Candor, Humility, Initiative

At the Naval Academy and in the Marine Corps, we lived and breathed core values - honor, courage, commitment. After taking off the uniform, I was among the first employees at a hyper-growth startup. There, we decided our mantra was “low ego, high output, no bullshit.” Some organizations treat core values like marketing slogans. High-performing organizations use them as lighthouses to guide them. I believe core values define how you work, communicate, and live. 

Culture Is the System

Values start as operating rules. They guide what we do when we’re tired, under pressure, or missing data. Hoplynk’s values are:

• Candor - Say the hard thing kindly, early, and with evidence. Speak up during decisions.

• Humility -  Strong opinions, loosely held. Change your mind with facts. Teach and learn in the open; celebrate team wins over heroics.

• Initiative - Run toward the smoke. Own problems end-to-end. Ship in small, safe steps with clear, observable outcomes.
  
  
  

Simple. Clear. Habits we expect everyone on the team to embody, and leaders to demonstrate in every interaction. If someone asks “What’s the culture here?” the answer must match what people see. 

Ben Horowitz wrote a fantastic book called “What You Do Is Who You Are,” effectively summarizing the core task of leadership in a few sentences.

“Your culture is how your company makes decisions when you’re not there. It’s the set of assumptions your employees use to resolve the problems they face every day. It’s how they behave when no one is looking. If you don’t methodically set your culture, then two-thirds of it will end up being accidental, and the rest will be a mistake.”

What Building Hoplynk Means

It means first principles engineering. We treat every problem as a greenfield opportunity to reimagine the way we approach networking. 

It means skill and ingenuity over experience and pedigree. We don’t care where you came from, we care what you’re willing to do in pursuit of the mission.

It means simple experimentation. We’re trying new things every day. Sometimes duct tape is good enough. And if that works, then we can invest the time to engineer something better.
It means operator first. Don’t walk a mile in your users’ shoes, run a marathon in them. Our job is to make the system shoulder the cognitive load so humans focus on the mission, not the modem.

We accept reality: links will degrade, radios will die, environments change. Our job is to adapt. With patience, passion, persistence, and perseverance, we’re building autonomy into the backbone. Candor, Humility, Initiative. We don’t want people who wait for permission. Do the work where your results speak for themselves. Don’t polish for show. Deliver for impact.

The Vision: Always Connected

Fully autonomous networking to ensure persistent communications in any environment. That’s the mission. Connectivity is no longer a technical problem. It’s increasingly a critical requirement to exist. When running operations in a dead zone or piloting autonomous systems where downtime isn’t an option, you need performance. And performance starts with the people building it and how they work together.

Networks pre-empt link failures, stitching together whatever is available to deliver maximum throughput, security, and resilience. In the next year, we’re trying to deliver the same output as 5 companies’ working for 3 years. We can only do that by being efficient, intellectually honest, and dedicated. Ben Horowitz captures the truth here:

“What you believe means nearly nothing. What you do is who you are.”

That’s exactly how we see Hoplynk. One culture, one mission.

If This Resonates

We’re still early. We’re still building. We’re still learning. If any part of this feels familiar—if the “everything went dark” moment hit you, or you’re someone who believes low ego + high output is the only way to move fast, we’d love to get to know you better

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Always Connected.

— Andrew