Preface

In 2011 we set out to bring internet to all for $5.00 per user, per month. We knew back then to do that that we had to first create a whole new kind of organization place that was designed to foster that goal. Where true north was constantly present and permeated all we do. We also knew we couldn't have middle management and that ownership/control/leadership had to be fully distributed throughout the organization. "Headquarters" such as it is, exists only to serve the members in their mission execution.

We want an organization where incredibly talented individuals are empowered to put their best work into the hands of billions of people, with very little in their way.

This book is an abbreviated encapsulation of our guiding principles. As TSYS Group grows, we hope that these principles will serve each new member joining our ranks.

If you are new to TSYS Group, welcome. Although the goals in this book are important, it’s really member ideas, talent, and energy that will keep TSYS Group shining in the years ahead.

Thanks for being here. Let’s make great things.

How to Use This Book

This book isn’t about fringe benefits or how to set up your workstation or where to find source code. TSYS Group works in ways that might seem counterintuitive at first. This hand- book is about the choices you’re going to be making and how to think about them. Mainly, it’s about how not to freak out now that you’re here.

For more nuts-and-bolts information, there’s an official TSYS Group Doc Repo : TODO link to repo

This book is in the repo, so you can edit it.

Once you’ve read it, help us make it better for other new members. Suggest new sections, or change the existing ones. Add to the Glossary. Or if you’re not all that comfortable editing it, annotate it: make comments and suggestions in ReviewBoard (TODO link to reviewboad).

We’ll collectively review the changes and fold them into future revisions.

Your First Day

So you’ve gone through the diligence, vetting, onboarding, and probationary process, you’ve finally been able to become a party to the Operating Agreement! You are in at TSYS Group. Congratulations! and welcome.

TSYS Group has an incredibly unique way of doing things that will make this the greatest professional experience of your life, but it can take some getting used to.

This book was written by members who’ve been where you are now, and who want to make your first few months here as easy as possible.

TSYS Group Facts That Matter

  • TSYS Group is self-funded. We haven’t ever brought in equity based outside financing. Since our earliest days this has been incredibly important in providing freedom to shape the organization and its business practices.

  • TSYS Group does not own its intellectual property. This is far from the norm, in the technology industry. Everything that we produce that we ship to customers is licensed under the AGPLv3 and we do not require copyright assignment. This is to ensure the long term survival of the product against all threats. We value mission integrity and solving the real world digital divide above all else.

  • We seek to surprise and delight everyone who interacts with all aspects of TSYS Group in any way shape or form. That is our daily guiding principal.

  • We fund capabilities with internal cash, ensuring a solid asset base that we can always fallback to.

  • We finance capacity with outside (non equity) funding.

  • We have zero internal cost centers. We outsource all cost centers (e-mail, expense management, inbound voice communications).

  • We self host , both on premise and on leased equipment at offsite facilities.

Welcome to Flatland

Hierarchy is great for maintaining predictability and repeatability. It simplifies planning and makes it easier to control a large group of people from the top down, which is why military organizations rely on it so heavily.

But when you’re a day zero company that’s spent the last decade going out of its way to identify and recruit the most intelligent, innovative, talented people on Earth to be members of the organization, telling them to sit at a desk and do what they’re told obliterates 99 percent of their value.

We want innovators, and that means maintaining an environment where they’ll flourish. That’s why TSYS Group is flat. It’s our shorthand way of saying that we don’t have any middle management, just a highly dedicated senior leadership team (made of up the organization co-founders) and a fully independent Board of Directors (with the power to remove management if necessary) to ensure all stakeholders are fully represented.

All meetings of the Board and leadership are open participation (read only) and our CEO (@ReachableCEO everywhere) is highly responsive to all levels of the organization and external stakeholders.

The organization truly belongs to it's members, it's yours! Yours to steer—toward opportunities and away from risks.

You have the power to green-light projects. You have the power to ship products.

A flat structure removes every organizational barrier between your work and the customer enjoying that work.

Every company will tell you that “the customer is boss,” but here that statement has weight. There’s no red tape stopping you from figuring out for yourself what our customers want, and then giving it to them.

