Why We Developed Our Core Principles

When someone sees a great product, the reaction is often the same. Customers frequently consider the “how” of the products they use. How does it work? How can it support me? How can it make a difference in my business? What is often overlooked is the “why”. Why did they make this product? Why should I care?

The truth is that every great product started with a big “why”. When founders seek to launch a new company, they typically do so because they see a need or a problem and feel as if they are uniquely suited to fulfill or solve it. However, the big “why” runs deeper than that. The “why” behind any great products lies in asking the question: What is important to us as a team, and how do we want to communicate that to the world?

In the start-up world, it is easy enough for teams to share values. In fact, it is important that they do so in order to promote organization-wide success. What is tricky though, is actually verbalizing and formalizing those values.

At Stamus Networks we believe that a good team makes a good company, and a good company paired with a great product leads to success. A team not only needs to respect one another, but should feel passionate about the product, share the same professional goals, and be guided by the same principals.

This is why our executive team sat down and developed our core principles. The desire was to formalize the beliefs we already held as we have grown this business in the last several years while ensuring we communicated those shared beliefs with our customers, our community, and our growing team around the world.

Discovering our Shared Purpose

In a growing business, consistency is one of the key elements to continued success. But the only way to maintain consistency in the way we operate is to develop a framework which guides our team. To do this, we spent considerable time having intentional discussions on what matters to us. We took the time to ensure that when we communicated our core principles we would be sharing the values that are important to our team while making it very clear to others exactly what they should expect from us. 

Some of our principles developed out of observation of other companies in the greater cyber security community. We didn’t just look at the things we saw that we felt were being done well, but we also looked at the practices that didn’t sit well with us. More importantly, we analyzed the beliefs that we already held and made certain that we were capable of continuing to uphold those values in our daily practices. We are always looking to improve, and the journey has only just begun; however, these six principles provide a solid foundation which will guide us as we continue to grow and improve. 

The six core principles are:

Deliver the most useful detection, period	Celebrate the defenders	Avoid fear and exaggeration

Embrace open interfaces and open-source	Apply the right technology to the right problems	Show respect and integrity in everything we do

We want to share these core principles publicly, not just for our customers or our competitors to see, but for our existing team and any future Stamus Networks team member who will join in the future. By sharing these principles we intend to hold ourselves accountable to them. We are proud of who we are and what we do. More importantly, we are proud of why we do it.

In this series I will share each principle individually. The intent is for readers to discover why we choose to elevate each idea and see how we apply it in every area of our organization. We sincerely hope that these articles give you more insight into who we are, why we exist in the first place, and how we strive to be the best that we can be.