang describes shutting down feedback routed through a manager and encouraging people to speak directly. He says specific behaviors make stronger cultural rules than abstract values.

Jesse Zhang

Jesse Zhang is co-founder and CEO of Decagon.

Co-founded Decagon, a conversational AI platform for customer support, and previously founded Lowkey, acquired by Niantic.

  • Joubin Mirzadegan, Host · Partner, Kleiner Perkins

    Took Palo Alto Networks' cloud business from $2M to $50M+ ARR in a year.

About this segment

Jesse Zhang describes shutting down feedback routed through a manager and encouraging people to speak directly. He says specific behaviors make stronger cultural rules than abstract values.

From “Inside Decagon: Finding PMF, Hiring Fast, and Scaling 10x”, Sep 21, 2026. Watch the full episode

“anytime you want to give feedback to someone, you tell them directly.”
Jesse Zhangat 56:26 · Grit56:26

Takeaways

  1. Replace abstract values with observable actions.
  2. Give feedback directly to the person involved.
  3. Leaders can discourage complaints passed through intermediaries.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 36:16Decagon differentiates by giving customers control of AI5:04
  2. 19:24Hard customer discovery helped Decagon escape the idea maze3:28
  3. 9:49Decagon uses culture interviews to protect its hiring bar3:36
  4. 25:17Six customers and $1 million made PMF feel real3:23
  5. 40:57Product marketing fits an early, amorphous company2:41
  6. 30:49A downturn may make recruiting easier3:15
  7. 14:18A prior startup taught Jesse preferences, not a playbook3:04

  8. 54:00Culture values work better as actionable behaviors3:04

Up next · Unsupervised LearningWhy AIs that only slightly like each other can still collude2:03

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 54:13

    playing basketball together or something. when did um this is going to sound weird but like when did like politics start to creep into the company where you're like oh my god like people are jockeying for this and that and roles and you know starting to point fingers if you know deployment says it's engineering and engineering says it's a product and like you know you don't when do you have to start worrying about that stuff slash how annoying is it i mean i think it starts pretty early it's like as soon as there's a team then like there's going to be some element of that and i think asha and i have always been very like allergic to stuff like that so we try to stamp it out aggressively as soon as possible and yeah it's like you know someone's complaining about um again i think this this doesn't happen

  2. 54:59

    that much at decagon i think we're like fairly apolitical you know hopefully but as far as you know as far as far as i know uh because when stuff does happen we like are pretty adverse to it like if someone is coming to you and saying like hey like i should own this other thing and like someone else is owning it right now shouldn't you be worried about your own stuff right now totally like yeah a lot of stuff you need to do like what's what's up with this what's up with that and yeah hopefully that helps a bit over time i don't think it's i don't think it's possible to point one of uh one of our early engineers came to me uh yesterday two days ago was you know had feedback on someone based on something they saw started telling me i'm like dude don't don't tell me what are you telling me for i don't want to hear any of this go tell the person

  3. 55:51

    like don't tell me what do you want me to do you want me to go tell them on your behalf yeah like go tell them like or worst case what are you going to do like sit on it Let it fester. Yeah. I think one of the big lessons that we've learned or we've kind of been coached on is most of these cultural things result in things like that. They're very actionable, right? It's like if one of your cultural tenants is go direct to people to give feedback, I have no opinions on if that's a good one or not, but at least that's very actionable, right? It's like your culture has to be built on stuff like that rather than we're going to be a transparent org. We value transparency.

  4. 56:36

    It's like, that is much weaker than like, okay, anytime you want to give feedback to someone, you tell them directly. I think you have to build a list of actionable things like that. Yeah. When, um, after he did it, one of our values is the truth sets us free. And after he did it, I texted him, the truth set you free. Like you have been