Korva is a scroll of the internet’s best ideas.
No secret bible
At earlier companies, arriving meant learning the payments bible, the established way of thinking about payments and operations. Here the thinking is published almost as soon as it exists, which changed the operating mode of someone used to holding it.
Direction from below
Direction also comes from the bottom more than the top. Top-down direction is extremely limited, and people in each area work the way founders would, doing everything it takes to reach product-market fit for their own product. The distance between them and the market stays thin, without the insulation from users that a large company can create.
A faster cycle
What the company thinks quickly turns into something users can touch and feel in the product, and that cycle is faster than anywhere else this product lead has worked.
Why does open development find flaws faster?
Eric Raymond's 1997 essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar compared closed software development with the open, public style of the Linux project. He summarized the advantage as given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow, a statement he named Linus's Law after Linus Torvalds. With many people able to inspect and test the work, most problems are quickly obvious to someone. Netscape cited the essay when it released its browser source code in 1998.
How do small teams stay close to customers?
Amazon popularized the two-pizza team, a rule of thumb that a team should be small enough to be fed by two pizzas. Jeff Bezos pushed it as a way to keep teams independent with fewer coordination costs. Each team owns its own service and answers for the result. Amazon's practice of one team owning a service is often summarized as you build it, you run it, a phrase from its CTO Werner Vogels in a 2006 interview.