Beautiful Tension: Culture, Profit, And Fulfillment At Katapult

A conversation with Katapult’s Chief Visionary Officer, Andrew Bryden, P.E.

Andrew Bryden is one of the founders of Katapult Engineering and has been part of the team since joining (then called) Stine Consulting in 2006. Andrew is a mad scientist at heart, but his passion and care for people have kept him more involved in operations, major client relationships, and project management rather than just focusing on research and development.

He is obsessed with innovation that empowers people, finding ways to develop scalable and accessible workflows in the midst of work that is hard and unglamorous (but extremely valuable). For years, he has boldly driven Katapult forward while balancing an exciting future with mindful stewardship of our present work and commitments.

As Katapult’s Visionary, Andrew is responsible for building company culture while discerning the path ahead. I sat down with him to better understand what culture means to the organization, what he believes about work as part of a fulfilling life, and where Katapult is headed and why it matters to the world.

Why is culture still so important to Katapult after all these years?

"As businesses develop, everyone hires really quality people. So the differentiator is no longer which school people came from. It's how cohesive are your people, do they care? Are they bought in? How is your culture making them healthy, keeping them aligned?

If you have bad people, you already lost. You're already kind of disqualified. So everyone got to hire good people, everyone got to start from the same spot. Okay, how do you rise above? And it's culture.

A lot of it has to do with a belief that a thriving worker also produces best for the company. You don't placate the employee just enough so that they'll keep coming to work. You want them to thrive. You want a truly symbiotic relationship. You want to truly set them up for success for real in life because that also will make them successful here. So it's not diabolical. When they win in their personal life, they win here too."

Ever since Harvard Business Review started talking about leadership and culture, companies have been touting their ethics and plastering their "values" on placards in their conference rooms. What's different about Katapult?

"Core values have to be authentic to be believed to be real. If they're not authentic, then people don't believe them. And as soon as people don't believe them, they don't start acting like them, and then they're not real. So if you want core values to actually be real, you have to do it in a way that you believe them. Anything you do that would make people doubt their authenticity is basically going to erode your culture. Putting things on a poster fundamentally changes the way people see, and their opinion of, core values themselves.

They have to see it in actions first. They have to hear it, so they have to be told. You can't hide them and only have people discover them. You have to communicate them well, you have to reinforce them, but it has to be authentic and real. You can't do it in a high polish, high gloss way. It's gotta stay a little bit raw or people will doubt its authenticity."

Okay, then let's keep it a little bit raw. What do Katapult's four core values actually mean?

"Our four core values are independently valuable and create a beautiful tension when considered together.

Starting with create maximum value. That's kind of our mission and what we're going to do in the world. That's held in tension with people matter: we're never going to choose the mission over people, but, alternatively, won't choose people over mission. That's a hard tension to maintain.

Growth mindset is a really important part of the formula because it's about making sure that our people grow and that we don't get trapped and we keep innovating as a company to keep offering more value to the world, and our people become more valuable, which is really important for our people.

Lastly, it's fair exchange, and how do we make sure that we never take advantage of people and we don't let people take advantage of us? How do we build trust with our employees and with our customers? We create that virtuous cycle of trust because people know that we're not trying to fleece them. We're not trying to take more than is deserved. I think that is one of our key differentiators that is countercultural to American capitalism. People are trying to figure out a way to prioritize profit over everything else. And that's just not who we are."

Katapult seems to believe something different about work and business than most other companies. Why isn't it a zero-sum game?

"I really tie it to create maximum value, where when you do work, you get to create something in the world that didn't exist before.

So many people are obsessed with red ocean strategies. How do I take from someone else? How do I take customers? How do I take market from someone else? They treat everything as limited, and it's a scarcity mindset of 'how do I make sure I get mine?'

We have a different philosophy. It's called Blue Ocean Strategy. We want to create something that didn't exist in the world. We're not out to steal customers, we're out to create value that was never created before. How do you do something that wasn't being done, that is valuable, that people want? That's so important, because in a zero-sum mindset, people just naturally think you have to take something from someone else to have it.

If you get out of that scarcity mindset and get into a mindset of production, it's just: 'I can create something that didn't exist. Therefore there's more to go around, because I did my work. I did my job.'"

