Fintech will hire you if you're a bad writer

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✍️ I’ve always been fascinated with companies that make writing a core part of their culture because I’m convinced that most business problems can be traced back to poor communication.

📰 10+ years as a journalist has taught me that these organizations are rarely newsrooms (SAD!). More often, writing champions are tech companies, where quick decisions need to be made across time zones and distributed teams.

🦅 One such company is UK fintech Griffin. This week, I chatted to co-founder David Jarvis about why writing is a skill he requires from everyone at the remote-first company. Something’s working because Griffin has raised tens of millions of $$ from investors, including Seedcamp, EQT Ventures and MassMutual Ventures, and last year got approval to become a fully operational bank in the UK.

Key takeaways from our conversation:

• Culture is what you hire and fire for. If high-quality communication through writing is going to be part of your culture, you need to test for it in interviews and be ready to fire for it.

• Good writing is a powerful signal of quality. Good writing can be a sign of quality — both for your customers and for your employees.

The man himself

EW: You’ve put writing at the core of building Griffin. Where did that come from?

DJ: It comes from a couple of things. One is it brings me joy. I have a background in the arts, specifically theater, and I find great joy in the expressivity that comes with language. Then there is the opposite side of that, which is that I’m definitely not neurotypical. I really struggle to read things that are badly written.

Some things are unique to us as a business. We were a remote-first organization from day one. Being remote first means a significant amount of your team communication is going to be written, so people need to be able to write and, ideally, to like writing.

As a bank, specifically, everything that you do needs to be auditable and have an audit trail attached. Writing is one of the ways that you generate an audit trail for decisions and how things work.

Part of the control environment for a bank is a large number of written policies and procedures. In most banks, these are either badly written or they are written in corporate speak that is not intended to be read by humans. It is intended to be read by regulators.

But that’s dumb, and it’s not what the regulators want. Regulators want your policy to actually inform the operations of the business, which means the most important readers are the people within the company. So you should write it so that people read it and don’t think, “This was written for space aliens.”

EW: Why are financial companies just writing for space aliens?

DJ: Received wisdom. Someone says, “This is how the regulators like it,” and no one challenges them. In our early days, we had people who said that. They did not stay.

EW: How did you go about instituting standards of communication and writing?

DJ: I wrote the initial version of our “how we write” document the day before we closed our seed round, on September 18th, 2019.

I think I wrote it for two reasons. One is because I saw Monzo published their style guide, and I loved it. The second reason was that one of the people we were looking at hiring was a bad writer, and it was already driving me nuts.

EW: Did you end up hiring that person?

DJ: Yes, and then having to fire them.

EW: Do you only hire great writers now?

DJ: You don’t need to be a great writer, but if you’re a bad writer, we’ll fire you. If you’re a bad writer, you’re probably bad at communicating over Slack, which means you can’t communicate with your colleagues.

In the second block of our culture guide, after the intro, we say, “For better or worse, we will be a distributed company for the foreseeable future. In distributed companies, ‘water cooler’ conversations where one could learn by osmosis are gone. In their place, we must actively document and share everything that happens within the company. If we don’t, our co-workers will be left in the dark.”

“In distributed companies, ‘water cooler’ conversations where one could learn by osmosis are gone. In their place, we must actively document and share everything that happens within the company.”

EW: Do you include writing in interviews?

DJ: It doesn’t matter what job you have; you have to produce a writing sample. It will be context-specific to your role and might also test domain knowledge.

Right now, we’re hiring for someone to run a card-issuing product. The prompt is, “Explain how a card transaction works as if you are running a training session for our board.”

Can you take a complex subject and distill it in an accessible way? That’s very important to most jobs, but especially a job at a highly complex business like ours.

EW: Having everything written down means that the entire business is transparent to all employees. Everyone can see what’s going on.

DJ: It’s about transparency, and it’s also about the company as an experience.

Your experience of working at a company is going to be defined by the work that you do, but principally by the relationships that you have. Those relationships will be defined by how you communicate with [your colleagues] and how you experience communication in turn. From leadership, from peers, from everyone. So we try to set a quality bar for that part of the experience.

It also extends to how our customers experience us. I care a lot that written communications with customers are very high quality, though obviously, we also spend a lot of time with our customers in person and on calls.

I’m obsessed with the idea that the way you do one thing is the way you do all things. Shitty writing implies that everything you do is garbage or done to a poor standard. Written communication is one of the most powerful signals you can give someone of quality.

