This handbook is an overview of how we work at White Rabbit. It’s full of tips to help you be successful. As White Rabbit continues to grow, we hope that these ideas will serve each new person joining our ranks. Ultimately, your ideas, talent, and energy will determine White Rabbit’s success in the years ahead, and we are here to support you. Thanks for being here. Let’s do great things.

Job titles don’t mean a lot at White Rabbit. While useful when interacting with others outside the company (such as when recruiting), many job titles are very general and don’t necessarily say much about the variety of activities the person actually does. We feel taking a job title seriously may blind one to the wealth of potential contributions a person could make.

A single person might work on an email marketing campaign, create a job posting, interview candidates, pick items for shop orders, write a proposal for a product feature, and build furniture for a new hire—all in a single week.

Inside White Rabbit, everyone is a designer. Everyone can question each other’s work. Anyone can be a recruiter. Everyone has to function as a “strategist,” which really means figuring out how to do what’s right for our customers. We all engage in analysis, measurement, forecasting, and evaluations.

White Rabbit started as a small publishing company. Today we still produce Japanese language products, but we’ve also diversified into various e-commerce services. We’re a proxy-buying service, a package forwarding company, and an online shop. But mostly, we’re a group of passionate people working to build great products and do great things with intense customer focus.

As a bootstrapped company, everything we need to do must contribute to being profitable. Without profit, we can’t sustain our operations. Lack of outside investors allows us to be customer-focused instead of investor-focused.

Products and Services

Japan Rabbit — japanrabbit.com A Tokyo-based proxy buying service. We make it simple and easy to buy and ship from Japan.

Blackship — blackship.com A Japan-based package forwarding service.

OMG Japan — omgjapan.com An online shop mostly for Japanese language learning items, and an eclectic assortment of office supplies, snacks, interior, and other lifestyle products.

White Rabbit Press — whiterabbitpress.com Publisher of beloved products for Japanese language learners, including kanji and kana flashcards, posters, and a series of Japanese Graded Readers.

Japanese Graded Readers — japanesegradedreaders.com Graded readers especially written for Japanese language learners using a limited set of grammar and vocabulary.

Office Hours

Our Yokohama office hours are officially 10:00 to 19:00, Monday through Saturday, except national holidays. Talk to your manager if you need flexibility.

Office Address

• 1-2-4 ORTO YOKOHAMA BUSINESS CENTER 4F, SHINKOYASU, KANAGAWA WARD, YOKOHAMA, KANAGAWA, 221-0013 JAPAN
• Tel: 045-225-9061

White Rabbit will be a different company in the months ahead because you are going to change it for the better. The products and features you create, the customers you attract and retain, the ways you improve our culture, and the service you deliver to our customers are the things that will define us.

Welcome to White Rabbit. We can’t wait to see where you take us.

We believe companies that “out-behave” their competition will also outperform them. Our aim is to create a “self-governing organization”—a team that doesn’t merely do the next thing right but does the next right thing. We hope to foster this kind of organization by replacing rules with shared principles and a common sense of purpose.

We want to work with people that embody these seven values.

Values at White Rabbit aren’t empty words. They define the behaviors that determine who gets hired, who gets promoted, and who gets let go.

Valued Behaviors

Impact

• You accomplish amazing amounts of important work.
• You work iteratively, separating what must be done well now, and what can be improved later.
• We value effectiveness, not effort.

Curiosity

• You are a lifelong learner, unafraid to tackle new challenges and learn new things.

Collaboration

• You are a team-oriented person and thrive when you work together and support each other.
• You believe that collaboration leads to your best work.

Customer Focus

• You care deeply about solving customer pain in everything you do.

Ownership

• You take ownership of your projects and are accountable for your actions.
• You learn from your mistakes and strive to improve.

Candor

• You value candor and honesty, even when it’s tough.
• You avoid sugarcoating or hiding your opinions or experiences.
• You respect those who speak candidly, even if you don’t always agree with them.

Transparency

• You believe in openness and transparency, which infuses our team with valuable context needed to make better decisions.
• You default to public conversation.
• You seek alternate perspectives to improve your ideas.

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White Rabbit must grow better

Innovation is an economic term; not a technological term. It could be improving a business process, improving how we explain our pricing, improving our interview process, or organizing shipping materials in a better way.

Innovation extends across all departments, all processes, all functions. Management guru Peter Drucker defined innovation as “the task of empowering human and material resources with new and greater wealth-producing capacity.”

• Be open about as many things as possible. Being open and honest improves team communication and trust.
• Share early in the decision process to avoid “big revelations.” The more context people have, the better their decision making.
• We strive to communicate clearly and avoid making assumptions.
• Communicating publicly reduces barriers to contribution and makes collaboration easier.

We aim to make nearly everything at White Rabbit open to internal staff by default — from financial information and operational metrics to job descriptions and work procedures. If there’s something you want to know but don’t have access to, just ask.

Making this company handbook public is an example of the kind of transparency we value. This kind of open transparency helps us recruit people that care about our values and allows us to get more feedback from people outside the company.

Communicate Publicly

Use public channels and shared folders whenever possible. Direct messages on Slack are useful for discussing sensitive issues or coordination that would otherwise spam other employees. However, to build a culture of belonging and inclusion, the rest of company communication should take place in public channels so that issues are surfaced and everyone relevant can give their input.

Direct messages discourage collaboration. Sometimes halfway into a conversation, it becomes clear that another person should join in, but they can’t easily see the conversation history when chats begin as direct messages. Use a public channel and mention the person or group you want to reach.