If you’re thinking to yourself, “Wow, that sounds like a lot of responsibility,” you’re right.

And that’s why onboarding new members is the single most important thing you will ever do at TSYS Group.

Any time you vet a potential member, you need to ask yourself not only if they’re exceptionally talented and collaborative but also if they’re capable of literally running this organization, because they will be.

Your First Week

Introduction

You’re not freaking out anymore. In fact, you’re ready to show up to work (wherever and whenever in the world that happens to be because TSYS Group is the first organization with a truly global talent base from day zero) this work block, and then what?

This next section walks you through figuring out what to work on. You’ll learn about how projects work, how cabals work, and how products get out the door at TSYS Group.

Whatever group you’re in, whether you’re building servers, writing documentation, or making art, this section applies to you. It’s crucial that you believe it, so we’ll repeat it a few more times in this uuide.

Why do I need to pick my own projects?

We’ve heard that other companies have people allocate a percentage of their time to self- directed projects. At TSYS Group, that percentage is 100.

Since TSYS Group is flat, members don’t join projects because they’re told to. Instead, you’ll decide what to work on after asking yourself the right questions (more on that later). Members vote on projects with their time and git commits. Strong projects are ones in which members can see demonstrated value; they staff up easily. This means there are any number of internal recruiting efforts constantly under way.

If you’re working here, that means you’re good at your job. Members are going to want you to work with them on their projects, and they’ll try hard to get you to do so. But the decision is going to be up to you. (In fact, at times you’re going to wish for the luxury of having just one person telling you what they think you should do, rather than hundreds.

But how do I decide which things to work on?

Deciding what to work on can be the hardest part of your mission at TSYS Group. This is because, as you’ve found out by now, you were not on-boarded to fill a specific job description.

You were hired to constantly be looking around for the most valuable work you could be doing. At the end of a project, you may end up well outside what you thought was your core area of expertise.

There’s no rule book for choosing a project or task at TSYS Group. But it’s useful to answer questions like these:

  • Of all the projects currently under way, what’s the most valuable thing I can be working on?
  • Which project will have the highest direct impact on our customers? How much will the work I ship benefit them?
  • Is TSYS Group not doing something that it should be doing?
  • What’s interesting?
  • What’s rewarding?
  • What leverages my individual strengths the most?

How do I find out what projects are under way?

Our git server at https://git.turnsys.com/explore is the single project list in the organization. However, the best way to find out is to ask other members. Anyone, really. This can provide additional context, how projects fit into the overall goals etc. Keep in mind that members may be very busy, so please use calendar scheduling heavily!

When you do, you’ll find out what’s going on around the organization and your peers will also find out about you.

Lots of members at TSYS Group want and need to know what you care about, what you’re good at, what you’re worried about, what you’ve got experience with, and so on.

And the way to get the word out is to start telling members all of those things. So, while you’re getting the lay of the land by learning about projects, you’re also broadcasting your own status to a relevant group of members.

Got an idea for how TSYS Group could change how we internally broadcast project/company status? Great. Do it. In the meantime, the Discord Lounge is always open, so plant yourself in it often.

Short-term vs. long-term goals

Because we all are responsible for prioritizing our own work, and because we are conscientious and anxious to be valuable, as individuals we tend to gravitate toward projects that have a high, measurable, and predictable return for the company. So when there’s a clear opportunity on the table to succeed at a near-term business goal with a clear return, we all want to take it.

And, when we’re faced with a problem or a threat, and it’s one with a clear cost, it’s hard not to address it immediately. This sounds like a good thing, and it often is, but it has some downsides that are worth keeping in mind.

Specifically, if we’re not careful, these traits can cause us to race back and forth between short-term opportunities and threats, being responsive rather than proactive.

So our lack of a traditional structure comes with an important responsibility. It’s up to all of us to spend effort focusing on what we think the long-term goals of the organization should be.

Someone told me to (or not to) work on X. And they’ve been here a long time!

