{"id":5336,"date":"2018-08-03T20:31:44","date_gmt":"2018-08-03T20:31:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rbc.com\/en\/thought-leadership\/the-silicon-valley-secret-a-growth-mindset\/"},"modified":"2025-03-26T04:53:15","modified_gmt":"2025-03-26T04:53:15","slug":"the-silicon-valley-secret-a-growth-mindset","status":"publish","type":"rbc_tl","link":"https:\/\/www.rbc.com\/en\/thought-leadership\/disruptors\/the-silicon-valley-secret-a-growth-mindset\/","title":{"rendered":"The Silicon Valley Secret: A Growth Mindset"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Instagram started as a Foursquare-style check-in app. Slack came from a studio making mobile games. And YouTube was originally pitched as a video-dating site.<\/p>\n<p>These stories share one thing, the secret that drives Silicon Valley&#8217;s best: the growth mindset. It&#8217;s about failing fast, learning fast and growing fast.<\/p>\n<p>The principles of the growth mindset are straightforward: candour, ambition, resilience and diversity. But that doesn&#8217;t mean filling out the CARD is simple.<br \/>\n\u00a0<br \/>\n<iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"100%\" height=\"166\" scrolling=\"no\" frameborder=\"no\" allow=\"autoplay\" src=\"https:\/\/w.soundcloud.com\/player\/?url=https%3A\/\/api.soundcloud.com\/tracks\/475570470&#038;color=%23ff5500&#038;auto_play=false&#038;hide_related=false&#038;show_comments=true&#038;show_user=true&#038;show_reposts=false&#038;show_teaser=true\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>Listen on <a href=\"https:\/\/link.chtbl.com\/WqJxzQiQ?sid=article_page\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Apple Podcasts<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/link.chtbl.com\/4Os8MeK3?sid=article_page\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Google Podcasts<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/link.chtbl.com\/QVwVVwQ1?sid=article_page\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Spotify<\/a> or <a href=\"https:\/\/link.chtbl.com\/Gdvm1L5x?sid=article_page\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\" target=\"_blank\">Simplecast<\/a><\/p>\n<hr>\n<h2   id=\"candour\">Candour<\/h2>\n<p>Incident response startup <a href=\"https:\/\/www.pagerduty.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">PagerDuty<\/a> is a great example of the growth mindset in action.<\/p>\n<p>At an RBCDisruptors event on July 18, PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada said their culture of candour has room for everything, even stupid questions.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cI ask the question that often other people are afraid to ask,\u201d she said. \u201cThat candour gives everybody else the freedom to be inquisitive in a non-judgmental way.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>PagerDuty runs a 24\/7 IT alert platform that lets other companies know when critical services are down. That means PagerDuty itself can never go down\u2014and when it does, it&#8217;s a big deal.<\/p>\n<p>Tejada said that after an outage, the company holds \u201cblameless post-mortems\u201d to discuss what went wrong and how to fix it.<\/p>\n<p>Using honesty and empathy gets people to open up, and that candour helps the company learn from its mistakes.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIf something&#8217;s not working, we&#8217;re going to talk about it,\u201d said Tejada. \u201cBut we&#8217;re not going to blame people in that process.\u201d<\/p>\n<h2   id=\"ambition\">Ambition<\/h2>\n<p>Growing companies can&#8217;t be complacent\u2014every success comes with the challenge to top it next time. That means instilling ambition to be the best, and to always be better.<\/p>\n<p>And it&#8217;s not only about ambitious leadership. That ambition needs to be baked into the corporate culture from the bottom up.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cPart of my job is to articulate a vision that is approachable and consumable for every single person in our business,\u201d Tejada said.<\/p>\n<p>PagerDuty now runs an internal annual conference, PagerCon, where engineers and product managers give talks about their work and where the company is headed.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe want a perfect experience for our customers,\u201d Tejada said. \u201cWe put a lot of pressure on ourselves collectively to do that.\u201d<\/p>\n<h2   id=\"resilience\">Resilience<\/h2>\n<p>A key part of the growth mindset is the ability to come back from failure.<\/p>\n<p>In October 2016, a cyberattack took down Dyn, one of the fundamental routing services behind major Internet services including Twitter, Spotify and GitHub. Parts of PagerDuty&#8217;s service also relied on that same provider, so they were absent when it was needed most.<\/p>\n<p>The company worked to have its services back online within minutes, and the outage exposed a new point of failure that they now account for in all their planning.<\/p>\n<p>Tejada said that&#8217;s one kind of resiliency: the ability to come back, keep working and pull through major obstacles. It&#8217;s not just about infrastructure, though\u2014the same idea applies to people.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cResiliency is about allowing teams to try new things and fail,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<h2   id=\"diversity\">Diversity<\/h2>\n<p>The last ingredient for a growth mindset is diversity, which drives innovation in Silicon Valley and beyond.<\/p>\n<p>More than a third of the Valley&#8217;s population is born outside the U.S., compared to around 13.4% for the rest of the country. PagerDuty reflects that diversity: Nearly two-thirds of the leadership team in San Francisco was born outside the U.S.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe think about diversity and difference as upside, not downside,\u201d Tejada said. \u201cAll the data points to better business outcomes, better respect, better results, better shareholder returns, better customer offerings if you have a diverse workforce.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Tejada saw diversity as a way to improve performance once she joined PagerDuty in 2016. Now, half of the engineering leadership team is women, as is half of the executive team.<\/p>\n<p>Tejada says they take their time in hiring, and will leave positions open if they can&#8217;t find the right fit.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhile you&#8217;re still growing it&#8217;s easiest to change the shape of your gender equity or your pay equity,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd we&#8217;ve just started with gender. There are a whole bunch of other classes that we need to look at.\u201d<\/p>\n<div class=\"jetpack-video-wrapper\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" title=\"#RBCDisruptors - How to think like a startup 2.0\" width=\"500\" height=\"281\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/FbpZEpPe_ro?feature=oembed\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share\" referrerpolicy=\"strict-origin-when-cross-origin\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<p>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Candour, ambition, resilience and diversity \u2014 all principles that make up the growth mindset. But that doesn&#8217;t mean filling out the CARD is simple, as PagerDuty CEO Jennifer Tejada explained at the last RBCDisruptors.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":209,"featured_media":5337,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"disable_focal_point":true,"featured_image_focal_point":{"x":0.5,"y":0.5},"advgb_blocks_editor_width":"","advgb_blocks_columns_visual_guide":"","footnotes":""},"rbc_tl_category":[109,100,110],"rbc_tl_tag":[108,113,105,103],"class_list":["post-5336","rbc_tl","type-rbc_tl","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","rbc_tl_category-disruptors","rbc_tl_category-innovation","rbc_tl_category-season-one","rbc_tl_tag-diversity","rbc_tl_tag-leadership","rbc_tl_tag-skills","rbc_tl_tag-technology"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO Premium plugin v26.7 (Yoast SEO v26.8) - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-premium-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>The Silicon Valley Secret: A Growth Mindset - RBC<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.rbc.com\/en\/thought-leadership\/the-silicon-valley-secret-a-growth-mindset\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Silicon Valley Secret: A Growth Mindset\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Candour, ambition, resilience and diversity \u2014 all principles that make up the growth mindset. 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