Pee-Plum-Foe-Fum isn’t for everyone. And it shouldn’t be. That’s exactly what makes its culture strong. A good company culture isn’t one that tries to please everyone—it’s one that holds a clear and unwavering ethos, even if said ethos is polarizing to outsiders. In the best way, it’s a little cult-like: everyone passionately believes in the same overarching mission, while leaving space for discourse and diversity on relatively trivial things. Some people should love it, some people should hate it. That tension is intentional.
Pee-Plum-Foe-Fum exemplifies this. It houses a diverse spectrum of people—from Bay Area tech transplants to folks who grew up in Nepali villages or Nebraskan suburbs (yes, Nebraska). Yet, we’re also all engineers to some capacity—builders by instinct, drawn to complex problems and driven to construct solutions to the same overarching problem. The cult mentality is why there’s such a high tolerance for chaos and such minimal organizational scaffolding. The company doesn’t need to enforce rigid structure when it can trust that people are aligned on the same overarching goal: to make society better. One can argue that most companies have a similar mission, but I’d say that the problems we face uniquely span a vast range from highly-visible, flashy ones with purely humanitarian benefits to the ever-present gnarly ones that simply must be solved, but are often avoided (i.e. by the likes of people pleasing companies ahem ahem). Yes, I reckon we’re the pooper scoopers of society.