Do you think this approach helps people be more satisfied in their work?

"An employee who thrives in their life will do better work. And I think part of thriving in life is doing good work. If you don't understand what value you create at your job, you'll go home defeated, and your family life will suffer.

Having high-quality time at work, knowing that your work matters, having good workflows so you can be done in a reasonable amount of time so that you get to go home and spend time with your family, having been successful at work, is such a virtuous cycle.

Because when you're successful and you bring a good attitude home to family, it sets you up to do it better tomorrow. If we treat our employees well and they're successful at work, we believe that their families will become cheerleaders for them at work. They're excited for them to go to work and be productive, and they're not trying to figure out ways to hold them at home as much as possible.

If work is a place you go for your soul to die, employees and their families are just going to try to find ways to spend the least amount of time at work possible. How do I reduce the evil time?

Many people view work as, 'my life is paused for these hours. My real life happens outside of work.'

I'm not against professionalism as a concept. But too much professionalism is leaving yourself at home. Some professionalism does need to come to work, because we are still trying to be a business, and not airing all of your dirty laundry at work is fine.

But you do need to be real at work, you do need to be authentic at work, and you do need some people at work who know all of you. That still needs to happen."

How do you balance running a profitable business with creating an environment where people want to bring their whole selves to work?

"As a company, we believe there is a bookends for profit. There is a floor that is healthy, but there's also a ceiling that is healthy. Once we make too much money, we have to figure out a way to invest it wisely. And that's not just a 'give it to the people at the top.' Looking at too much profit as a chance to invest is really important.

Some of it will be research and development to further the mission. Some of it will be reducing costs for customers. We don't need to charge that much. Some of that will be increasing wages for employees. And some of that will be reducing the amount of time that people need to work. There is a beautiful margin in life by working less, having your work hours be more potent and productive, and also having more time with family.

I fundamentally believe that profits are not to be maximized for shareholders. I think that's a bad business. And it's not bad business financially, it's bad business morally, in my opinion. So Katapult became an employee-owned trust (EOT) because it allows the paradigm of all profits going to shareholders to be broken.

The EOT helps us balance that. More margin in your life is healthy, but the rewards of your work should also not be just tossed up uphill to line the pockets of someone at the top. By making the EOT, we allow profits to be shared with all employees. And in a way, allowing you to reduce your hours is a way for us to take some of those profits and give them to your family in your time."

Our families are huge cheerleaders for what Katapult is doing and where we are going. What's next on the roadmap? Where is this train headed? You can go deep into the weeds for a bit.

"My ambition has no bounds. I'm happy to change the world, and I believe I will, and I believe we will. I believe Katapult has what it takes to be influential in what the world will become.

We do something that's not always noticed or sexy. We look at utility poles and write software for their engineering analysis. We have a rare skill set that happens to be valuable right now, that we can keep building on that foundation. Distribution poles are the backbone of getting electricity to people. Batteries and solar are going to be one of the other foundational items in the formula to distribute power and make sure people have reliable access to energy, but I think the distribution poles to connect them are the way that we're going to keep everyone with access to energy, not just those who can afford it now.

Right now, we are mostly all just consumers of the grid, consumers of electricity. If we could turn it into an environment where we are producers of energy, through solar, through storage, I would like to turn it as a financial opportunity and a civic duty.

I am taking care of my neighbor by having batteries. But I also have a financial opportunity to better myself. Investment in solar and batteries captures the people who want to do it for altruism, and it captures the people who want to do it for pure financial gain. If we can create the environment where both people act, whether their motivation was financial or civic, they did the same thing and the world's a better place, because we didn't rely on people doing it out of altruism. We make sure there's alignment between personal benefit and public benefit.

It takes a lot of effort to keep the distribution grid healthy, because it's really technical and not always fun for a lot of people. They just want it to be invisible and not go down in a storm.

I want Katapult to be a leader in the transition of the global grid from radial to mesh. I want electricity and energy to be distributed and common and shared, as opposed to centralized and controlled. Some of that is financial incentives, and some of that is resiliency in disasters and storms and political situations.

I think it's just a better model for the world."

Katapult is always looking for great people who resonate with our values and mission. Please check out our open positions or contact us to learn more about life at Katapult Engineering.