# Radical transparency — why PostHog's handbook is public

- **Episode:** [189](https://agents.truthliesandwork.com/episodes/189.md) (2025-04-17)
- **Type:** interview
- **Tags:** transparency, company-culture, handbook, remote-work
- **Time:** 5:23–6:48 (start 323s)
- **Listen:** [https://truthliesandwork.com/189?t=323](https://truthliesandwork.com/189?t=323)

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[5:23] Al Elliott: Looking at your website, it does feel a bit like I've got unauthorized access to your Notion wiki. It does. It feels a bit like I shouldn't know these things. Um, I've got, I've got loads of questions about small teams, but just so I understand, what made you decide to do everything in the open?
[5:37] James Hawkins: Uh, in the early days, it was about trust. We, when we were just 2 idiots building something from scratch with nothing. We're like, well, how can we get people on the internet to kind of trust who we are before we were remotely kind of legit? And I thought, well, transparency is kind of the foundation of trust. So if we're much more transparent than a normal startup would be that puts like just a one-page website up, I think it will help give users the confidence to use our software before we've got any kind of reputation. So it kind of started from almost a marketing and external branding kind of perspective. But the reality is it's wound up being much more important internally for how we operate. Because there's this interesting effect of, it's like having someone else mark your homework. If your internal wiki or Notion or whatever isn't exposed to the world, it's going to be kind of badly written and not that well thought out most of the time, or it's kind of very secondary to most companies, I think. But if you know that you'll get like angry mobs on the internet talking about your like policies around hiring or firing people or whatever it might be, it just means you have to be a bit more rigorous in how you think through stuff