Directness

Being direct is about being transparent with each other. We practice “radical candor” — an uncommon cocktail of no-bullshit and no-asshole. Feedback is always about your work and not your person.

Surface Issues Constructively

Be transparent to the right people at the right time (when still actionable). If you make a mistake, don’t worry; correct it and proactively let the affected party, your team, or manager know what happened, how you corrected it, and how you changed the process to prevent future mistakes.

Anyone and Anything Can Be Questioned

Any past decisions and guidelines are open to questioning as long as you act in accordance with them until they are changed.

Never waste valuable time, or mental peace of mind, on the affairs of others — that is too high a price to pay. —Robert Greene

Employee gossip in the workplace is a common issue despite having no real positive effect. In the worst case, a small group of workplace gossipers can seriously impede a company’s morale, erode trust, and drive good people out.

Dangers of Gossip

• Erosion of trust and morale
• Lost productivity and wasted time
• Increased anxiety among employees as rumors circulate
• Divisiveness among employees as people take sides
• Hurt feelings and damaged reputations
• Attrition due to good employees leaving because of an unhealthy work environment

What Is Gossip?

A few test questions:

1. Does the chitchat rejoice in the misfortune of others? — Gossip.
2. Does it have a negative emotional charge or perpetuate conflict or negativity? — Gossip.
3. Does it hurt or damage the one being spoken of? Would you say it in front of this person’s face?
4. Is it an unsubstantiated rumor about another employee’s work situation? — Gossip.
5. Are you recruiting uninvolved people into a conflict or complaint that doesn’t concern them? — Gossip.

Gossip vs. Legitimate Concerns

Not every conversation about a colleague is gossip. The difference is direction: a legitimate concern goes up or across to someone who can act on it; gossip goes sideways to people who can’t.

If you have a concern about a colleague’s performance, conduct, or a workplace situation, raise it with your manager or through the grievance process (see Section 24: Expectations for Handling Grievances and HR Investigations). Talking about it with uninvolved coworkers doesn’t solve the problem — it creates new ones.

What We Expect from You

Employees are expected to:

• Refrain from spreading unverified information about colleagues, including speculation about others’ employment status, performance issues, compensation, or personal matters.
• Not recruit others into interpersonal conflicts. If you have a disagreement with a colleague, resolve it directly with them or escalate through your manager — don’t build a coalition.
• Redirect gossip when you encounter it. If someone brings gossip to you, a simple response is: “That sounds like something you should raise with your manager directly.” You are not obligated to be someone’s audience.
• Use public channels for work discussions. As outlined in Sections 7 and 9, we default to transparency. Private messages and side conversations can become vectors for gossip. The same standards of conduct apply regardless of medium — Slack DMs, LINE messages, private group chats, or hallway conversations.

Dealing with Gossip

If you hear gossip

1. Redirect. Encourage the person to take their concern to someone who can act on it: their manager, or the grievance process. This is the single most effective thing you can do.
2. Don’t engage. Gossipmongers thrive on an audience. Make yourself unavailable for the conversation. You don’t need to be confrontational — simply declining to participate is enough.
3. Report it. If gossip is persistent, growing, or recruiting followers, inform your manager. Patterns matter, and leadership can’t address what they don’t know about.

If you’re tempted to gossip

1. Ask yourself: can this person do anything about it? If not, you’re venting to the wrong person.
2. Go direct. Talk to the person involved, or talk to your manager. Both are harder than complaining to a coworker, and both are more likely to actually fix the problem.
3. Write it down. If you’re unsure whether your concern is legitimate or just frustration, write it up. Writing forces clarity. If you can articulate a specific problem and a desired outcome, bring it to your manager. If you can’t, it may just be venting — and that’s what friends outside work are for.

Consequences

Gossip that disrupts team cohesion, damages colleagues’ reputations, or undermines trust in the workplace is a violation of our culture values — specifically Collaboration, Candor, and Transparency.

Persistent gossip may result in disciplinary action, up to and including termination. As stated in Section 5: Values at White Rabbit aren’t empty words. They define the behaviors that determine who gets hired, who gets promoted, and who gets let go.

Courage: You question actions inconsistent with our values. Everyone is responsible for enforcing our culture values.

Inspired and adapted from Rework by Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson

Don’t think of marketing as someone else’s job. Accounting is a department. Marketing isn’t. Marketing is something everyone at our company is doing all of the time.

You cannot not market:

• Every time we answer the phone, it’s marketing.
• Every time we send an e-mail, it’s marketing.
• Every time someone uses our product, it’s marketing.
• Every word we write on our web site is marketing.
• Every notification and error message in our software is marketing.
• How we pack the packages we ship is marketing.
• The order confirmation emails we send are marketing.

Recognize that all of these things are more important than what we post once in a while to Twitter or Facebook. Marketing isn’t just a few individual actions; it’s the sum total of everything we do.

From “Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking” by Daniel Dennett

Making Mistakes

Mistakes are not just opportunities for learning; they are, in an important sense, the only opportunity for learning or making something truly new. Before there can be learning, there must be learners. Biological evolution proceeds by a grand, inexorable process of trial and error — and without the errors the trials wouldn’t accomplish anything.

The Key to Good Mistakes

The chief trick to making good mistakes is not to hide them — especially not from yourself. Instead of turning away in denial when you make a mistake, you should become a connoisseur of your own mistakes, turning them over in your mind as if they were works of art, which in a way they are.

The fundamental reaction to any mistake ought to be this: “Well, I won’t do that again!” The trick is to take advantage of the particular details of the mess you’ve made, so that your next attempt will be informed by it and not just another blind stab in the dark.

