It’s never too early to start thinking about culture

By Matt Ziegler


“It’s all about the people.”

The idea that people are the driving force behind the success or failure of startups has been drilled into us repeatedly through cases, classroom discussions, and guest speakers…we get it.  The HBS curriculum also preaches that people are central to success in companies of all sizes, and that companies institutionalize people practices through culture.  

Despite implicitly understanding this, founders are consumed by building products, finding customers, and raising capital.  With the emphasis on finding PMF, it’s not surprising that founders make early hiring decisions based on “who is the best person for this job?” instead of “who is the right person to help me build my company?”  I’d argue that building a culture is just as important as finding PMF.  

My views are strongly shaped by my internship experience last summer at DoubleDutch, a mobile enterprise startup in SF.  DoubleDutch cared deeply about its culture from early on and built a strong culture built on transparency, growth, and trust.  Based on my conversations with fellow HBS interns in the Bay Area, I feel DoubleDutch had a truly unique and awesome culture. Only a couple months post Series-A funding with 15 employees, we spent a day at an offsite retreat brainstorming what made our culture so unique, and how to protect it as the company grows from 15, to 50, to 100-plus employees.

Here is what DoubleDutch taught me about the importance of having a strong culture from day 1:

Strong cultures make decision-making easier
The values that make up a team’s culture serve as “guard rails” and help clarify priorities in difficult moments.  Early on, DoubleDutch faced a dilemma: it found a major bug in a product for its largest client and needed to decide whether to tell the customer.  Losing the account risked the future of the company, yet there was a chance the customer would never find the bug.   With an explicit, established value of “doing right by our customers,” the founder made the right decision to immediately notify the customer of the bug.  DoubleDutch and the customer worked to fix the problem together, and the founder retells this story to reinforce the importance of having shared values.

Culture is solidified early on
While culture comes from the founders, it eventually must be lived by the employees.  The first 5-10 hires are critical toward building a culture (they will become your VPs of sales, product, etc.)  One purpose of our “culture brainstorm” was to force each functional area lead to think about how they would build DoubleDutch culture into their hiring processes as they scaled their teams, but they needed to first share and live the culture to be able to transfer it. 

Culture is a talent-acquisition asset
Great tech talent is scarce, and top-caliber engineers typically have multiple simultaneous job offers.  By building a strong culture, DoubleDutch was able to hire several developers away from other “hot startups” that had greater funding, proven success, and offered higher pay.  Culture was the difference.

  
In the midst of chaos that comes with driving toward product-market fit, take a step back and think about the type of working environment you want to build.  Try to get it right early – you may never get the chance to “pivot” your culture.



Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Managing Your Online Persona, Part I

by Brandon Giles (republished from his personal blog ) Why Care? It is becoming more important than ever to actively manage your persona on the internet, particularly if you operate in the fields of entrepreneurship, venture capital or marketing. In general, persona management is more crucial in industries where your value and success depends on personal human capital and others perception of that value. However, digital footprints have a material impact on everyone. Beginning back in 2007, an ExecuNet survey  found that 83% of recruiters already used internet searches to evaluate job candidates, with 43% of recruiters eliminating candidates because of what they found. “How-to” Guide As an aspiring entrepreneur I sought to learn more about the tools, platforms and best practices before busting out onto the Blogging scene. I heard from nearly every guest in my Launching Tech Ventures entrepreneurship course at the Harvard Business School (#hbsltv) that blogging was critical to estab...
Read more

Letting it Go

by Anthemos Georgiades There are various lessons I could have discussed here regarding the UX tests I ran for my startup Zumper. But, instead, I am going to focus on one challenge that these tests created for me: my ability – or lack thereof – to let my own opinions and intuitions drop. In the three lean tests that I ran, two of them confirmed something I had suspected. The third one however did not. In my ‘banner’ test, I tested (1) the price users thought a standard bed frame was worth, under three different themes of page banners and then (2) if the user could actually remember the site’s name after use. I found that what I considered to be the most ‘boring’ white and grey banner drove the highest price estimations from users and beat our other two banners hands-down on brand recollection. I had actually only included this ‘boring’ banner in the lean test as a control. My hypothesis had been that our green banner would drive the best engagement given that this was the predominan...
Read more

Creating the “Next Big Thing": How to Inspire Innovation

By Brad Bonnett  How do I apply all my learning’s about lean startups such as finding product market fit with a minimum viable product if I don’t have an initial problem that I am trying to solve?  I know that I want to build something that changes the world but I continue to struggle to find what product or service I want to build.  During our class with Fred Wilson he said that “If you have an idea that you can't get out of your head, do a startup. Otherwise join a startup.”  Although I appreciate the simplicity of this view and the experience that Fred brings to the table I am dismayed to think that unless I stumble upon an idea that really sticks with me I am going to be excluded from starting my own company.  Therefore I tried to put together a process that can help inspire innovation for those of us who are lacking an idea to create that “next big thing!” I tried to take the best practices that I have learned from my Managing Innovation class at HBS and ...
Read more