Last week, our community of founders, builders, investors, and change-makers gathered for my favorite Westbound tradition: our annual summit. Over two days in Healdsburg, advisors, investors, and operators shared their expertise and founders provided fresh perspectives, accelerating everyone’s growth. 

My journey from Venezuela to Northern California twenty-three years ago taught me that while your surroundings can shift overnight, your values travel with you. 

This is not unlike what leaders experience as their organizations grow and their roadmaps blur. In times of uncertainty, you need more than a playbook. You need a North Star and principles for how you will navigate towards it. This year’s summit focused on exploring how values shape stronger daily decisions and give organizations a lasting competitive edge:

1. Clarity amid turbulence: Shared values can help teams cut through noise and analysis-paralysis;
2. Execution speed: These same principles collapse decision-making time on a daily basis. Organizations with this kind of alignment move faster without sacrificing integrity; and,
3. An enduring advantage: This isn’t just a feel-good mantra. Data shows this is how you win.  A multi-decade McKinsey study of 1,000 organizations found that companies with healthy values, vision and strategy-aligned cultures dramatically outperformed peers on total shareholder return. 

Many of our speakers spoke about how they’ve brought our Summit theme – Values as a Compass –  to life throughout their organizations and careers:

• The San Antonio Spurs’ R.C. Buford lifted the curtain on how the team’s basketball philosophy shapes their entire organization and has guided them through multiple championships; 
• Character.AI’s Erin Teague, Sierra’s Clay Bavor, and Next Play Ventures’ Brian Rumao discussed how to scale AI-native companies and how team structures shift when models sit at their core;
• Jeff Weiner shared how he translated long-term vision into everyday operating principles during his 11-year CEO tenure at LinkedIn with his vision-to-values framework;
• Visa’s Frank Cooper and Sixth Street’s David Sutphen unpacked the habits behind durable brands, from full immersion in your industry and cultivating taste to hiring in the age of AI, and
• Acrew’s Theresia Guow unpacked how her values-first investing ethos – honed from Accel to starting Acrew – guides everything from taking a bet on a founder to building winning teams. 

In breakouts, Westbound Network industry experts shared practical tactics, from go-to-market frameworks to resilience rituals, that our community can put to use immediately. Special thanks to Wemimo Abbey, Jane Alexander, Steve Benjamin, Maria Colacurcio, Somesh Dash, Joelle Emerson, Prakash Janakiraman, Fern Mandelbaum, Danielle Naftulin, Satya Patel, James Slavet, Mike Smith, Peter Walker, and Russell Wolff.

It was a privilege to bring the kinds of conversations we typically have one-on-one in founder coaching sessions into a community setting, where we could learn from and with each other. That’s why we offer culture coaching to help our founders codify and operationalize their values, and hire with them in mind.

Finally, we’re deeply grateful to our sponsors who partnered to make this event successful: AWS, Carta, Cleary, Esusu, Latham & Watkins, MetLife, Ramp, SVB, Visa, and Wilson Sonsini.

Questions, reflections, or speaker stories to add? Email me or tag @WestboundEquity so we can keep amplifying the wisdom that surfaced in Healdsburg.