We have all heard the forlorn refrain “Well, it seemed like a good idea at the time!” This phrase has come to stand for the rueful reflection of an idiot, a sign of stupidity, but in fact we should appreciate it as a pillar of wisdom. Any being who can truly say this is standing on the threshold of brilliance.

So when you make a mistake, take a deep breath, grit your teeth, and then examine your own recollections of the mistake as ruthlessly and as dispassionately as you can manage. Try to acquire the weird practice of savoring your mistakes, delighting in uncovering the strange quirks that led you astray. Then, once you have sucked out all the goodness to be gained from having made them, you can cheerfully set them behind you, and go on to the next big opportunity.

Evolution Works the Same Way

In science you make your mistakes in public. You show them off so that everybody can learn from them. It is not so much that our brains are bigger or more powerful, but that we share the benefits that our individual brains have won by their individual histories of trial and error.

Actually, people love it when somebody admits to making a mistake. Generous-spirited people appreciate your giving them the opportunity to help. Let them! Either way we all win.

Our goal is to inspire people more than manage them. We trust our teams to do what they think is best for White Rabbit — giving them lots of freedom, power, and information in support of their decisions. In turn, this generates a sense of responsibility and self-discipline that drives us to do great work that benefits the company.

As a hybrid-remote organization, we want each team member to be a manager of one.

A manager of one is someone who comes up with their own goals and executes them. They don’t need heavy direction. They don’t need daily check-ins. They do what a manager would do — set the tone, assign items, determine what needs to get done, etc. — but they do it by themselves and for themselves.

These people free you from oversight. They set their own direction. When you leave them alone, they surprise you with how much they’ve gotten done. They don’t need a lot of handholding or supervision.

How can you spot these people? Look at their history. Have they been self-sufficient at previous jobs? Have they defined their own role before? Have they started their own site/company before? Or done their own thing in some other way? Find someone with initiative and a budding entrepreneurial spirit. And then nurture it.

You want someone who’s capable of building something from scratch and seeing it through. When you find these people, it frees up the rest of your team to work more and manage less.

—excerpt from Hire managers of one, 2008, Basecamp blog

No matter what role you serve, self-leadership is an essential skill needed to be successful as a manager of one.

To avoid the rigidity of over-specialization, and avoid the chaos of growth, while retaining freedom, we work to have as simple a business as we can given our growth ambitions, and to keep employee excellence rising. We work to have a company of self-disciplined people who discover and fix issues without being told to do so.

We are dedicated to increasing employee freedom to fight the python of process. Some examples of how we operate with unusual amounts of freedom:

• We share information, data, and documents internally broadly and systematically. Nearly every document is fully open for anyone to read and comment on.
• Buyers and Customer Service team members don’t need approval to make decisions, including refunding money. Each employee is expected to seek advice and perspective as appropriate. “Use good judgment” is our core precept.

We do not seek to merely preserve our culture — we seek to improve it. Every person who joins us helps to shape and evolve the culture further.

At some companies, decisions are made by the senior person in charge and implemented top-down. We discourage this kind of decision making at White Rabbit and give employees an unusual level of freedom with the aim of speeding up the decision-making process and bringing fresh ideas to the process.

Do what’s best for the company.

In order to do what’s best for the company, decision-making should not be made in isolation. We should make decisions as a team, with individual team members attempting to influence each other using rational persuasion and data. Gut feeling should have little impact on how decisions are made.

Decision-Making Process

• Leaders should identify the person closest to the situation and let them make the decision.
• Decision makers must ask for advice when making material decisions. They are expected to gather information and seek advice from peers, managers, or someone outside the organization.

Choosing a Decision-Maker

Start by looking at who is close to the issue, who is well acquainted with the context and details, and who understands the big picture. Then consider their perspective, experience, and wisdom.

The Advice Process

The Decision Maker makes the final call but must ask for advice. Look for these qualities in people to seek advice from:

• Experience — Has this person had experience with circumstances similar to the decision being made?
• Position — People in different positions see things differently. Seek a leader, a peer, or someone below in hierarchy — and even, if circumstances allow, someone outside the company.
• Skipping the advice process when making material decisions is tantamount to being disloyal to the company.

Reversible vs Irreversible Decisions

Inspired by Jeff Bezos:

1. Type 1 decisions are consequential and irreversible — treat them with great care.
2. Type 2 decisions are changeable and reversible — make them quickly by whoever is most qualified.

Don’t wait for all the information. Most decisions should probably be made with around 70% of the information you wish you had. If you wait for 90%, you’re being slow.

Disagree and commit. Don’t let one person’s objection create a deadlock. Commit to the decision even when you disagree, and see it through.

Embracing Small Iterations

At the core of our work philosophy lies a commitment to small iterations. Instead of undertaking large-scale overhauls, focus on making incremental improvements one step at a time. Short iterations mean quicker feedback, faster delivery of value, and continuous improvement.

Minimum Viable Change (MVC)

Strive to implement the swiftest change possible that improves the outcome. Don’t wait for a polished solution; if your idea is an improvement, act on it. When proposing changes that aren’t essential for the first iteration, create a separate issue for them. Avoid drafting extensive plans; focus on outlining the initial step. You’ll know you’re on the right track if the first iteration feels slightly unpolished. More often than not, the simplest version proves to be the most effective.

An Iteration Ships. A Revision Doesn’t.

