How we work, decide and communicate.
We are a small team building infrastructure for AI agents. Small is a decision, not a constraint. This is the operating manual: how we run meetings, how we commit, what we protect, and what we expect from you.
- 3 meeting types
- 1 fixed calendar
- Thursdays protected
- Async-first
- 15-day onboarding
- Read time ~18 min
Welcome to Stackbone.
We are a small team building infrastructure for AI agents. Small is a decision, not a constraint: we would rather have three exceptional people than fifteen average ones. That means your judgement matters from day one, and that nobody is going to walk you through exactly what to do each morning.
This handbook explains how things work here: how we decide, how we communicate, how many meetings we have (few) and what we expect from you. Read it end to end on your first day. If something is unclear, ask — nobody is born knowing, and an unasked question becomes debt.
We do not expect you to know everything in a week. We expect that in fifteen days you understand the problem we solve better than almost anyone outside this company — and that you have already shipped something.
What you get on day one
- A @stackbone.ai email account and access to the password manager
- Access to the Stackbone Discord server
- Access to Notion and the OKR tracker
- Access to GitHub and the development environment
- Access to Google Workspace — Drive, Calendar
- Access to the time-off tool and the expense process
- A buddy assigned for your first two weeks
Who we are.
A world where any organisation can deploy AI agents on its own infrastructure, without handing over control of its data or its stack to a platform that can change the rules tomorrow.
To be the infrastructure layer on which agents are built and deployed. Real sovereignty, not marketing sovereignty.
Human agency in the age of AI is not defended with speeches. It is defended with infrastructure.
Our values
These are operating values, not poster values. Each one has a consequence in how we work.
Speed over perfection
Better to ship in one to three weeks than to perfect over six months. Speed is a form of learning.
Bias for action
Build, ship, measure, iterate. Theory without execution is worthless.
Honesty first, bad news first
We never sugarcoat reality — not with the team, not with investors, not with customers. What is going wrong gets said early.
AI-native by default
Any process an agent can run, an agent runs. Humans stay in the loop only where their judgement is irreplaceable.
Everything compounds
Every deployment adds data; every data point improves the next one. If something leaves no reusable asset behind, question it.
Bootstrap mindset
Every euro counts, including after we raise. Efficiency first, always.
Deep focus on one bet
We go deep before we go wide. Saying no is part of the job.
First principles
Question the industry assumption before accepting it. "That is how it is done" is not an argument.
What this looks like day to day
- Reversible decision: decide fast and move on. Irreversible decision: stop, analyse, write it down.
- If something can be written instead of scheduled, it gets written.
- If you make a mistake and say so early, it is fine. If you make a mistake and hide it, it is not.
- We do not ask permission to do the obvious. We ask for context when it affects others.
Async-first. We write, we don't schedule.
We are a distributed team — Spain, Chile and the US. We work async-first: the default is to write, not to schedule. Nobody's calendar is public property.
Ground rules
- Write first. A well-written half-page document saves three meetings.
- Context with the request. Do not send "do you have a minute?". Send the problem, what you have already tried, and what you need.
- Focus blocks. Protect long uninterrupted blocks. Set yourself to Do Not Disturb in Discord and say so.
- Explicit ownership. Every task has a name and a date. If it has no owner, it does not exist.
- Close the loop. When something changes state, update it where it was written down, not just in your head.
We do not track hours. We care about outcomes. Because the team is spread across time zones, we define an overlap window of five hours — 14:00–19:00 CEST / 08:00–13:00 ET — during which we assume you can be interrupted. Outside that window, you organise your time as you see fit.
Meetings are the most expensive line item in a small company. There are three types and one fixed calendar. Everything else is an exception.
The three types
20 min
Quick Meeting
Prep: an agenda. Unblocking something — a fast decision or a point of alignment.
45 min
Think Meeting
Prep: a 3-page memo. Thinking together — strategy, architecture, an open problem.
30–40 min
Recurrent Meeting
Prep: the fixed format. The heartbeat of the company — repeats weekly with a stable objective.
How to call a meeting
Every invitation starts with the abbreviation of the meeting type, followed by a colon and the title. No exceptions.
