Inside Sixtyfour: how we operate

💡 When a customer asks for a watergun, we hand them a bazooka.

That's the saying in our office, and it's the closest thing we have to a mission statement for how we work.

A customer never asks for the thing they actually need. They ask for the smallest thing they think they can get away with asking for. A CSV. A quick check. "Can you just look at one profile for me."

Most companies hand over the watergun. Exactly what was asked, nothing more, ticket closed.

We hand over the bazooka. We look at what they're actually trying to do, and we solve that, at a scale and depth they didn't think to ask for. Then they tell their friends.

When we moved offices, Saarth needed a little 1-foot wagon to move some boxes. Reasonable ask.

Ronin, our Head of Growth, showed up with a 120lb flat cart which he got from his apartment complex 2 miles away. I still don't know how he brought that over to this day.

That's the whole culture in one picture. Nobody told Ronin to do that. He heard "I need to move stuff," skipped the literal request, and solved the actual problem so hard it became a joke.

That's high agency. It's the trait we care about more than any other, and every principle below is a version of it.

1st Principle: Our goal is our customers.

Everything at Sixtyfour exists to make our customers successful. Not to raise money, not to look cool on X, not to have the smartest agent architecture. Those things are nice. They are not the point.

In practice:

• When a customer needs something on a Saturday, it gets done on Saturday. Not because there's a policy. Because they need to feel seen, and a customer who feels seen doesn't churn.
• When a customer says "this report was insane," it makes the whole team's week. When one churns, it stings for a while.
• We would rather over-deliver to 10 customers than under-deliver to 50.

We don't enforce this. You can't enforce caring. We hire people who already care and then we get out of their way.

2nd Principle: Bazookas, not waterguns.

High agency means you own the outcome, not the task.

• You don't wait to be told. You see the gap and you fill it.
• You don't do exactly what was asked if you can see the person actually needs something bigger.
• You don't say "that's not my job." At a company this size, every job is your job.
• You don't stop at the first "no" from a tool, a vendor, or a process. You find another way.

The 1-foot wagon is the literal ask. The flat cart is what they actually need. Bring the flat cart.

3rd Principle: We move insanely fast.

Fast gets good before good gets fast.

• Ship the thing. Get feedback. Fix it. Ship again. A rough answer to a customer in 20 minutes beats a perfect one tomorrow.
• Speed is a customer feature. Half of why customers love us is that we respond like we're sitting next to them.
• In a fast-moving environment, the cost of waiting is almost always higher than the cost of being wrong and correcting.

4th Principle: Happy customers → happy team → better company.

This is the ops flywheel, and it only spins in one direction.

Customers happy → they renew, they expand, they tell people. That's revenue and pipeline we didn't have to buy.

Team happy → we ship more code, write better content, and work in sync instead of stepping on each other. Morale isn't soft. It shows up in the commit log.

Ops sits in the middle of this loop. Half the job is making sure customers feel seen. The other half is making sure the team is fed, unblocked, and not drowning in admin so they can do the work that makes customers happy. Same job, two ends.

5th Principle: We prioritize ruthlessly.

You will always have more asks than hours. Every ask gets sorted on two axes: who it's for and how time-sensitive it is.

How to read it:

• Customers outrank everyone. A customer "whenever" still beats an investor "soon."
• Prospects are close behind. A prospect is just a customer we haven't closed yet.
• Team asks feel the most urgent because they're the loudest and closest to you. Resist that. Sort them honestly.
• Investors matter, but investors are patient. Customers are not.
• If two things land in the same cell, the one closer to revenue wins.

6th Principle: Precision with the team. Humanity with customers.

Two different modes of communication. Don't mix them up.

With teammates: precise and detailed. In a high-stakes, fast-moving environment, vague messages cause fuckups. Minor fuckups incur major losses. Say exactly what, exactly who, exactly by when, and exactly what "done" looks like. Over-communicate context. A message that takes you 30 extra seconds to write can save someone an hour of guessing.

With customers: sound like a human. Don't use AI when chatting with customers, or at the very least don't sound like it. There is so much slop out there right now that a real human message with a typo, a "lol," an actual opinion hits completely different. Customers can smell a template. Write like you're texting a friend who happens to pay us.

7th Principle: Ask. Then ask again.

Most of my biggest fuckups came from one thing: I didn't ask enough clarifying questions. To a teammate, to a customer, to the CEO. I assumed, I ran, and I built the wrong thing fast.