This is the most common misunderstanding. Changing something without putting it in front of anyone — refining a document, polishing a prototype, improving a plan — is a revision, not an iteration. You only learn when the work reaches someone who can react to it: an internal user, a stakeholder, a customer, a search engine. If nothing shipped, nothing was iterated. By the same logic, moving through internal stages — experiment to prototype to staging to demo — is one release, not several iterations. Milestones on a roadmap are not iterations either. The test is always the same: did someone outside the work see it and react?

Publish Early So Others Can Build on It

There’s a second reason to ship early that has nothing to do with feedback: a published artifact is what lets a team work in parallel. Once a first version exists — one real page, one working report, one live process — one person can improve how it’s produced, another how it looks, another the content itself, and everyone’s changes land on the same thing where we can see them fit together. When work stays split into private fragments, nobody discovers whether the fragments fit until the end. Publish the smallest real thing, then improve it together.

Low Level of Shame

Publishing early means publishing unpolished, and that takes practice. In many workplaces you take a risk showing work that isn’t finished, so people learn to hide work until it’s perfect — and by the time it appears, it’s too late to course-correct cheaply. Here, showing rough work early is a strength, not an embarrassment. If someone asks why something isn’t polished, the answer is simple: it’s an iteration, it took X hours, and the next version arrives on Y. When a teammate ships something rough and early, that’s the behavior to praise. (Adapted from GitLab’s handbook.)

Deliver one before starting another

Keep ongoing concurrent work to a minimum, ideally one, at most a handful. Working on too many things at a time erodes the focus, attention and depth that any of those items can humanly be dealt with. Starting new tasks before completing an ongoing one creates the illusion of moving fast, but it ultimately slows down both of them. Setting expectations and communicating early, clearly and openly reduces the anxiety around pending tasks.

Keep Early Decisions Easy to Walk Back

Don’t agonize over getting early decisions perfect; keep them easy to walk back instead. Shipping small does this naturally — the less that’s built on top of a choice, the cheaper it is to change your mind. (See Decision Making, §12.)

Set a Due Date; Cut Scope, Not the Date

If a first version can’t ship soon, the scope is too big. When a date is at risk, remove features — don’t move the date. Something real on a fixed date builds trust and starts the feedback clock; something complete on a sliding date does neither. (Adapted from GitLab’s handbook.)

Iteration Is Not an Excuse

To be clear about what iteration is, it helps to say what it isn’t. Iteration is not: reducing quality or lowering the goalposts; skipping documentation or compromising on security; shipping something of no value; revisions you never publish; an excuse to skip planning or impose unrealistic deadlines; or expecting others to fix your work. You should still know where you’re going — iteration is how you get there, not a substitute for having a destination. (Adapted from GitLab’s list of “things that are not iteration.”)

Creating value for customers is at the heart of what we do. The following ideas aim at improving the velocity at which we can add value to our product and processes. While originally drafted for engineering teams, we believe most of the ideas work just as well when applied to non-technical roles.

Fix Problems While They’re Small

A common rule we should always try to heed: detect and fix any problem at the lowest-value stage possible.

Efficiency

We care about working on the right things, not doing more than needed, and not duplicating work.

• Boring solutions. Use the most simple and boring solution for a problem. You can always make it more complex later if needed. The speed of innovation for our organization is constrained by the total complexity we have added so far.
• Be respectful of others’ time. Consider the time investment you are asking others to make with meetings and approval processes. Try to avoid meetings, and if one is needed, make attendance optional with a clear agenda and document the outcome.
• Spend company money like it’s your own. Every dollar we spend will have to be earned back.
• Frugality. Accomplish more with less. Constraints breed resourcefulness, self-sufficiency, and invention.
• Short verbal answers. Give short answers to verbal questions so the other party has the opportunity to ask more or move on.
• Keep broadcasts short and concise. 81% of businesspeople say what they read is frequently ineffective because it’s too long, poorly organized, unclear, filled with jargon, and imprecise.
• Responsibility over rigidity. When possible, give people the responsibility to make a decision and hold them accountable instead of imposing rules and approval processes.
• Accept mistakes. Not every problem should lead to a new process to prevent them. Additional process makes all actions more inefficient; a mistake only affects one.

Write a Pitch

Whenever you feel compelled to call a meeting, consider writing a pitch instead. A written pitch will be a much more effective use of everyone’s time.

The concrete is still wet. Everything is in “draft” at White Rabbit and subject to change, though we rarely put “draft” on any content.

Collaboration

• Helping others is a priority, even when it is not related to the goals that you are trying to achieve.
• Say thanks. Recognize the people that helped you publicly, for example in our #praise channel. Give recognition generously, in the open, and often.
• If you make a mistake, own it. Acknowledge it and fix it. Ask for help if needed. Hiding mistakes is unacceptable.

Managing Conflict

When there is conflict, manage it. Constructive debate is an effective way to quickly get to the heart of a matter. People are expected to stop fighting each other and to search for the right answer together. Join arms and attack the problem instead.

When searching for the best answer, fight like you’re right; listen like you’re wrong.

A good team player disagrees openly. We only unlock the benefits of cognitive and demographic diversity if people speak their mind. — Todd Kashdan

“A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with two watches is never sure.” — Segal’s Law

Single source of truth (SSoT) is a practice that ensures everyone in an organization bases business decisions on the same data.

A single source of truth guarantees that everyone in an organization has access to the same information. That means there are no work silos keeping people from knowing important information. Working from a single version of the truth ensures nothing will be concealed from anyone and you’ll all be on the same wavelength. This results in:

• Reducing duplicate effort (creating, organizing, and correcting information)
• Reducing the time spent on identifying which information is correct
• Helping decision-makers find the right information, faster

Designate a SSoT for Your Team

To practice SSoT, designate your SSoT and communicate it to the team. It can be as simple as creating a folder for brand assets, a Notion document for team OKRs, or a spreadsheet for payroll data. The tools matter less than the team-wide agreement to maintain a single, canonical source for a given task or project.

