Flyle Founders: Set Mission, Values, and OKRs at Day Zero

Flyle CEO Takarabe and COO Aiba, veterans of ZUU and Uzabase, make the case that culture debt compounds harder than technical debt and must be tackled at founding.

• HubSpot’s co-founder said tech debt has an estimable repayment timeline; culture debt has no clear schedule — he was still repaying culture debt 16 years after founding.
• Takarabe joined ZUU in 2014 and saw it through IPO; post-listing, roughly half of all executive meetings were culture remediation, not business strategy.
• Aiba interned at Uzabase in 2010 when headcount was under 10, rejoined in 2015, and attributed the entire culture shift to embedded Values — that experience drove him to set Values at Flyle’s founding.
• Values must be timeless (designed to survive 30+ years and global expansion) and drawn from behaviors the founders already practice naturally, not aspirational traits.
• Setting process: co-founders read foundational texts (Built to Last, Measure What Matters), benchmarked world-class companies, each independently listed dozens of value candidates, then converged on five.
• Co-founders run semi-annual mutual feedback using a 4-quadrant matrix — strengths, weaknesses, weaknesses-to-fix, and weaknesses-to-keep — and hold each other accountable for changing the fixable ones.
• OKR’s four essences per Measure What Matters: Focus, Alignment, Tracking, Stretch; simply populating Objectives and Key Results without applying all four turns OKRs ceremonial.
• Product-driven culture is maintained by posting customer feedback to a dedicated Slack channel immediately after each call, then reviewing all win, loss, and churn reasons with the full team — including engineers — at a daily morning standup.

2025-06-26 · Watch on YouTube