What is the right way to work?

For Toss team members, the company’s Core Values are far more than statements tucked away on a corporate website. They are close at hand, hanging in meeting rooms, showing up in peer feedback, and even coming up in hiring conversations. You’ll often hear the team say things like, “Let’s lower the priority on this task and focus on impact” (since Focus on Impact is one of Toss’ Core Values). In countless decision-making moments at work, these values naturally serve as the first and most important criteria. But how did things come to be this way?

By definition, corporate core values are “the shared standards of thought and behavior that guide members of an organization in achieving their mission and vision.” At Toss, however, they go beyond the dictionary meaning. They represent what it means to perform at a high level. By living out these values, Toss’ talented individuals are able to achieve better results and earn the respect of their peers. And when these values actively shape the way people work, they become the driving force that sustains Toss’ innovation.

Ever-evolving Toss Core Values

The Core Values were not perfectly defined from the beginning. As the team grew and the industry shifted, Toss steadily refined the principles and standards it placed at its center. From its earliest days until now, Toss Core Values have gone through two major evolutions. Instead of keeping to the same set of values, the way of working has continuously evolved alongside the growth of the organization.

1.0 : The Success Formula of High Performers

In 2015, Toss launched its simple money transfer service and quickly drew wide attention. It looked like an overnight success, but behind it were five years of trial and error and eight failures. Because the success was born of such urgency and struggle, the team couldn’t just sit back and celebrate. Rather, they asked themselves how to keep the momentum going.

The answer they found was in the culture. More specifically, the way talented people work. At the time, Seunggun Lee interviewed team members who had achieved the strongest results. It was discovered that their working styles shared a common set of values. From these common threads came 18 principles, refined further into five keywords: customer-oriented, excellence, integrity and transparency, respect and trust, and commitment. Each principle was explained in detail, eventually growing into an eight-page document that served as the prototype of Toss Core Values, which continues to guide the team to this day.

This document shares the principles, way of working, and lessons that have been uniquely important to Toss throughout its growth. New team members are encouraged to leave behind their old ways of working, and adopt the way Toss has learned through failure and built its own approach. That way, they can carry forward the powerful formula for success at Toss. - ‘Lessons Learned from Toss History’, Toss internal document

2.0 : From Personal Belief to Organizational Consensus

The wording of the Core Values 1.0 was somewhat rough. They reflected Seunggun Lee’s candid reminders and convictions, captured without polish. Still, when the team numbered around only 25 people, it wasn’t hard to build shared understanding.

But once the team tripled in size, things changed. In 2017, Silicon Valley circles were calling Toss “the fastest-growing startup in the world.” The team numbered just 85 then, but it was clear the number would soon grow rapidly. To keep decision-making consistent even among new members, the Core Values had to evolve from value-driven statements into more concrete behavioral guidelines.

To do this, the Toss Culture Team asked five key questions of high-performing team members who also made strong contributions to Toss culture:

1. What do you prioritize when making decisions?

2. What capabilities define strong performance?

3. What kind of attitude best supports high performance?

4. How do you collaborate with colleagues?

5. What should your relationship with the company look like?

The answers were distilled into five keywords: customer-centric thinking, excellence, accountability, mutual respect, and sense of mission. These were similar to the keywords of the Core Values 1.0, but each was now given clearer, more specific meanings. To ensure these values could be applied in real situations such as hiring, onboarding^*, and peer feedback, the Culture Team translated them into actionable behaviors. Each behavior was reinforced with more refined language than in version 1.0. Under the five keywords, a total of 21 culture principles were defined. *the process of helping new hires adapt to the company’s culture and ways of working.

For nearly five years, until February 2022, Toss Core Values 2.0 served as the backbone of Toss’ culture. By working according to these values, Toss team members were able to keep innovating and sustaining a steep growth curve. Whenever people asked about the secret to Toss’ rapid growth, the answer was always the same: culture. It was also during this period that stories of Toss’ distinctive way of working began to spread outside the company.

3.0 : Simpler, yet Sharper

In 2022, Toss surpassed 1,500 team members, a seventeen fold increase in just five years. Dozens of people were joining each week, and the Culture Team worked hard to communicate the company’s core values during onboarding. But with headcount in the thousands, it became increasingly difficult to pass along all 21 culture principles. Fewer and fewer team members were reading the core values document all the way through.

As the organization scaled and the industry shifted, it became necessary to rethink our formula for success. The focus had to move away from detailed behavioral guidelines and toward something more fundamental.

Building on the Core Values 2.0, the Culture Team distinguished between how individuals excel in their work and the values the organization as a whole should uphold, and restructured the items related to individuals. Input was gathered both bottom-up, through team member interviews and peer recommendations, and top down, reflecting the perspectives of Toss team leaders. Finally, feedback was collected from the entire Toss team over a two-week period, leading to the first draft of the Core Values 3.0.

After intense reflection and debate, the Core Values 3.0 were distilled into eight items. Within Toss, a consensus formed that those who embodied these eight principles were the very definition of “individuals with exceptional capabilities.” And because the list was drastically reduced, the fast-growing number of newcomers found it easier to learn and internalize the values.

Thus, the current Toss Core Values were born.

All of these principles are still evolving. Some of the principles may even conflict in certain situations, and others have already changed over time. These principles are never final. They’re part of our ongoing commitment to keep individual effort connected to the company’s success. We invite everyone to take part in this ongoing process of evolution. - Seunggun Lee, ‘Introduction to Toss Culture’

Editor Youra Shin