When you open your calendar and see the prefix, you already know three things before reading anything else: how long it will take, what is expected of you, and whether you have to prepare something. A TM: means there is a memo waiting for you. A QM: means twenty minutes and a decision.
An invitation without a prefix can be declined without explanation. It is the cheapest way to keep the discipline alive.
Think Meeting TM: — 45 minutes
This is the most expensive meeting we hold, which is why it is the most prepared. The format is inspired by Amazon's six-page memo, cut down to three.
- 01 Whoever calls the meeting writes a memo of no more than 3 pages and attaches it to the invitation at least 24 hours in advance.
- 02 The first 5 minutes of the meeting are silent reading. We read it there, not before — so everyone reaches the discussion with the same context.
- 03 The remaining 40 minutes are discussion and decision.
Slides let weak thinking hide behind a bullet point. Full prose, with sentences and verbs, forces the argument to hold together. If you cannot write it as three clear pages, you have not thought it through yet — and that is valuable information to have before spending 45 minutes of five people's time.
The weekly loop
Commit
Monday OKRs. Which initiatives, which KR they move, under which objective.
Execute
A ten-minute daily pulse. Status, not solving.
Go deep
Golden Day. A full day with no meetings at all.
Close
HPM. What happened, what actually moved, and one human thing.
The weekly calendar
All times in CEST (Madrid), the company reference, with the ET (New York) equivalent alongside.
| Day | CEST | ET | Meeting | Length | Led by | Who attends |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monday | 09:00 | 03:00 | Engineering Meeting | 30 min | Luis (CTO) | Engineering team (Europe) |
| Monday | 15:45 | 09:45 | Monday OKRs | 40 min | Andrés (CEO) | Whole team |
| Monday | 16:30 | 10:30 | Sales Meeting | 30 min | Dan | Commercial team |
| Tuesday | 15:45 | 09:45 | Daily Stand-up | 10 min | Juan | Whole team |
| Wednesday | 15:45 | 09:45 | Daily Stand-up | 10 min | Juan | Whole team |
| Wednesday | 16:30 | 10:30 | Product Meeting | 30 min | Alex (CPO) | Product team |
| Thursday | 15:45 | 09:45 | Daily Stand-up | 10 min | Juan | Whole team |
| Thursday | — | — | GOLDEN DAY — no meetings | all day | — | Everyone |
| Friday | 17:00 | 11:00 | Friday HPM | 40 min | Andrés (CEO) | Whole team |
| Every day | 12:00–13:00 | 06:00–07:00 | GOLDEN HOUR — no interruptions | 60 min | — | Everyone |
Daily Stand-up
10 minutes · Tue, Wed, Thu · 15:45 CEST / 09:45 ET · led by Juan
The pulse of the team. Ten minutes, not one more. Each person gets 2 minutes to say what they are going to do today. That is all.
- Starts exactly on time. We do not wait for anyone. Latecomers join in silence.
- Camera on. It is the one time a day we see each other's faces.
- Two minutes per person. Juan cuts people off naturally if they run long. It is not rude: it is protecting everyone else's time.
- It is for status, not for solving. The moment two people start solving a problem, Juan sends it to the parking lot.
- Parking lot. Topics that come up get noted and resolved afterwards, between the people involved.
- It is not a report to the boss. You are talking to the team, so others can raise a hand if you are about to collide with their work.
- Blockers, out loud and fast. If something is stopping you, say it in those two minutes.
- Hard stop at 10 minutes. If there was not enough time, either the team has grown or someone is rambling.
Monday OKRs
40 minutes · Monday 15:45 CEST / 09:45 ET · led by Andrés
The commitment the week starts with. The whole team attends. Each person answers three questions, in order:
- 01 Which Key Initiatives am I running this week? Concrete, finishable within five days.
- 02 Which Key Result do they move, and how? State the mechanism explicitly.
- 03 Which Objective does that sit under? The full line all the way up.
Maximum 3 Key Initiatives per person. If you have five, you have no priorities. What you say on Monday is exactly what gets reviewed on Friday.
Friday HPM — Highlight, Performance & Me
40 minutes · Friday 17:00 CEST / 11:00 ET · led by Andrés
The close of the loop we opened on Monday. Whole team, three blocks.
Highlight
How did the initiatives you committed to on Monday go? Done, half done, or not done. "I did not do it, and here is why" is a good answer. "It is progressing" is not.