Maintain the SSoT

Teach everyone how to contribute to the single source of truth, no exceptions. Require regular contributions from everyone to ensure accuracy.

Manage Multiple Copies Smartly

When maintaining multiple copies of information, edits should flow down from the SSoT. For example, maintain a single “master” logo file in a non-lossy format which is used to generate all other derived files. Designate the canonical source and update derived copies accordingly.

Many people take the situation at their organization as a given, and fail to proactively engage with their new boss to shape the game in their favor. There is much you can do to build a positive working relationship with your new boss and you should start doing it as soon as you’re being considered for a new role.

Invest in the relationship with your boss. Your boss sets your benchmarks, interprets your actions for other key players, and controls access to resources you need.

Don’t isolate yourself. Get on your boss’s calendar regularly. Be sure your boss is aware of the issues you face and you are aware of their expectations.

Don’t bring only problems. Bring pitches; at least come up with a pitch on how to begin addressing issues.

Focus on a few key issues. Don’t run through everything you’ve been doing. Cut it down to no more than three things you really need to share or need action on.

Revisit expectations. Confirm and clarify expectations early and often.

Take 100% responsibility for the relationship with your boss. It’s best to assume it’s on your shoulders to make the relationship work.

Negotiate timelines. Buy yourself the time needed to diagnose issues and come up with an action plan. Figure out what your boss cares about most and aim for early wins in those areas.

Leading Up the Chain of Command

Adapted from Extreme Ownership by Jocko Willink and Leif Babin

One of the most important jobs of any leader is to support your own boss — your immediate leadership. Leadership doesn’t just flow down the chain of command, but up as well. Instead of blaming others and complaining about decisions from above, take ownership of your problems and lead — this includes leading up the chain of command. If your supervisor isn’t making decisions in a timely manner, don’t blame your boss. First, blame yourself. Examine what you can do to better convey the critical information for decisions to be made and support to be allocated.

Four Conversations to Have with Your Boss

1. Situational Conversation

Diagnose the current situation. How did the organization get here? What are the challenges? Your view may differ from your boss’s, but it is essential to grasp how they see the situation.

2. Expectations Conversation

What does your boss need you to do in the short and medium term? How is success defined? How is performance measured?

• Agree on short-term and long-term goals and timing
• Closely align expectations with your diagnosis of the situation
• Bias yourself to under-promise achievements and over-deliver results

3. Style Conversation

Your agenda is to determine how you and your boss can work best together. Adapt to your boss’s style, not the other way around.

4. Resource Conversation

Make the case for the resources you need to accomplish your goals.

Excellence in management is at the core of every great company, but managers can’t do it alone. At White Rabbit, we view management as a collective activity. Management isn’t just what managers do; it’s what we all do.

We focus on designing the organization to give employees a great amount of freedom and responsibility to exhibit self-managed behaviors. Specifically, we attempt to manage by context, not control.

Leaders at White Rabbit rarely pull out their authority card. If leaders appear to take too much control, then the organization will stop behaving in a self-managed manner. Our leaders almost exclusively depend on feedback, communication, relationships, and influence.

The move-by-move control that seemed natural to military operations proved less effective than nurturing the organization — its structure, processes, and culture — to enable the subordinate components to function with “smart autonomy.” —General McChrystal, Team of Teams

General Principles and Practices

• Set requirements and expectations upfront and give people the responsibility to meet them.
• Avoid creating too much process. If responsibilities are clear, the process will emerge from the interactions of the collaborators.
• Teach everyone how to contribute to the single source of truth, no exceptions.
• Always iterate on your processes, but avoid “meta work” (overhead and people management) as much as possible.
• Reviewing (micro-managing) work in progress is a waste of time. Instead, team members are encouraged to seek feedback early when there are doubts about the feasibility, functionality, scope, or outline of a deliverable.

Investing in Context

We believe high performance people will do better work when they understand the context. Managers at White Rabbit are encouraged to use communication and influence, over command and control.

Context over Control

By creating an environment of transparency around decision-making and providing as much relevant context as possible, managers empower their direct reports with tremendous authority to make their own decisions.

Control (avoid)	Context (embrace)
Top-down decision-making	Strategy
Management approval	Metrics
Committees	Assumptions
Planning valued more than results	Clearly-defined roles

Task-Relevant Maturity

Adjust management style based on employee skill level:

• Low task-relevant maturity — Provide structured, detailed instructions
• Medium task-relevant maturity — Discussion and support, less directive
• High task-relevant maturity — Hands-off management, set objectives only

Hiring

The most important thing you can do for our company is to hire people who will be assets. Ask yourself: could this person run the company? Could you replace yourself with this person?

Challenge yourself to get more technical.

Learn how things work. Learn how to analyze data. Making data-driven decisions depends on being able to pull together and analyze relevant data. Nothing that any of us do — engineers included — is fundamentally unlearnable.

There’s real power in formally, or informally, observing others in the org. If you want to learn as much as possible at a startup, you have to be proactive about your own growth.

