Our Vision

Everyone everywhere enjoys high-quality, affordable housing that protects them well from the effects of climate change.

Stable, high-quality housing is prerequisite for people to achieve their human potential. We called our company Cadence OneFive because hitting the pace of climate action to keep global warming to 1.5° above pre-industrial temperatures is critical to ensuring that everyone everywhere enjoys high-quality housing that they can afford and that is resilient to the effects of climate change.

Our Mission

By providing the OS for retrofits with streamlined workflows and market transparency, help building owners accelerate the climate transition of existing multifamily buildings.

Cadence OneFive Inc. is a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation, which means that our public mission is enshrined in our articles of incorporation:

Specific Purposes and Benefits. The specific public benefit purposes of the Corporation are to

  1. accelerate large-scale building decarbonization and adoption of climate-adaptive building technologies, processes, and methods;

  2. promote the principle of climate justice, that actions to mitigate or adapt to climate change should equitably distribute their benefits, remedy existing inequities, and dismantle institutional racism and other forms of systemic injustice.

For comparison, here are public purpose statements of some other PBCs.

Our Values

The bullet points below exemplify what we think these values look like in practice, but are not meant to be limiting. Definitions are from Merriam-Webster, unless otherwise noted.

1. Transparency

Transparency: the quality that makes something obvious or easy to understand

  • In interpersonal communication, we will prioritize and do all we can to be understood by the person we’re communicating with. This means that we may need to adjust our efforts to how the other person hears rather than assuming that the other person will listen differently. We will seek and give confirmation (e.g. “What I heard you say is…”).

  • We will adopt work practices that make it easy for others to understand what decisions were made and why, even if they did not participate. We will default to communicating in the open (e.g. in channels vs DMs), and we will communicate in recorded form (e.g. text) rather than ephemerally (e.g. verbal).

  • We will default to keeping things simple whenever possible.

  • In the industry and the wider world, through our participation in organizations, events, etc., we will promote information and data sharing, open processes, and transparent governance.

2. Inclusion & Collaboration

Inclusion: the act of taking in or comprise as a part of a whole or group

Collaboration: the act of working jointly with others or together especially in an intellectual endeavor

  • Collaboration and inclusion go together because we cannot collaborate without full and equal participation by everyone.

  • Recognizing that we bring societal and personally engrained habits of power that are contrary to the value of inclusion, we will develop and implement habits that achieve inclusion.

  • We will remember that we are one team, so that we can be host to healthy conflict.

3. Authenticity & Rigor

Authenticity: the quality of being true to one’s own personality, spirit, or character AND that of being worthy of acceptance or belief as conforming to or based on fact

Rigor: strict precision; exhibiting or marked by strict, particular, and complete accordance with fact or a standard

  • We will try to get to the truth of things, basically by applying the scientific method.

  • We will act with initegrity in dealing with everybody.

4. Efficacy & Efficiency

Efficacy: the power to produce an effect

Efficiency: the ability to do something or produce something without wasting materials, time, or energy

  • We will make products that work

  • We will be results-oriented, not effort-oriented, in management practices.

  • We will not waste time or energy on things that don’t have great impact on efficacy, particularly if we’re in the space of getting the marginal benefit characterized by the saying “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good.”

5. Respect & Renewal

Respect: a feeling or understanding that someone or something is important, serious, etc., and should be treated in an appropriate way

Renewal: to make like new; restore to freshness, vigor, or perfection

  • We will recognize people as people, not just as workers.

  • When we have conflicts or failures, we will adopt restorative practices in working through them.

  • We will not dehumanize or devalue people by thinking of anyone as “enemies,” regardless of whether their interests are aligned with ours.

How will policies embody the values?

We (Marc and Bomee) aim to cultivate “honest karma culture”: the idea that we do what needs doing, having faith that it will come back in positive ways (whether to individuals, to teams, or to the company), and that we do that with full commitment to honesty – i.e. it’s not about just being “nice” for the sake of being nice. We should hold to a high standard of intellectual honesty so that the “good” we do is rooted in authenticity, balanced with empathy for the whole person.

Here are some thoughts on how we can turn these values into habits (and therefore into culture):

Trust team members

  1. Ask for and accept help from each other.

  2. Expect and support each person being an effective “manager of one.”

  3. Apply “continuous RCx” for ourselves and the team by honestly assessing what’s going right, what’s not going right, and what we should do more of or do differently.

Respect the whole person

  1. Allow each other to fail without prejudice and help each other recover from failure.

  2. Speak honestly and listen with openness. In conflict, assume best intentions and seek restoration.

  3. Strive for transparency in corporate affairs, including for compensation, to ensure equity and build trust, while respecting privacy for personal affairs.

  4. Support each other’s personal and professional well-being.

  5. Embrace and support each other’s diversity of backgrounds, experience, race/culture, stage of life, etc.

Embrace the mission

  1. Aim our work at enabling action at the speed and scale appropriate to the climate emergency and act in concert with the principle of climate justice. This means considering if we’re doing the right thing by these yard sticks and how we can be doing more.

  2. We will thoughtfully balance the success of the company and its shareholders, the needs of the team members, and the impacts we have in the world.

What other people say about “karma” and work culture

  • Fast Company “Creating Good Karma at Work”

  • In the end, the ultimate good karma at work is in doing good work. Good work is thoughtful, usually a shared success with a team, shows spot-on judgment, demonstrates intention, and owes its achievement to an overall awareness of needs and goals.

  • Gigster blog Karma - our philosophy behind team culture and performance

  • In the end, the culture of an organization is simply the sum total of what people in the organization actually do organically, especially when faced with tough choices (reference: “What You Do Is Who You Are,” Ben Horowitz, September 26, 2019.) Organizations characterize their culture in terms of values they want expressed through actions.

  • A list of some concrete examples