The System of a Story-Led Company
How Sports and Novels Inspired the Way We Build at Lumos
I’ve always liked Netflix’s mantra: just focus on hiring stunning people and even your hardest problems get solved. But it felt incomplete. When I look back at my teenage years playing competitive soccer, the best teams didn’t just have great players. They had great players built around a great system. In this post, I’ll share a bit about Lumos’ approach to building a lasting company with a system that helps us win.
The Power of Systems
One of my all-time heroes is Pep Guardiola. He is probably the most influential coach in soccer history. He revolutionized soccer with a system called tiki-taka that every soccer fan knows: short, quick passes, constant movement, and high-possession play. Of course, the system was centered around amazing players like Messi, Xavi, and Iniesta. But countless teams have had great players and failed. What made Barcelona different was their system - just check out the video below. Talent alone didn’t bring Barcelona their success. It was their system that unified and amplified the team, which changed the history of soccer.
It's a mistake to think great people alone can solve every challenge. Without a great system, even the best talent can stray off course or row in opposite directions. In today’s day and age, when AI tools are making it easier than ever before to build products, consistent execution is the most important moat of a company. In order to execute well, you need A+ systems that unlock the full potential of A+ people. Yet, we often overlook our systems. Inspired by sports coaches who obsess over their team’s tactics, I continuously asked myself: what's the tiki-taka of Lumos? What are the systems that will make us win?
The System of a Story-Led Company
At Lumos, we follow the system of a story-led company. It’s even reflected in our name! Lumos is inspired by the magical spell from Harry Potter, a symbol of bringing light to the unknown. Running a company is like crafting a great story. At the heart of every story is a protagonist and their mission. Frodo ventures out to destroy the One Ring, Alice to find her way home and Harry to defeat Voldemort.
The same applies to building a great business. The day-to-day complexities of a tech company can easily cause us to lose focus, to row in different directions. We avoid this by learning from stories. Almost all stories have the same key components to help their protagonists reach their potential. As a story-led company, we broke it down into the 4Ps, which form the foundation of how we operate:
Purpose - Build a Four-Bullet Secret Master Plan Everyone Knows.
Principles - Promote and Hire by Values.
Path - Create Rituals to Continuously Revisit and Refine the Course.
Partnership - Bond Intentionally Beyond the Office Desk.
Purpose - Build a Four-Bullet Secret Master Plan Everyone Knows
Every great story starts with a call to adventure, a clear purpose. Most stories follow the simple structure of the Hero's Journey: an undeniable challenge, a worthy adversary, a vision for a better future, and a hero to lead the way. The true power of purpose lies in its simplicity. It’s a force multiplier that can make a company of 100 operate like 1,000.
For a long time, we had the vision and the strategy but they were buried in long documents. We realized that without simplicity, teams lose focus and start working on unrelated things. Tesla’s Secret Master Plan from 2006 is a perfect example of getting it right. Elon captured the entire vision and strategy in just a few bullets.
Our mission at Lumos is to unlock the power of software for everyone, human and machine. We aim to achieve this by building the world’s first Autonomous Identity Platform that manages access to software on auto-pilot. We are not quite ready to share our four-step secret master plan publicly but will do so in 2025. Stay tuned. 🙂
Key Internal Documents: The Lumos Secret Master Plan
Principles - Promote and Hire by Values.
Every great story features characters who stay true to their core principles. Harry, Hermione and Ron won together because they embodied the defining traits of House Gryffindor: courage, chivalry and determination.
Most companies today have a set of nice-sounding values that they splash on their career page. So did we! These look great and offer a nice script to recite in recruiting calls. However, the test of great values is the actual impact they’ve had on a company. How often were these values influencing the team’s actions day-to-day?
In order to make them impactful, we thought about how they connect to our system of a story-led company. We decided to make three key changes. First, we needed to make them memorable. To bring our values to life, we created a narrative called “The Anatomy of an Alchemist”— see here. Second, we integrated our values directly into the career ladder, ensuring that they guide how we hire, reward and manage performance, influencing every part of our work. Third, I personally interview every candidate and veto if the candidate doesn’t meet the bar.
Key Internal Document: Lumos Values & Operating Principles
Path - Create Rituals to Continuously Revisit and Refine the Course.
A great story isn’t just about the destination. It’s about the journey. The path a character takes to achieve their purpose is just as vital as the purpose itself. At Lumos, we faced the challenge of setting ambitious OKRs and crafting thoughtful strategies at the start of the year, only to watch them gather dust in forgotten Notion docs. We lost sight of the path we set for ourselves.
To change this, we built an operating system grounded in two key concepts: Sources of Truth and Rituals.
Sources of Truth: These are our centralized, up-to-date repositories for strategy, goals and reflections. They provide everyone with a single reference point to stay aligned and track progress. They make sure everyone knows where we’re headed and why.
Rituals: These are the consistent, intentional practices (e.g. monthly business reviews) that bring our Sources of Truth to life. They foster accountability, keep us aligned and make sure we constantly reflect, adjust and improve.
Together, Sources of Truth provide direction, while Rituals keep us on track. They transform our plans into progress, ensuring we don’t lose sight of the path we’re on.
Key Internal Document: The Lumos Operating System, Sources-of-Truth at Lumos
Partnership - Bond Intentionally Beyond the Office Desk.
Every mission comes with constant setbacks. To succeed, teams need to have each other’s backs. Teams that work best together will always outperform any collection of individual superstars. In great stories, this bond forms through shared adventures. Harry, Ron and Hermione didn’t grow inseparable over cafeteria lunches. They grew closer with every troll they fought and every Horcrux they hunted.
Lumos was born during COVID and has always been hybrid. Some worked remotely, others came in a few times a week. Winning teams aren’t just built by sitting together in an office. Resilience comes from shared experiences that build character. We do have offices in SF and NYC. However, our real investment is in quarterly offsites and monthly events. Even when we were just 50 people, we hired someone specifically to elevate these experiences to a production level. These moments create genuine connections, build shared purpose and make our teams far more resilient than routine work ever could.
Key Internal Documents: Lumos Work Programs
The Path Forward
I hope this gave you a real look into the “tiki-taka” of Lumos and how we bring our system of a story-led company to life.
In the next posts, we’ll dive deeper into each of these pillars. Here’s what’s coming up:
Purpose: Our secret master plan.
Principles: A refresher of our values & operating principles.
Path: Our operating system for running our business.
Partnership: Our program around building extremely resilient teams.
And more
We’re hiring across almost all teams! If this post excited you about Lumos, feel free to check out our positions here.
-Andrej
Thank you to Amy Yin, Sean Stapleton, Leo Mehr, Tim Porthouse, David Vasquez, Alyssa Mike, Candice Ji for giving feedback.