"Openness" is a word that gets thrown around a lot in startup culture. But when you press people on what it actually means, the answers are surprisingly vague.

I've been thinking about this carefully at 10X. Here's where I've landed.

Three conditions for genuine openness

True openness in an organization requires three things to be true simultaneously.

1. Information is accessible without asking

Any member of the team should be able to find the information they need at any time, without having to ask anyone. This means information is written down and stored in a place that's easy to find — not locked in someone's head, not in an email thread from three months ago, not available only to people who know to ask the right person.

This is much harder than it sounds. It requires discipline about where things are written and consistency about actually doing the writing. Most organizations have pockets of inaccessible information everywhere, and they don't even notice because the people who need the information have learned to ask around rather than look it up.

2. It's clear where information lives and who holds it

Accessibility without structure is just noise. People need to know not only that information is somewhere but where to look for it.

This means having a clear, consistent system — agreed-upon places for different types of information. When something is written down, it should be obvious where it goes. When someone needs information about a topic, it should be obvious where to look.

3. Informal communication is easy

The first two conditions cover formal information — documents, decisions, policies. But a huge amount of important information flows informally. Catching something up in a quick conversation, sharing a concern before it becomes a problem, asking a question before going down the wrong path.

For this to happen, people need to be able to reach each other easily and without friction. This doesn't mean everyone must always be available — that's a different kind of dysfunction. It means the barriers to informal communication are low.

Why openness multiplies output

If you have a team of good, capable people — what I think of as learning animals, people who can define problems, learn what they need, and solve them — then openness is the multiplier.

These people, given the same information and the same principles, will make approximately the same good decisions. The bottleneck isn't their judgment; it's their access to information. Openness removes that bottleneck.

In an opaque organization, people are constantly waiting: waiting to be told what they should know, waiting for permission to take action, waiting for someone with context to make a decision. Openness turns that waiting into movement.

What openness is not

Openness is not radical transparency in the performative sense — sharing everything with everyone always. Some information is genuinely sensitive (personal performance discussions, sensitive business negotiations) and should be held appropriately.

Openness is not the same as having an open-door policy. "My door is always open" is about access to a person. What I'm describing is access to information, which is structural.

Openness is not the same as noisiness. A team where people are constantly sharing updates, meeting frequently, and communicating at high volume is not necessarily open in the meaningful sense. If none of that communication is written down and findable later, it leaves no trace.

Openness as infrastructure

I've come to think of openness as organizational infrastructure — like a road network. The roads don't move the goods; the people and vehicles do. But without roads, movement is slow and unreliable.

Information infrastructure — the systems and habits that make information accessible, structured, and easy to share informally — doesn't generate ideas or make decisions. But without it, the people who do those things are slowed down at every turn.

Investing in this infrastructure is unglamorous. It feels like overhead. The returns are diffuse and hard to attribute. But over time, a team with good information infrastructure will consistently outperform a team without it, even if the second team has more talented individuals.

At 10X, this is something we're actively building. We're not there yet. But I believe it's one of the highest-leverage investments a growing team can make.