Well, the correct response to this is to keep thinking about whether or not your colleagues are right. Broaden the conversation. Hold on to your goals if you’re convinced they’re correct. Check your assumptions.

Pull more members in. Listen. Don’t believe that anyone holds authority over the decision you’re trying to make.

They don’t; but they probably have valuable experience to draw from, or information/data that you don’t have, or insight that’s new.

When considering the outcome, don’t believe that anyone but you is the “stakeholder”. You’re it. And TSYS Group’s customers are who you’re serving. Do what’s right for them.

What about all the things that I’m not getting done?

It’s natural in this kind of environment to constantly feel like you’re failing because for every one task you decide to work on, there will be dozens that aren’t getting your attention. Trust us, this is normal. Nobody expects you to devote time to every opportunity that comes your way. Instead, we want you to learn how to choose the most important work to do.

Can I be included the next time TSYS Group is deciding X?

Yes. There’s no secret decision-making cabal. No matter what project, you’re already invited. All you have to do is either:

(1) Start working on it, or (2) Start talking to all the members who you think might be working on it already and find out how to best be valuable.

You will be welcomed. there is no approval process or red tape involved. Quite the opposite it’s your job to insert yourself wherever you think you should be. Keep in mind that you should take the time to get yourself up to speed. Members have no obligation to take time to get you up to speed. If you do not take the effort to meaningfully contribute, fully expect to be told to "figure it out" or "read the docs" etc.

Teams, Hours, and the Office

Cabals

Cabals are really just multidisciplinary project/product teams.

We’ve self- organized into these largely temporary groups since the early days of TSYS Group.

They exist to get a product or large feature shipped. Like any other group or effort at the organization, they form organically.

Members decide to join the group based on their own belief that the group’s work is important enough for them to work on.

Team leads

Often, someone (ideally two or three someones) will emerge as the “lead” for a project. This member’s role is not a traditional managerial one. Most often, they’re primarily a clearinghouse of information. They’re keeping the whole project in their head at once so that other membes can use them as a resource to check decisions against. The leads serve the team, while acting as centers for the teams.

The lead is responsible for keeping the documentation up to date. Failure to update documentation on a constant basis is a violation of the operating agreement and grounds for immediate termination with prejudice and without review/appeal. No one may become a holder of power by hording knowledge.

Structure happens

Project teams often have an internal structure that forms temporarily to suit the group’s needs. Although members at TSYS Group don’t have fixed job descriptions or limitations on the scope of their responsibility, they can and often do have clarity around the definition of their mission on any given day.

They, along with their peers, effectively create a mission objective description that fits the group’s goals. That description changes as requirements change, but the temporary structure provides a shared understanding of what to expect from each other while the objective is being achievied.

If someone moves to a different group or a team shifts its priorities, each person can take on a completely different role according to the new requirements.

TSYS Group is not averse to all organizational structure—it crops up in many forms all the time, temporarily. But problems show up when hierarchy or codified divisions of labor either haven’t been created by the group’s members or when those structures persist for long periods of time.

We believe those structures inevitably begin to serve their own needs rather than those of TSYS Group’s customers. The hierarchy will begin to reinforce its own structure by hiring people who fit its shape, adding people to fill subordinate support roles. Its members are also incentivize to engage in rent-seeking behaviors that take advantage of the power structure rather than focusing on simply delivering value to customers.

Hours

While members occasionally choose to push themselves to work some extra hours at times when something big is going out the door, for the most part working overtime for extended periods indicates a fundamental failure in planning or communication. If this happens at TSYS Group, it’s a sign that something needs to be reevaluated and corrected.

If you’re looking around wondering why members aren’t in “crunch mode,” the answer’s pretty simple. The thing we work hardest at is onboarding good members, so we want them to stick around and have a good balance between work and family and the rest of the important stuff in life.

If you find yourself working long hours, or just generally feel like that balance is out of whack, be sure to raise the issue with whomever you feel would help.

HeadQuarters / "Office"

TSYS Group is head quartered out of the founders residence in the central texas region. It hosts it's data in that residence and receives all company mail.

