“Don't fuck up the culture” – A letter to the Airbnb team
medium.com
medium.com
To me, culture is something that happens organically and not via directive. Leaders can shape company culture but only through their own personal demonstration of it and not by decree. Once I hear someone saying "this is how it shall be henceforth," I'm gone. They're either hopelessly naive or trying to construct a happy edifice while behaving badly.
Therefore, not to be flippant but a great way to fuck up the culture is to write a memo about not fucking up the culture.
[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[2] Considering which it should be even harder quality control.
[3] I use the term loosely.
How do you gather?
The illiad was a tour de force promulgation of culture that pre-dated its written (and many times translated) forms by hundreds of years. This list of empirical examples would be mind-boggling and need not be elaborated here. Whether or not the company in question is one of the exemplars is almost beside the point.
Personally i feel that culture is preserved by practice and not directive. So writing down culture is a rather weird exercise, though i suppose it works as a corrective mechanism. But this memo feels like a half measure. If you want to preserve your culture, best way is to keep following it and lead by example, and you employees will keep following it, and the new ones will automatically conform to it. But if you are explicitly telling them to adhere to it, shouldn't you highlight exactly WHAT do you expect them to adhere to? If not, then what's the point of telling them to keep conforming to it?
He doesn't have to write a formal document on it, but perhaps hint with a few examples so that that reinforces what behaviour is valued.
I agree that you can't direct culture. But writing is one way you can transmit it. At some point, the number of CEO-minutes per employee gets pretty small, so the CEO wants to make sure everybody hears his take on it, broadcast media are what he has. He then also has to live it, of course, or it ends up being the do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do horseshit that everybody has experienced.
I disagree. I think his point was that he is choosing to focus on culture over other tasks because it is the thing he values more than anything else. Wanting to improve something doesn't mean it is inherently broken. Ex. working out when you are already in great shape.
It's funny to me how most people in this thread assume his attention to the culture automatically means it's messed up. Can you not put conscious effort into things proactively?
If you have no walls on your office before taking money, and move to a corner office with a close door after, you change the culture.
If you work flex hours and let the staff do so, then change, the culture changes.
If you hire guys who wear cut-offs and have unkempt beards, but later switch to only those who are straight laced you change the culture.
Amazon everyone used to have a Door with saw horse legs for a desk. That changed along the way. And the culture changed.
You can't keep the Garage culture, when you move to a skyscraper, but you can keep hints of it if the executive team works hard to make sure it happens.
No, door desks are still present at Amazon. Ironically, Amazon is large enough now that outfitting every employee with a door desk is in fact more expensive than ordering conventional desks in bulk. But they stick with the door desks because it's a good way of transmitting the frugal culture.
I'd love to hear about one of these emails reading "Hi employee, person who is totally dependent on my whim and fancy for sustinence and shelter, I've been thinking a lot about what me and my 2 friends stand for, and even though I'm not totally sure, and can't necessarily articulate it, its extremely important to me, and from now on its pretty damn important that you start standing for it too. You are an extension of me. That's why your office looks like my old apartment. Your identity has been subsumed, and to prove it I'd like to point out that your livelihood is now in a great part dependent on your allegiance to my completely undefined and arbitrary value system. So we're in this together. I am writing you to tell you everything will be fine, as long you don't. fuck. this. up. Thanks! I'll be back in touch with more specifics, or not, in the meantime just act natural."
Once I moonlighted webdev for a young thugish team of car dealers and the boss would pay me according to my advancing on the "project". But the "project" was never clearly defined.
I see it as a way to assert dominance in a soft but disgusting way. If key-words like "project" or "culture" were precisely defined one would have ground to assess his condition : payment on the project, respect of the culture (like work conditions).
The boss presents himself not as a master but a minister : "Project" is a devine word that he is to interpret. We're a community. I'm just our pastor. And a cool one.
If you want culture to be a certain way, you have incentivize people to act and react in certain ways. If you want a culture where ideas are freely expressed and discussed, then you can't penalize people for expressing unpopular ideas. If you want a culture of innovation, then you can't harshly penalize people for failed projects. If you want a culture of cooperation and collaboration, then you must reward people for it.
