Find the sacred pie
Treat your company culture like a product, where your employees are the customers. Rather than preserving the established culture, founders should iterate on cultural principles and values to meet the evolving needs of a growing team. Document, iterate, and clarify cultural elements to reflect past, present, and future aspirations.
Zigging vs. zagging: How HubSpot built a $30B company | Dharmesh Shah (co-founder/CTO)
Britt Gage added
most founders tend to remain high-level when the topic of culture comes up. For starters, there are tons of reads on why culture matters, but strikingly few on how to actually architect it. “We all understand what it means to some extent, but it's rarely defined or broken down. There are frameworks for product/market fit or founder-led sales, but w... See more
Run This Diagnostic to Thoughtfully Build Company Culture
Britt Gage added
“If I have one tip regarding traditions, it's to not be overly prescriptive or forceful. Observe what develops naturally, and then just let it ride. They shouldn’t be something that you plan out in a very extensive way,” he says. “Traditions slowly become a part of your company’s DNA and self-reinforce over the years to become culture. And they nee... See more
First Round Capital • How Gusto Built Scalable Hiring Practices Rooted in Tradition
Johanna added
A manager I admire once told me that an organization’s culture is best understood not from reading what’s written on its corporate website but from seeing what it’s willing to give up for its values.
Julie Zhuo • The Making of a Manager: What to Do When Everyone Looks to You
Becoming a value-led organization doesn't happen automatically. We imported somebody else's culture with every person we hired, and therefore had to undo a bunch of stuff. We called it "re-programming." People learn culture based on what behavior they observe around them, good, bad, or somewhere in between.
Frank Slootman • TAPE SUCKS: Inside Data Domain, A Silicon Valley Growth Story
Start with an ambitious, high-potential idea, but challenging and full of ambiguities — the rough shape of a nascent great idea. It typically isn’t new, but solves many problems in a simpler, more intuitive way. It ignites people’s curiosity and self-motivation. At the end, it should seem “obvious” so that others want to copy, because there aren’t ... See more
Notion – The all-in-one workspace for your notes, tasks, wikis, and databases.
We are all prisoners of our past to some extent. We bring our frame of reference, shaped by our unique combination of experiences, into any new role. But the most valuable leaders are those who can combine the scrappiness of a start‐up leader with the organizational and diplomatic discipline needed in a big company. Those who can scale up or scale
... See moreFrank Slootman • Amp It Up
Abhilash Rao added