Performance
How did they actually affect the Key Result? The number, before and after. And what is left over.
Me
Something personal you are doing this weekend. A plan, a match, a meal, a trip.
It is where you find out that an initiative shipped in full and the KR did not move. When that happens the problem is not execution — it is the hypothesis. Wanting to know that early is the difference between correcting in a week and correcting in a quarter.
Protected time
Thursdays — no meetings. None.
The only exception is the ten-minute Daily Stand-up. Deep work needs long unfragmented blocks. One full Thursday without a single calendar interruption is worth more than five chopped-up mornings.
Every day, 12:00–13:00 CEST / 06:00–07:00 ET
No meetings are scheduled and nobody is interrupted. One hour a day when everyone knows nobody will touch them. The only thing that breaks Golden Hour is a real [FIRE].
The exception makes the rule
Everything above is a general rule and we follow it. But a rule that admits no exception stops being a working framework and becomes bureaucracy. If a key customer only has a slot on Thursday, we take Thursday. If a production incident blows through Golden Hour, it gets blown through.
Name the exception as an exception. What erodes a framework is not breaking it with judgement and out loud — it is breaking it quietly until nobody remembers why it existed.
Discord is where the day to day lives.
It is not a waiting room: it is asynchronous by default.
- #general — announcements, company-wide
- #product — product and roadmap
- #engineering — dev, deploys, incidents
- #gtm — pipeline, discovery, partners
- #design-partners — one thread per partner
- #fundraising — private: founders
- #wins — closed customers, milestones
- #random — everything else
- Always use threads. Channels are indexes, not walls.
- Public by default. DMs are for personal matters.
- @here and @everyone are exceptional.
- No immediate response expected. Same working day.
- Voice to unblock. Past ten messages without converging, jump on voice for ten minutes and write the conclusion back into the thread.
- Do Not Disturb is respected.
Prefixes
| Prefix | Meaning | What is expected |
|---|---|---|
| [ACT] | Action required — I need you to do something | A response or action the same day |
| [DEC] | A decision has been taken and is on the record | Read it. Object only if something is seriously wrong |
| [FYI] | Information, no action needed | Read it when you can |
| [REP] | Report, metrics, analysis | Read it |
| [FIRE] | Production down, a customer at risk, something genuinely urgent | Now. Drop what you are doing |
It is sacred precisely because it is almost never used. If it gets abused, it stops working. The world does not end every day, and it probably will not today.
Company, team and personal objectives, connected to measurable results.
≤ 3
Objectives per quarter
Company level. Ambitious, qualitative, time-bound.
3–4
Key Results per objective
Measurable, hard but not impossible. Numeric or binary.
≤ 3
Key Initiatives per person
What you actually do to move a KR. This is what you commit to on Monday.
All OKRs are public inside the company. No exceptions. They live in Tability.
Process
- Quarterly: set in the first week of the quarter, in a dedicated planning session.
- Weekly: everyone updates their KRs before Friday midday and posts the change in #general with the [REP] prefix.
- Monday: Monday OKRs. Which Key Initiatives, which KR they move, under which Objective.
- Friday: HPM. What actually happened and what actually moved.
- End of quarter: scored, with a short retro written down. What failed and why, unvarnished.
An objective counts as achieved between 70% and 75%. If you consistently hit 100%, the objectives were not ambitious enough.
The stack we run on.
| Category | Tool | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Communication | Discord | Main channel, async-first |
| Video calls | Google Meet | External calls recorded with Tactiq |
| Documentation | Notion | Wiki, specs, playbooks, meeting summaries |
| Files | Google Drive | Contracts, proposals, commercial material |
| Calendar | Google Calendar | Block your focus time |
| Code | GitHub | PRs reviewed before merge |
| Tasks | Linear | Issues, cycles, everything that has an owner and a date |
| OKRs | Tability | Objectives, Key Results, weekly check-ins |
| CRM | Attio | Every commercial contact gets logged |
| Meeting notes | Tactiq | Structured summary into Notion, no raw transcripts |
| Passwords | 1Password | Mandatory. No credentials on Discord |
| Time off | TBD | Shared spreadsheet for now; a proper tool when the team is bigger |
| Infrastructure | GCP / AWS / Supabase | Access by role |
| AI | Claude | See the security section on what may be sent to a model |
Before asking a person to do a repetitive task, ask whether an agent can do it. If it can, build it and document it. Time spent automating something you do every week pays for itself.