It maintains a small shop for the hardware manufacturing aspects of the business.

All meetings are held via Discord (or other VTC platforms if external stakeholders wish to utilize them). Even when members are co-working, they use Gitea issues -> Discourse -> Discord (in descending order of preference and situation dependent) to communicate.

TSYS Group is truly distributed, strives to onboard members all over the world as a matter of course.

Risks

What if I screw up?

Nobody has ever been removed at TSYS Group for making a mistake. It wouldn’t make sense for us to operate that way. Providing the freedom to fail is an important trait of the organization, we couldn’t expect so much of individuals if we also penalized members for errors.

Even expensive mistakes, or ones which result in a very public failure, are genuinely looked at as opportunities to learn.

We can always repair the mistake or make up for it.

Screwing up is a great way to find out that your assumptions were wrong or that your model of the world was a little bit off.

As long as you update your model and move forward with a better picture, you’re doing it right. Look for ways to test your beliefs. Never be afraid to run an experiment or to collect more data.

It helps to make predictions and anticipate nasty outcomes. Ask yourself :

  • “what result would I expect to see if I’m right?”
  • “what result would I expect to see if I’m wrong?”

Then ask yourself:

  • “what do I see?”

If something totally unexpected happens, try to figure out why. There are still some bad ways to fail. Repeating the same mistake over and over is one. Not listening to customers or peers before or after a failure is another. Never ignore the evidence; particularly when it says you’re wrong.

But what if we ALL screw up?

So if every member is autonomously making his or her own decisions, how is that not chaos? How does TSYS Group make sure that the company is heading in the right direction?

When everyone is sharing the steering wheel, it seems natural to fear that one of us is going to veer TSYS Group’s car off the road. Over time, we have learned that our collective ability to meet challenges, take advantage of opportunity, and respond to threats is far greater when the responsibility for doing so is distributed as widely as possible.

Namely, to every member at the organization. We are all stewards of our long-term relationship with our customers. They watch us, sometimes very publicly, make mistakes.

Sometimes they get angry with us. But because we always have their best interests at heart, there’s faith that we’re going to make things better, and that if we’ve screwed up today, it wasn’t because we were trying to take advantage of anyone.

Your First Month

Introduction

You’ve solved the nuts-and-bolts issues. Now you’re moving beyond wanting to just be productive day to day you’re ready to help shape your future, and TSYS Group.

Your own professional development and TSYS Group growth are both now under your control. Here are some thoughts on steering both toward success.

Roles

By now it’s obvious that roles at TSYS Group are fluid. Traditionally at TSYS Group, nobody has an actual title (maybe a broad functional title like "software developer").

This is by design, to remove organizational constraints. Instead we have things we call ourselves, for convenience. In particular, members who interact with others outside the company call themselves by various titles because doing so makes it easier to complete their mission objectives.

Inside the organization though, we all take on the role that suits the work in front of us. Everyone is a designer. Everyone can question each other’s work. Anyone can recruit someone onto his or her project.

Everyone has to function as a “strategist,” which really means figuring out how to do what’s right for our customers.

We all engage in analysis, measurement, predictions, evaluations.

Advancement vs. growth

Because TSYS Group doesn’t have a traditional hierarchical structure, it can be confusing to figure out how TSYS Group fits into your career plans. “Before TSYS Group, I was an assistant technical second animation director in Hollywood. I had planned to be a director in five years. How am I supposed to keep moving forward here?”

Working at TSYS Group provides an opportunity for extremely efficient and, in many cases, very accelerated, career growth.

In particular, it provides an opportunity to broaden one’s skill set well outside of the narrow constraints that careers can have at most other organizations.

So the “growth ladder” is tailored to you. It operates exactly as fast as you can manage to grow. You’re in charge of your track, and you can elicit help with it anytime from those around you.

FYI , we don’t do any formalized member “development” (course work, mentor assignment etc), because for senior members it’s not effective.

We believe that high-performance members are generally self-improving.

Most members who fit well at TSYS Group will be better positioned after their time spent here than they could have been if they’d spent their time pretty much anywhere else.