• Ask before you start. "When you say X, do you mean A or B?" costs 30 seconds. Rebuilding costs a day.
• Don't be afraid of looking dumb. Nobody remembers the dumb question. Everybody remembers the wrong deliverable.
• But be tasteful. There is a point where a dumb question is just a dumb question. If the answer is in Slack, the docs, or the last five minutes of the call, go find it first.
• Ask for help before you drown. I once took on too many time-sensitive requests from too many teammates at once, and delivered mediocre work on all of them. Nobody wins in that scenario. If you are sure you can't do something well and on time, say so early. We're a team. Someone will grab it.

8th Principle: Be a sponge.

Collect as much context as you possibly can, as fast as you can. Sit in on sales calls. Read every customer thread. Understand the sales cycle end to end: who the buyer is, what they're evaluating, what makes them sign, what makes them stall. Understand the team dynamic: who owns what, who's stretched, who needs what from you.

The more context you have, the fewer clarifying questions you need, and the better your instinct gets for when a watergun ask is actually a bazooka ask.

9th Principle: Low ego. Get your hands dirty.

No task is below you. Not one.

The same person who runs a customer call at 10am is hauling boxes at noon, ordering lunch at 11:30, and cleaning up the kitchen at 6. The Head of Growth dragged a flat cart 2 miles. The CEO takes out the trash. Nobody here thinks their title exempts them from the unglamorous stuff, because the unglamorous stuff is what keeps the company running.

• If something needs doing and you're the closest person to it, it's yours.
• You can't be afraid to get your hands dirty. Wiping down tables, chasing an invoice, packing boxes, fixing a broken CSV by hand at midnight. All of it counts.
• Ego slows everything down. The moment someone decides a task is "not their level," the task sits there and the whole team eats the delay.
• Low ego also means taking feedback without flinching. If you're wrong, say so, fix it, move on.

The people who go furthest here are the ones who never once asked whether a job was worth their time. They just did it.

10th Principle: We love the untravelled path.

Conventions are fine when they work. But that's all they are. Conventions.

Look at who's actually on this team. One of our founding engineers dropped out of school to join us when he was 19. Some of us came from research labs. Some of us came from door-to-door sales. Some of us came from making content. A huge chunk of the team are international students who moved across the world to build here.

That's not an accident. We hire for unique perspectives, because the obvious path has already been walked by everyone else, and there's nothing left on it. The interesting stuff is off the trail.

• If a customer request sounds weird, that's a reason to lean in, not a reason to say no.
• If nobody on the team has done something before, great. That means we get to figure it out.
• If the "normal" way of doing something is slow or boring, find the abnormal way.

A room full of people who took the same path will all see the same things. We'd rather see something new.

11th Principle: We always want more.

Nobody here is waiting to be handed a bigger challenge. They go and take one.

The pattern at Sixtyfour is that someone finishes what they were hired to do, then shows up asking for the next, harder thing. The ops person starts running sales calls. The engineer starts writing content. The intern starts closing deals.

We love this. It's how a small team punches way above its headcount.

• Master your lane, then step out of it.
• If you're bored, that's a signal to ask for more, not to coast.
• The people who grow fastest here are the ones who never think of their job description as a ceiling.
• Be an infinite learner. There is always more to want.

12th Principle: We are extremely capital efficient.

We don't throw money at problems. We think first.

We are a small team with a finite runway, and every dollar and every hour is a bet. A lazy team spends its way out of problems. A strategic team asks whether the problem even needs money, and if it does, what the smallest amount is that gets the answer.

This doesn't mean we're cheap. It means we're deliberate. We spend on things that move customers, and we don't spend on things that don't.

• Think before you spend. Can this be solved with a message, a workaround, a favor, or an afternoon of work instead of a purchase? Usually yes. Ronin didn't buy a cart. He borrowed one.
• Minimum viable tests. Before committing a week, commit an afternoon. Before a big enrichment, run a sample. Before a big event, run a small dinner.
• Say no to bad-fit customers. A customer who isn't a fit today costs more to serve than they pay. It's fine to turn them away or park them.
• Neglect on purpose. It's normal for parts of the product, the office, or the process to be ugly because we're focused on something that matters more right now. That's a choice, not an oversight.
• Go all-in when it counts. Sometimes a thing looks trivial from outside but is the whole deal. When it is, we throw everything at it, money included.

Extreme prioritization, minimum viable tests, and thinking before spending. That's how a small company acts like a much bigger one.