Time, absences and holidays.
Remote by default. There is no mandatory office. You work where you do your best work.
22 days + your birthday
If your birthday falls on a working day, you do not work. It happens once a year — enjoy it. Days not taken within the year can be used until 31 March of the following year.
Holidays are for resting. Turn on your out-of-office, mute Discord, and agree with the team who covers your work. Nobody will think better of you for replying from the beach. For sick leave, tell your manager as soon as possible — the paperwork can wait; the heads-up cannot.
Expenses and travel.
Spend as if it were yours and you had to justify it in front of the team.
- Every purchase in Stackbone's name needs an invoice or receipt with the company's tax details.
- Under $90 and within your own area: your call, no approval needed. Above that: prior approval.
- Recurring software subscriptions always need prior approval. They pile up without anyone noticing.
- Flights: economy class, domestic and international. Train: standard class.
- Book at least one week in advance. Last-minute flights cost three times as much.
- Meals while travelling: reasonable, with receipts. No fixed per diem — use judgement.
Security, data and confidentiality.
We sell sovereign infrastructure. Our own security hygiene is part of the product.
- Password manager is mandatory. Never share credentials over Discord, email or WhatsApp.
- 2FA on everything. Email, GitHub, cloud, banking.
- Encrypted disk and automatic screen lock on any machine with access to company data.
- Customer data stays in approved environments only. GDPR and the DPAs signed with each customer apply.
- AI tools: do not paste customer personal data, credentials or material under NDA into an external model unless the tool is explicitly approved for that use.
- Confidential by default: fundraising, cap table, compensation, named pipeline and unannounced roadmap do not leave the team.
An exposed credential, data sent to the wrong person, a phishing click: say so immediately in #general with [FIRE]. Nobody gets in trouble for flagging fast. Staying quiet is a different matter.
Your first 15 days.
Fifteen days, not ninety. In a team this size a long ramp-up is a cost everyone pays, and the fastest way to understand this company is to be inside the work rather than reading about it.
- Day 1 — Land and ship something
- Verify every account works. Anything broken goes in #general immediately.
- Read this handbook end to end — about an hour.
- Read the Stackbone lightpaper and one-pager.
- Introduce yourself in #general: what you are here to do, where you come from, how you prefer to work.
- Welcome session with Andrés — 45 min.
- Ship one small thing. A PR, a fix, a corrected doc. It matters that you touched the real system on day one.
- Day 2 — The problem
- Listen to or read three customer discovery calls — the Tactiq summaries are in Notion.
- A 20-minute session with every member of the team. All of them, today.
- End of day: write half a page on what you think our customer's real problem is, and post it in #general.
- Day 3 — The product
- Full environment running, or complete access to your area's tools.
- Walk the product end to end the way a customer would, and write down everything that confused you.
- Agree your first Key Initiative with your manager.
- Days 4–5 — First real delivery
- Ship the first thing a customer or the team actually notices.
- Sit through a full Monday-to-Friday cycle: Monday OKRs, the daily stand-ups, and Friday HPM. You speak in all of them from week one.
- Week 2 — Ownership
- You own an area, announced in #general so everyone knows who to go to.
- Your personal OKRs for the quarter, defined with your manager.
- Run your first meeting yourself — a QM: or TM:, with a proper prefix and agenda.
- Fresh eyes memo — day 10. Half a page on everything that struck you as odd, inefficient or badly explained. You only get this perspective once.
- Day 15 — Calibration
- A conversation with your manager that runs in both directions: what is working, what is not, what you are missing — and whether this is the right seat for you.
If you have a question, ask it.
Nobody is born knowing. Asking early is cheap; guessing wrong is expensive.
If anything in this document is wrong, out of date, or does not match how we actually work, say so and we will change it. This handbook is a living document, not a stone tablet.
- Hotel cap for the US
- Where expenses get submitted, and the monthly cut-off date
- Cloud provider — GCP, AWS or Supabase
- Time-off sheet — to be created
Stackbone, Inc. · Team Handbook v0.1