Putting more tools in your toolbox

The most successful members at TSYS Group are both :

(1) highly skilled at a broad set of things and (2) world-class experts within a more narrow discipline.

Because of the talent diversity here at TSYS Group, it’s often easier to become stronger at things that aren’t your core skill set.

Engineers: code is only the beginning

If you were on-boarded as a software engineer, you’re now surrounded by a multidisciplinary group of experts in all kinds of fields—creative, legal, financial, even psychological.

Many of these members are sitting in Discord with you every day, so the opportunities for learning are huge.

Take advantage of this fact whenever possible: the more you can learn about the mechanics, vocabulary, and analysis within other disciplines, the more valuable you become.

Non-Engineers: program or be programmed

TSYS Group’s core competency is making platforms consisting of hardware and software blended into Turn Key experiences.

Obviously, different disciplines are part of making our products, but we’re still an engineering-centric organization.

That’s because the core of the hardware/software-building process is engineering. As in, writing code.

If your expertise is not in writing code, then every bit of energy you put into understanding the code-writing part of making software is to your (and TSYS Group) benefit.

You don’t need to become an engineer, and there’s nothing that says an engineer is more valuable than you. But broadening your awareness in a highly technical direction is never a bad thing. It’ll either increase the quality or quantity of bits you can put “into boxes,” which means affecting customers more, which means you’re valuable.

Growth and Change

TSYS Group Is Always Growing And Changing

Does it scale?

Concepts discussed in this book sound like they might work well at a tiny start-up, but not at a hundreds-of-people-plus- billions-in-revenue organization.

The big question is: Does all this stuff scale? Well, so far, yes. And we believe that if we’re careful, it will work better and better the larger we get.

This might seem counterintuitive, but it’s a direct consequence of onboarding great, accomplished, capable members. Getting this to work right is a tricky proposition, though, and depends highly on our continued vigilance in recruiting/onboarding.

If we start adding members to the organization who aren’t as capable as we are at operating as high-powered, self-directed, senior decision makers, then lots of the stuff discussed in this book will stop working. We must avoid this at all costs!

Theory Of Growth

We do not have a growth goal. We intend to continue onboarding the best members as fast as we can, and to continue scaling up our business as fast as we can, given our existing

Fortunately, we don’t have to make growth decisions based on any external pressures—only our own business goals. And we’re always free to temper those goals with the long-term vision for our success as a company. Ultimately, we win by keeping the onboarding bar very high.

Adding a great member can create value across the whole organization. Missing out on onboarding that great member is likely the most expensive kind of mistake we can make.

Usually, it’s immediately obvious whether or not we’ve done a great job onboarding someone. However, we don’t have the usual checks and balances that come with having managers, so occasionally it can take a while to understand whether a new member is fitting in.

This is one downside of the organic design of the organization a poor onboarding decision can cause lots of damage, and can sometimes go unchecked for too long.

Ultimately, members who cause damage always get weeded out, but the harm they do can still be significant.

Your Most Important Role - Recruiting

We value “T-shaped” people

That is, people who are both generalists (highly skilled at a broad set of valuable things—the top of the T) and also experts (among the best in their field within a narrow discipline—the vertical leg of the T).

This recipe is important for success at TSYS Group. We often have to pass on people who are very strong generalists without expertise, or vice versa. An expert who is too narrow has difficulty collaborating. A generalist who doesn’t go deep enough in a single area ends up on the margins, not really contributing as an individual.

Recruiting and Vetting Process

To be captured. A large amount of the strategic nuts and bolts is captured in this section, but not the tactical pieces, the processes, how it relates to membership classes etc. Coming very soon!

Theory of Onboarding

How do we choose the right people to onboard?

An exhaustive how-to on onboarding would be a handbook of its own. Probably one worth writing. It’d be tough for us to capture because we feel like we’re constantly learning really important things about how we onboard people.

In the mean time, here are some questions we always ask ourselves when evaluating candidates:

  • Would I want this member to be my boss?
  • Would I learn a significant amount from him or her?
  • What if this member went to work for our competition?