A Few Practical Tactics

• Ask questions early and often. Don’t wait until you’re stuck. The cost of asking is almost always lower than the cost of going the wrong direction.
• Write things down. If it’s important, write it up. Writing forces clarity of thought and creates a record others can learn from.
• Default to action. Bias toward doing rather than deliberating. You can course-correct after you have real feedback.
• Seek out context. Understand why decisions were made, not just what was decided. Context helps you make better decisions independently.
• Build relationships across the org. Your ability to get things done often depends on relationships with people in other teams.
• Share your work early. Don’t wait until something is polished to share it. Early feedback saves time.
• Manage your energy, not just your time. Prioritize work that matches your energy levels. Deep work requires focused energy.

Say What You Really Think (with Positive Intent)

Offer feedback anytime, anywhere

Most people are reluctant to give constructive criticism to their colleagues — especially their bosses. Even if their feedback is well-intentioned, people worry about coming across as harsh. Netflix thinks about this differently.

As long as feedback is given with positive intent (aiming to help the recipient) and provides an alternative solution (focusing on what the recipient can do differently), feedback can — and should — be given anytime, anywhere.

In return, the recipient needs only to show appreciation for the feedback; they aren’t required to apply it.

At Netflix, it is tantamount to being disloyal to the company if you fail to speak up when you disagree with a colleague or have feedback that could be helpful. —Erin Meyer, No Rules Rules

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Giving Feedback

1. Aim to assist

Feedback must be given with positive intent. Clearly explain how a specific behavior change will help the individual or the company.

2. Actionable

Feedback must suggest what the recipient could do differently.

3. Appreciate

When receiving feedback, show appreciation regardless of whether you agree.

4. Accept or discard

You are not obligated to implement every piece of feedback you receive.

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Receiving Feedback

1. Appreciate

When someone gives you feedback, start by simply thanking them.

2. Consider

Take time to reflect on the feedback before deciding whether to act on it.

3. Respond

Let the feedback-giver know what you intend to do with their feedback.

Below, you’ll find a collection of general principles we try to keep in mind at White Rabbit when communicating with teammates across the company and the public. Our communication style may be challenging at first if you come from a workplace where frequent meetings are the norm. While these ideas aren’t strict requirements, they serve as shared practices to draw upon when we do the one thing that affects everything else we do: communicate.

• Real-time sometimes; asynchronous most of the time.
• Internal communication based on long-form writing, rather than a verbal tradition of meetings, speaking, and chatting, leads to a welcomed reduction in meetings, video conferences, calls, or other real-time opportunities to interrupt and be interrupted.
• Give meaningful discussions a meaningful amount of time to develop and unfold. Rushing to judgment or demanding immediate responses increases the odds of poor decision-making.
• Never expect or require someone to get back to you immediately unless it’s a true emergency. The expectation of an immediate response is toxic.
• Poor communication creates more work.
• Ask yourself if others will feel compelled to rush their response if you rush your approach. If you aren’t sure, sleep on it before saying it.
• If you want an answer, you have to ask a question. Questioning others, early and often, helps people practice sharing, writing, and communicating.
• Urgency is overrated; ASAP is poison. Time is on your side, rushing makes conversations worse.
• Communication is lossy, especially verbal communication. Every hearsay hop adds static and chips at fidelity. Whenever possible, communicate directly with those you’re addressing rather than passing the message through intermediaries.
• Ask if things are clear. Ask what you left out. Address the gaps before they widen with time.
• Good communication is often about saying the right thing at the right time in the right way with the fewest side effects.

Our team uses Slack internally for instant messaging. It allows us to contact members and have them reply asynchronously.

Slack Channel Guide

A guide to our key public Slack channels: where to ask what, and where different kinds of work and conversation happen. Descriptions are based on how each channel is actually used today. Channels are sorted alphabetically within each group.

Naming conventions

Channel prefixes map to our brands and functions: jpr- = Japan Rabbit · blk- = Blackship · omg- = OMG Japan · eng- = Engineering · ext- = a shared channel with an outside vendor or partner.

Key channels

Channel	Purpose
#general	Company-wide home base. Official announcements, product launches, Linear project updates, and team-wide news. Where wins get shared and everyone stays in the loop; all team members are here.
#ceo	Direct line to the exec group. Sign-off on wire transfers and prepayments, platform-access and admin decisions, account/vendor escalations, and other matters that need a leadership call.
#praise	Recognition and thank-yous. Celebrate a teammate who went above and beyond, a first 5-star review, a shipped feature, or a milestone. Our place to show appreciation.
#customer-love	Sharing positive customer reviews and feedback (Trustpilot, Delighted, 5-star reviews across JPR/BLK) to celebrate great service and the team behind it.
#random	Off-topic and casual chat — plus the occasional hands-on problem-solving thread. Socialize, share, and think out loud here.

PRAISE BETTER — Great praise includes: What did they do? Why does it matter? How does it make you feel?

Team & operations channels

Channel	Purpose
#eng	Engineering’s main channel. Linear triage queue, issue prioritization, cycle/sprint kickoff, deploys, repo-access requests, and cross-team engineering asks.
#cs-team	Customer Support team coordination. Team announcements, training and tooling (Front, Claude), meeting notes/recordings, and process changes.
#fulfillment	The warehouse floor (bilingual JP/EN). Daily shift and overtime coordination, package processing, weight corrections, error packages, and on-site logistics.
#shipping	Shipping operations. Carrier issues (FedEx / DHL / Japan Post), HS codes, SDS/dangerous-goods, Front email handling, shipping reports, and staffing for shipping tasks.
#finance	Treasury and finance operations. Wire-transfer and prepayment approvals (Mercury, MUFG, Yokohama Bank), AMEX/credit-card management, and tax-audit document requests.
#recruiting	Hiring coordination (bilingual). Job posts on Wantedly / TeamTailor / Indeed, candidate pipeline, interview and work-trial scheduling, and external-recruiter coordination.
#office-manager	Office facilities and HR admin for the Japan office (bilingual). Supplies, shelf labels/locations, transportation reimbursement, attendance, and contract/social-insurance changes.
#training	Onboarding and training for ops/CS staff. SOPs (e.g. COD handling), email templates, and brand-specific (JPR/BLK) training handoffs. (formerly #jpr-training)

Japan Rabbit (jpr-)

Channel	Purpose
#jpr-buying	Japan Rabbit buying team. Auction/order purchasing, bot behavior and task identification, payment-card coordination, and purchasing-process improvements with engineering.
#jpr-ops	Japan Rabbit day-to-day operations. Buyer coordination, order/COD handling, account and tooling issues, help-article updates, and scheduling.

