Embracing Your Weirdness

Can you share with us some of the most important values at Poshmark? And how do you maintain your company cultures? The team keeps growing and expanding.

One of my favourite values at Poshmark, and it’ll all make sense in the context of this conversation is embrace your weirdness. What we found with our company values—so a lot of people, you don’t have values when you launch your business and then over time, you’re like, “Oh, okay, we’re like a legit company now, so we need to have our company values posted on our internet, all that stuff.” And they’re largely kind of just a service.
What I think is really amazing about Poshmark is our values were created because we looked at what we had and said, “Let’s codify what we have so they’re real.”
And so, embrace your weirdness. It’s another way of saying people first, right? But what it’s saying is you have to know how you’re weird, we’re all weird. I was saying I was the other because I was a Chinese Malaysian growing up in America but everyone has their story about how they feel weird. And that weirdness actually is a source of such strength. If we could get there and we could help each other get there.
But what happens is if you’re really insecure about your weirdness, which is understandable because you’re different. But if you’re insecure about your weirdness, it’s really hard for you to see, accept, and empower the weirdness of others. And that’s where we can kind of start to bring each other down, is out of fear.
So, if we could say, “I’m weird, you’re weird, how can I lead into your weirdness and help you thrive?” Then all of a sudden, we start to empower and lift each other up. And so I really like that about Poshmark culture is because we explicitly say, “Embrace your weirdness,” we can now have these conversations, we can now proactively . . .
Well, my interview question when I bring new team members on board is, “Here’s how I’m weird. How are you weird?” And if you don’t know how you’re weird, that tells me something. That tells me about how much time you’ve spent looking inwards and that matters for our culture. So, I think that is a really cool part of our culture.