“Written communication is one of the most powerful signals you can give someone of quality.”

EW: Does this obsession with quality in writing stem from a deeper need to understand things at their most fundamental level? I find that writing often suffers, especially in business contexts, when people don’t actually know what they’re talking about.

DJ: I have a violent need to understand things from first principles. But my need to go over [lower level concepts] in great detail, to really internalize and understand them, has meant that when I run into something that I don’t understand in real life, I don’t pretend I understand. I’m like, “Stop. I don’t know what this is.”

EW: How does that help you in your job?

DJ: I run a bank. Most of the companies that we bank are regulated financial institutions. A lot are in payments. In the payment space, people will often be very loose with language in ways that can be noncompliant with regulations.

If I hear [someone willingly using the wrong language], in my head, I’m like, “Cool. I’m gonna continue to be friendly, but we’re not going to be collaborators.”

EW: So, precision of language can also be a sign of truthworthiness. Let’s talk about AI. The writing that you produce, for compliance purposes, for example, is meant to be read many times. But lots of AI writing seems created to never be read.

DJ: That’s a terrible use of AI. There are a couple of use cases for AI that I think are interesting and sensible. First, when you need to collate information from across disparate systems that you would otherwise have a human do. That can take hours for a person to do, but it can be done by AI instantly if — critically — the written evidence already exists in the relevant places.

There’s also a lot around case management — cases where something is not getting written once and read many times, but getting written once and read once.

Let’s say you’ve got a flagged payment. There’s a concern about fraud, which doesn’t mean it’s fraudulent. Right now, a human being has to go pull a bunch of information, reference what our policy says, make a decision, and action the decision. It’s very helpful if you can have AI say, “I’m going to pull the information about the transaction and about what the policy says, make a recommendation that includes what the action should be, and I can take this action — do you want me to do that?”

EW: What platforms does Griffin use for communications?

DJ: Fathom, which makes sure everyone gets to participate always. There’s a recording of every meeting and a transcript that goes to an email list. Very helpfully, it also links to our sales CRM so action items get identified. Then Slack, Notion, Google Drive, Google Calendar, Google Meet.

EW: Do you have an emoji culture? What are the top emojis?

DJ: We do have an emoji culture. Let me look at what’s in our announcement channel [on Slack]…A troll…a little animated Gong emoji. Whenever someone closes a deal, we always post a GIF from The Bear saying, “That’s fire, chef.” The party parrot emoji is very actively used. Similarly, we have a dancing happy blob…an emoji of Andrew Bailey…a custom emoji of our logo with a party hat. There’s a great emoji of me in Grind, by Liverpool Street Station, underneath a neon sign that says ‘Money.’

EW: Do other investors or founders ask you about the writing culture at Griffin?

DJ: Not often because most founders today are not running fully remote businesses. And investors don’t really believe in remote businesses — that’s a hot take.

EW: Why do you believe in remote business?

DJ: It’s very valuable to me to be able to go for a walk, go to the bathroom, pick up my kid, walk my dog. We skew older. People have families. They put a lot of value on the flexibility that comes with being a remote-first organization.

The aforementioned canine, the real star of this show

EW: Finally, what advice would you give someone building a business on how to enforce clear communication through writing?

DJ: If it’s valuable to you, you gotta interview for it, and you gotta be willing to fire people over it.

I’m really getting a lot of mileage out of looking through these old emojis, by the way. There’s an emoji of one of our oldest employees touching a pig.

EW: Is it a real pig?

DJ: It’s a real pig. Pig’s fine, by the way.

EW: Phew.

Next steps: This week, think about what communications within your company says about the culture. How would you improve it?

📖 Griffin’s “how we write” document.

🧠 How to build a personal brand when social media is dying.

🧀 Cheese, wine and ChatGPT: SF ladies are having AI Tupperware parties.

🦄 Personal stories and anecdotes can make you stand out in the age of AI writing. Love this from

.

🐶 Good piece on the schism between AI-positive bosses / AI-skeptical employees. Includes a hilariously nonsensical line from a quippy equity analyst (the deadline-rattled journo’s best friend): “It’s a problem when the dogs won’t eat the dog food.”

🦜 A history of the party parrot. Turns out his name is Sirocco, and he is a rare New Zealand species of which only 153 remain.