Blackship (blk-)

Channel	Purpose
#blk-ops	Blackship operations. SDS/shipping handling, COD payment prep, package issues and returns, customer requests, and FedEx fee reconciliation between CS and the warehouse.

OMG Japan (omg-)

Channel	Purpose
#omg-ops	OMG Japan (Shopify) operations. QuickBooks/OneSaaS sync and sales-receipt issues, reconciliation, and shipping/returns for OMG orders.

Engineering alerts & bots

These are mostly automated feeds — keep them low-noise and route chatter elsewhere.

Channel	Purpose
#eng-alerts	Automated production monitoring and incidents — Better Stack incidents, GCP 429/error bursts, scheduled-job failures. Engineers triage here.
#eng-hasura	Hasura GraphQL alerts (schema changes, query errors), split out of #eng to keep it quiet. Eng debugging of Hasura/shipment-query issues.
#buying-bots	Automated run notifications from our purchasing bots (Rabot V2, Mercari API, Yahoo Auctions, Melonbooks) — success/failure per order. Eng and buyers watch bot health here.
#gcp-billing-alerts	Automated Google Cloud budget/billing alerts. Notifies when spend thresholds are crossed.

External channels (ext-)

Channels prefixed with ext- are Slack Connect channels shared with an outside vendor or partner, used for support and collaboration with them.

Channel	Shared with	Purpose
#ext-finance	External accounting / audit firm	Bookkeeping and reconciliation, QuickBooks entries, audit support, payroll, and tax matters.
#ext-jpr-mercari	Mercari	Japan Rabbit ↔ Mercari coordination (mostly JP): account restrictions, purchasing issues, and revenue-share invoices.
#ext-lua-whiterabbit	Lua (AI agent platform)	Support for our CS AI agents/RAG — billing, agent deployment, and technical questions.
#ext-betterstack-white-rabbit-japan	Better Stack (monitoring)	Support and setup for monitoring/observability.
#ext-metabase-support	Metabase (BI/analytics)	Support channel with Metabase’s success engineers.

Slack Etiquette

Prefer public channels over DMs. Direct messages should be reserved for sensitive topics or quick coordination. Most conversations should happen in public so the whole team can learn and contribute.

Use threads. When responding to a message, use threads to keep channels clean and organized.

Mute irrelevant channels. You’re not expected to read every channel. Mute channels that don’t apply to your work.

Emoji reactions are powerful. Common reactions:

• 👀 — I’m looking at this
• ✅ — Done / acknowledged
• 🙏 — Thank you
• 💯 — Agreed / great
• 🎉 — Celebration

Avoid urgency signals. Don’t use @channel or @here unless it’s genuinely urgent. Respect that others may be in deep work.

Real-time sometimes; asynchronous most of the time.

Meetings Should Be a Last Resort

Before scheduling a meeting, ask: Could this be a Slack message? A short document? A quick walk to someone’s desk? If yes, do that instead.

People’s time is highly valuable. Five people in a room for an hour isn’t a one-hour meeting — it’s a five-hour meeting. Be mindful of the tradeoffs.

We prefer focused collaboration between small groups — usually just two or three people. If you need input from more than three people, a written pitch or Slack thread is almost always better.

How to Run a Meeting

1. 15 minutes by default. If you need longer, take longer — but most meetings don’t.
2. No spectators. Everyone should have a reason to be there. If you don’t, decline the invite.
3. Start with a purpose. State it upfront. Share a preread or agenda beforehand so people come prepared.
4. Be present. In person: close laptops, put phones away. Virtual: close unrelated tabs, mute notifications. Your attention is the reason you’re in the room.
5. End with a written record. Decisions made, tasks assigned, owners identified — posted to the relevant Slack channel or document. If a meeting produces no written output, it probably didn’t need to happen. (See Section 15: Single Source of Truth.)

Everyone is responsible for enforcing these rules — regardless of whether it was your meeting or not.

One-on-One Meetings

Scheduled weekly with your manager. Typically 30–60 minutes.

The one-on-one is the subordinate’s meeting — you set the agenda and tone.

• Prepare an outline in advance
• Focus on no more than three things you need to discuss or need action on
• Prioritize potential problems and things that are bothering you — don’t just give status updates
• Your manager’s job is to listen, ask questions, and remove obstacles

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The best meeting is the one that didn’t need to happen. The second best is the one that was over in fifteen minutes with a clear decision posted to Slack.

Since the majority of White Rabbit employees work in Japan, this section is written with that as the default. Some benefits don’t make sense in other countries. We will try our best to provide comparable benefits and perks outside Japan as it makes sense.

Benefits

Pension and National Health Care

Enrollment in Japan’s social welfare and national healthcare programs (50% company paid).

