I'm prototyping a culture growth platform for startups that's employee-centric.
If you've worked at/founded a startup, what elements of culture have been lost as the company grew? What do you think could have been done, had there been more foresight?
Thanks!
I don't understand this. What does it mean?
So you can have a culture that's can-do, high trust, where everyone can talk to the CEO. And then, you hire a bunch of people.
Communication and trust may not scale. Suddenly people are keeping secrets from each other, refusing to help each other unless ordered, and the CEO hides out to avoid burnout.
Also, you probably won't be hiring the same kind of people. Your original startup crew probably shared some ethos and some might have been friends. The next wave of people won't be the same.
Having been in growing orgs and having scaled orgs, there's one thing that has separated cultures that scaled vs those that didn't: conscious, repetitive communication of what the culture is. e.g. the culture is defined and referenced in town halls, team meetings, CEO communications, etc. It's the one thing that actually trickles down if you mean it.
Unsuccessful orgs that I've seen had a verbal history of the culture. The CEO/CTO mentioned it once and it's been repeated by others ever since. In one place, one of their core values was collaboration, but because the culture wasn't really defined, each team had their own subculture that there were rough spots when teams needed to work together. In the same place, they had to continually rehash the same thought process for every tool change - this will slow us down vs it will increase quality. In contrast, speed vs quality should be defined in a culture so that those conversations don't need to be repeated.
A seldom discussed point in org growth is investing in the management layer. Managers are de facto leaders and go a long way in reinforcing the culture. Startups promote those that get things done so management isn't always experienced and this can breed problems if undressed for too long. Once you get past hockey-stick growth, the management layer changes, usually because startup skills are different than enterprise skills, but having seen slower growing orgs get better medium-term results, I think startups can do better in this area.
Anyway, I think culture is a function of how we work. It needs to be defined, constantly communicated, and authentic. I don't think you'll capture the same magic if you abstract that into an app.
Inability to make hard decisions due to lack of interest and engagement in company’s domain, market, and customers from the corp team.
Hiring people that didn’t fit into the companies values. Just hiring anyone you could…
Not actually defining the values…
Long story:
I was the CTO and we were doing well. I had a strong vision of how the company and market operated. My work accounted for the lions share of the company’s revenue.
Nevertheless, the COO ended up becoming the CEO. It seemed like a good idea at the time: nerds like me at the company all wanted to remain technical! Let this other businessy person we trust run things and keep the lights on.
Big mistake.
Several fundamental company decisions required ruthless leadership, but the CEO was strongly oriented towards consensus based decision making. Much of the time being consensus based is the right choice. But when it comes to fundamental questions of values and culture, you need someone who truly cares to lead with vision.
One such area was “do we take the company in CTOs direction into X market” or “let’s just flounder around and do interesting stuff in a million directions”. I had my posse of incredible, very growth-oriented engineers that really believed in my vision and wanted to push the boundaries. But 2-3 more lifestyle company oriented people didn’t like us. We were providing the companies growth (monetarily and otherwise). the lifestyle folks were content, so they didn’t want to join up with us. They also complained (despite our growth numbers) that we had “all the fun”.
That created a significant culture issue. Of course it escalated to the Corp team. Many times in many ways over a long stretch of time. The CEO could not resolve the issue whether we’re going to be a lifestyle company vs we’re going in this high growth direction. One or the other meant losing a lot of people.
He always put it to the team for discussion and consensus. But fundamentally you were never going to get consensus on the issue. Furher the CEO wasnt engaged with customers, didn’t know the market or domain, and thus didn’t personally care which way thing went.
This lack of decisiveness was deadly or the higher growth crowd (my crew), especially as we were micromanaged and told what to do/not do constantly by the CEO/Corp team the more others complained. We started to strongly feel like the CEO fundamentally didn’t get it. Instead they were trying to appease everyone. We were being punished for being the financial and marketing lifeblood of the company. That just destroyed our morale.
In the end I got tired of dealing with it and left to greener pastures. As did many of the folks on my teams.
Like I said, earlier on I should have fought to be CEO, and just committed to being far less technical. I should have kept the COO a COO (he’s really good at that) and made these fundamental values decisions myself.