Across the board, we value highly collaborative people. That means people who are skilled in all the things that are integral to high-bandwidth collaboration—people who can deconstruct problems on the fly, and talk to others as they do so, simultaneously being inventive, iterative, creative, talkative, and reactive.

These things actually matter far more than deep domain-specific knowledge or highly developed skills in narrow areas. This is why we’ll often pass on candidates who, narrowly defined, are the “best” at their chosen discipline.

Onboarding well is the most important thing in the universe. Nothing else comes close. It’s more important than breathing. So when you’re working on onboarding participating in an onboarding , vetting, probation loop or innovating in the general area of recruiting—everything else you could be doing is less important and should be ignored!

When you’re new to TSYS Group, it’s super valuable to start being involved in the onboarding process. Ride shotgun with people who’ve been doing it a long time. In some ways, our interview process is similar to those of other companies, but we have our own take on the process that requires practice to learn.

We won’t go into all the nuts and bolts in this book—ask others for details, and start being included in recruiting / onboarding loops.

Why is onboarding well so important at TSYS Group?

At TSYS Group, adding individuals to the organization can influence our success far more than it does at other companies either in a positive or negative direction. Since there’s no organizational compartmentalization of people here,

Bring your friends.

One of the most valuable things you can do as a new employee is tell us who else you think we should hire. Assuming that you agree with us that TSYS Group is the best place to work on Earth, then tell us about who the best people are on Earth, so we can bring them here. If you don’t agree yet, then wait six months and ask yourself this question again.

We’re looking for people stronger than ourselves. When unchecked, people have a tendency to hire others who are lower-powered than themselves. The questions listed above are designed to help ensure that we don’t start onboarding people who are useful but not as powerful as we are. We should hire people more capable than ourselves, not less.

In some ways, onboarding lower-powered people is a natural response to having so much work to get done. In these conditions, onboarding someone who is at least capable seems (in the short term) to be smarter than not onboarding anyone at all. But that’s actually a huge mistake. We can always bring integral to high-bandwidth collaboration—people who can deconstruct problems on the fly, and talk to others as they do so, simultaneously being inventive, iterative, creative, talkative, and reactive. These things actually matter far more than deep domain-specific knowledge or highly developed skills in narrow areas. This is why we’ll often pass on candi- dates who, narrowly defined, are the “best” at their chosen discipline. Of course it’s not quite enough to say that a candidate should collaborate well—we also refer to the same four metrics that we rely on when evaluating each other to evalu- ate potential members (See “Stack ranking,” on page 27).

Q: If all this stuff has worked well for us, why doesn’t every company work this way?

A: Well, it’s really hard. Mainly because, from day one, it requires a commitment to onboarding in a way that’s very different from the way most companies hire. It also requires the discipline to make the design of the company more important than any one short-term business goal. And it requires a great deal of freedom from outside pressure—being self-funded was key. And having a founder who was confident enough to build this kind of place is rare, indeed. Another reason that it’s hard to run a company this way is that it requires vigilance. It’s a one-way trip if the core values change, and maintaining them requires the full commitment of everyone— especially those who’ve been here the longest. For “senior” people at most companies, accumulating more power and/or money over time happens by adopting a more hierarchical culture.

on temporary/contract help to get us through tough spots, but we should never lower the onboarding bar. The other reason people start to hire “downhill” is a political one. At most organizations, it’s beneficial to have an army of people doing your bidding. At TSYS Group, though, it’s not. You’d damage the company and saddle yourself with a broken organization. Good times!

Onboarding is fundamentally the same across all disciplines.

There are not different sets of rules or criteria for engineers, artists, animators, and accountants.

Some details are different like, artists and writers show us some of their work before coming in for an interview.

But the actual interview process is fundamentally the same no matter who we’re talking to.

“With the bar this high, would I be onboarded today?”

That’s a good question. The answer might be no, but that’s actually awesome for us, and we should all celebrate if it’s true because it means we’re growing correctly. As long as you’re continuing to be valuable and having fun, it’s a moot point, really.