Commuting Allowance

Commuting allowance is paid in the amount equivalent to the actual cost required for commuting, up to a maximum of ¥26,000 per month, or ¥4,000 monthly for bicycle commuting.

Paid Time Off

After your first six months, you’ll receive 10 days of paid vacation plus a few extra personal days. In subsequent years, you’ll receive an extra day of paid vacation per year, up to 20 days at 6.5 years of employment.

Bereavement Leave

• Close family members: 10 days
• Extended family or close friends: 3 days

Employee Liquidity Pool (ELP)

If White Rabbit Japan is sold or goes public, 10% of the transaction value is distributed as a cash bonus to eligible employees. Your share depends on how long you’ve been with us.

The ELP is a contractual cash bonus program, not actual equity. “Shares” are a calculation method for determining your bonus amount — you don’t own stock in the company.

How it works

• Shares accrue monthly from your first day.
• Your first 24 months of accrual vest at your 2-year anniversary.
• After that, shares continue accruing monthly up to a 10-year maximum.

Eligibility

You must be a full-time employee in good standing on the date of the liquidity event to receive a payout. If you’ve left the company for any reason before that date — resignation, termination, retirement, anything — you receive nothing, regardless of accrued or vested shares.

“Good standing” means no pending disciplinary action, employment dispute, or termination-for-cause notice. If something is pending at the time of the event, payout is delayed until it’s resolved.

Other notes

White Rabbit Japan may adjust ELP terms before a liquidity event, but we’ll preserve the spirit of rewarding long-term employees.

Perks

Computer Setup

• Apple or Windows computer of your choice
• Dual monitors

Personal Development Stipend

¥72,000 per year for books, courses, conferences, or other self-improvement. This is a self-improvement allowance, not a job-training reimbursement — it deliberately covers learning beyond your current role, including languages and other transferable skills. Run it by your manager for approval before you commit.

How approval works: the default is yes. Your manager approves any self-directed learning that builds a genuine skill, unless it’s already covered by another budget or it creates legal, safety, or reputational risk.

Home Office Setup

For remote workers: ¥100,000 every 3 years for home office setup.

Co-working Space Stipend

Up to ¥20,000 per month for co-working space.

At White Rabbit, we believe in keeping things simple: do what’s best for our company and our customers. As a company operating in Japan, we maintain comprehensive work rules (就業規則) in compliance with labor regulations. These rules cover essential aspects of employment including:

• Employment Terms — Conditions of employment, probationary periods, and documentation requirements
• Working Hours & Flexibility — Standard 40-hour work week, flextime options, and discretionary work arrangements
• Leave & Time Off — Annual paid leave, special leave for life events, maternity leave, and other types of leave
• Compensation — Salary structure, overtime allowances, commuting allowances, and bonus policies
• Professional Conduct — Confidentiality obligations, intellectual property rules, and workplace behavior standards
• Health & Safety — Regular health checkups, workplace safety measures, and accident compensation
• Termination — Rules regarding resignation, retirement, and conditions for dismissal

The complete work rules are filed with the Labor Standards Inspection Office since 2022 (last updated 2023). We regularly review and update these rules to reflect changes in labor laws and company needs.

Full work rules are available in English and Japanese — ask your manager or HR for access to the complete documents.

Updated: Dec 13, 2025

Purpose: To clarify the company’s standards for handling workplace complaints. We are committed to a safe, inclusive environment where employees feel empowered to raise concerns. To maintain trust in this system, investigations must be conducted with rigorous fairness, neutrality, and due process for all involved.

1. Protection of Good Faith Reporting

We encourage employees to report safety concerns without fear.

• An employee who reports a concern that turns out to be unfounded (but was believed to be true) will not be penalized.
• This protection does not extend to knowingly false statements or the fabrication of events.

2. The Presumption of Neutrality

The investigator must operate as an impartial fact-finder, not an advocate for either side.

• When a complaint is received, the initial stance is neutral inquiry. We do not start with a conclusion of guilt or innocence.
• Preliminary communications should outline the allegations and the process, avoiding language that issues reprimands or demands behavioral changes before facts are established.

3. Evidence-Based Adjudication

Findings and disciplinary actions must be based on verifiable facts.

• Objective evidence (video recordings, audio, system logs, transcripts) takes precedence over witness memory or subjective interpretation.
• Where objective records exist, they must be reviewed prior to issuing determinations. If a subjective report contradicts a verified recording, the recording establishes the factual record.

4. The “Reasonable Person” Standard

We adjudicate harassment claims based on objective standards of conduct.

• Harassment is generally defined by whether a “reasonable person” in the same circumstances would consider the conduct intimidating, hostile, or abusive.
• We validate the complainant’s feelings but adjudicate based on the accused’s actions. Benign professional interactions are not policy breaches solely because a recipient experienced internal anxiety regarding them.

5. Due Process & Credibility Assessment

A fair workplace protects the accused from defamation as vigorously as it protects the complainant from harassment.

• The accused must be informed of specific allegations (dates, quotes, contexts) and given a meaningful opportunity to present contradictory evidence.
• If a party makes demonstrably false statements during an investigation, this impacts their credibility and may itself be grounds for disciplinary review.

6. Escalation for Executive Disputes

In cases involving senior executives or the CEO, the company reserves the right to appoint a neutral third-party investigator (external HR consultant or legal counsel) to ensure impartiality.

7. Confidentiality

Details of a grievance are confidential to protect the privacy of the complainant and the reputation of the accused. “Closing the loop” on a complaint involves stating the outcome (sustained/not sustained), not broadcasting the details to the wider team.