118 Spring Street · New York
Mission and Core Values
At Bleecker Street, our mission is to work with great people.
Founders, candidates, investors, and colleagues come to us every day because they want to work with great people too.
The right to work with great people is earned, not given. We must deliver excellent results consistently in order to earn this right. This initiates a flywheel. The better results we deliver, the more exceptional people we get to work with, which in turn drives even better results.
This leaves us with a problem. Where do we start? Excellence comes at the end. It’s an output, not an input. Telling someone to be more excellent isn’t helpful or instructive.
Our core values answer that question. They serve as a behavioral framework for delivering excellent results in the context of our business.
Bleecker Street’s core values are:
1.
Love of learning: A boundless desire to improve one’s understanding of the world.
2.
Joy: A delightful and upbeat approach to work and life.
3.
Discipline: Focused effort applied consistently over time.
4.
Make a call: A bias for fast, confident decision-making.
Our core values work because (i) the more deeply we understand something, the better decisions we can make; (ii) great people do their best work in upbeat environments; (iii) this work is grueling, and without Discipline we might give up before our efforts start to compound; and (iv) acting decisively frees us up to move at the pace of our industry.
These values balance one another. In isolation, they lead us astray. Love of learning by itself has us in an ivory tower. Joy alone is just a party, Discipline a hamster wheel, and Make a call a coin flip. Love of learning tethers Make a call to ensure the decisions are well informed. Joy keeps Discipline sustainable. All four must inform our actions for us to deliver excellent results.
No task, process, or way of working is too small for us to anchor to these core values.
Take our most atomic unit of work: outreach. Our outreach to every candidate should (i) start with learning about the target candidate; (ii) contain a bit of levity; (iii) be the result of hours of focused work; and (iv) be sent today instead of refined all week.
At Bleecker Street, we believe that how you do anything is how you do everything. When we have faltered, it has been due to a failure to abide by these values. When our actions embody our core values, we deliver excellent results. And when we deliver excellent results consistently, we earn the right to work with great people.
Sincerely,
Michael Cullen
Founding Partner
Download the letter (PDF)