Everyone says the same things about the importance of values and culture, but I don't think everyone is willing to set up the systems of incentives and disincentives to back that up.
In my experience "core values" boil down to professionalism and "culture" boils down to hard work. Once they start labeling and promoting those it tells me the company has gone from passion to "work" and the uppers can't figure out how to get it back.
(Clue: you can't company wide.)
Is there anyone anywhere who has been working, say, for more than 5 years, who takes any talk of "corporate values" whatsoever as sincere?
I mean, I don't always take it as bad - it just means that they've hired business people, and the business people are... doing business things. I always figured there must be a pool of investors out there who had never had a real job, who eat that sort of thing up. I thought it was some kind of in-group thing, like salespeople all driving really expensive cars.
I've had people try to get me to write values for my company, and... while I can see the utility for myself, comparing your actions to what you say you want can be an eye-opening exercise, I really can't see how directly and publicly writing values can be seen as sincere by anyone.
The reason is that a company culture is organic and highly dependent on the people that make it. When a company is very small, it's easy to have only the best people who also happen to fit in to the same culture, because those people naturally gravitate together. In the beginning, the company is small enough that they are not hiring for very specialised and disparate skills so much as "a bunch of smart people that work well together".
As teams get bigger, inevitably things get more structured and by trying to hold on to that initial culture, you inevitably kill it.
Personally I believe the best thing is to have small autonomous units within the business that have a set remit and are allowed to have their own culture, with the company as a whole acting to promote cross-pollination between units. There really doesn't have to be one single "culture" guided by the "core company values" because those are two different things that invariably do not mesh once you get past about 30 people. So when companies hit that awkward "teenage" size and try, they usually fail.
I also find that the claims about company culture made by most mid to large sized company are inevitably false. There might be a particular culture within individual teams (the IT team in the basement, for instance), but usually it does not permeate the entire business to the extent the HR team wishes it did.
Having said that, the people that are there are determined by the culture. If the culture of a company is well known, articulated and understood, there's a self-selection process that happens. A given culture attracts certain kinds of people -- so it becomes self-reenforcing.
I also disagree with the notion that a culture cannot permeate across groups. There is certainly a sub-culture that can (and does) exist within groups (this exists everywhere people of like mind or activity aggregate), but that doesn't mean there can't be an overarching culture that is shared organization wide.
I've given a lot of thought and calories to this topic. My company (HubSpot) has grown from 2 people to 800 people and like Brian (OP from AirBnB), we think about this culture thing a lot.
Just because you hit the "awkward teen" size doesn't mean you are predetermined to fail at trying to have a functional , shared culture.
That's essentially my point about gravitation, except my assertion that it doesn't scale. After a certain point, it becomes more important to hire the people the company needs, not just the people that want to work there. Below a certain size it is much easier for those to be overlapping sets.
> that doesn't mean there can't be an overarching culture that is shared organisation wide
I think inopinatus is on the right track in terms of breaking "culture" down into different things. There can certainly be certain values and principles of "how things are done" that span the whole company (note: I'm not saying processes either - perhaps 'ethics' is the right word). But that's not enough to make a culture, and trying to force one out of those relatively small commonalities is where things generally fall down.
Again I think the most important thing when it comes to scaling out is having representation in place at various levels and listening to what people at the lower levels actually want, rather than trying to dictate things in a top-down manner. It is very likely that as teams become more specialised, they will have much more individual needs that might not fit with certain aspects of the original culture. There's no reason that the shared culture can't evolve and stay beneficial to everyone - just expect the size of that shared part to shrink if you are doing it right.
The sad fact is that it's much easier to get company culture wrong than it is to get it right. I'm not going to say I have some magical solution to this because I don't, but I do wish you the best of luck with HubSpot - and the same to AirBnB of course. Just because something is an ominous sign doesn't mean anything is predestined.
One thing that I do think is quite important is that the company culture in a small business tends to be the way it is because the management structure is pretty flat, everyone has a set of shared goals and cooperation is easy. That's another thing that doesn't scale. It's very easy to break a company culture with things like poor management structure, skewed employee incentives, etc., which tend to foster a dog-eat-dog culture and company politics that very often do not exist in smaller companies. Personally, were I currently scaling a business to around 800 staff I'd be worrying most about the management structure and trying to create an environment where cultures can grow organically, while ensuring what remains consistent are the shared values, goals and company vision.
I think by focusing too much on the company culture at the top level, it's easy to lose sight of the forest for the trees. In macromanagement there's only so much you can directly control and culture isn't one of those things. That means getting the outcome you want by indirect means, even if it doesn't look exactly how you might have pictured it.
Look at Github, they have an internal "facebook".
I don't know if this because the author of this memo doesn't understand culture analytically or felt that explaining what was meant didn't have a place in this memo, but dismissing process was a mistake. A more nuanced perspective breaks culture into multiple domains:
# Values
# Norms
# Routines
Values are the fundamental beliefs that people cherish. The thing about values is that they are, as a result, near impossible to change quickly. Five to seven years and you'll have to change the CEO and the hiring policy to achieve it.
Norms are the units of behavioral control. Norms are group-level social pressures such as bringing a plate for morning tea or writing good commit messages. These are the real interesting pieces because they shift readily in response to incentives. (If you're ever looking for easy goals in an organisational change effort, fiddle with the norms)
Norms generally help keep routines-that-aren't-written-down (some might say "the unwritten processes") steady and reify new ones in response to externalities.
So when Thiel was saying "don't fuck up the culture" I take away two things:
* Don't bother wittering about values. You're stuck with them anyway.
* Don't fuck with the incentive structure
Interesting, I've observed the opposite. As someone single, I've been surprised at how much process there is among many married or cohabiting couples. Lots of discussion and planning around everyday routine chores, such as going to the grocery store.
These couples have assured me with confidence that this is very important to the health of their relationships.
An analogy fitting to OP's point is comparing two people from Hollywood and Ethiopia living in the same apartment versus one of the cohabiting couples you're talking about. In one case, you'll need expressed rules for each to abide by since they're culturally quite different. Comparatively the other case will have very few rules, because of the cultural similarity. The cohabiting couple will more naturally work towards similar goals without painstakingly negotiating them and laying them out.
"Hey, do you mind helping me clean the kitchen?" "Sure."
Also, my favorite working environments have been similar to a family of peers.
"Hey, do you mind pushing your changes this morning?" "Sure."
There's also a lot of process in families. Some you can automate now, like paying the bills. Some processes are routines. Getting up, getting our child dressed, walking her to school, picking her up, taking her to her after school activities. Doing her homework with her.
There's also process with checking things around the house. Checking the fire alarms regularly, scheduling dentist appointments, making plans for seeing family. These are all processes.
The whole original article came off as ignorance and out of touch. As someone with an academic background in Anthropology and Sociology the author doesn't seem to understand what culture is or how hierarchy and unbalanced power relationships in the office place work. It's not a very sophisticated treatment of the topic in any regard. And in that vein, my opinion is that as long as the times are good and you're not hiring a bunch of dickhead managers your culture will be fine. If you take your culture to mean don't hire old people because they don't play the video games your 20 somethings do then your shit is fucked. In the end, when things go bad in the business, culture will sour.
Process, at least in the corporate context, is about a bunch of stuff you do regularly to check on whether on not the stuff that matters is being attended to. Getting your kid dressed is not a good analog to the 'process' that is being referred to in this sense. Process is a tax on hiring people that don't have that internal compass, or on operating in an environment that stifles that internal compass. If the to-do list isn't there, isn't being followed, or doesn't work in some other way, process exists to find out that there's a problem so everyone can sit down and talk about what to do to fix it.
Put simply: you're defining a culture in your household that is healthy. It's exactly what the author hopes for in a company, and that's not process, it's discipline.
Humanistic Psychology defines process similar to how the author describes 'culture'. [1]
Take ceramics, for example. "Process" is working wet clay on a wheel with one's hands. It extends to the atmosphere of the studio – the mood that the artist creates in their environment (what music do they listen to, what is the lighting like?).
Humanistic Psychology posits the most beautiful products will emerge out of situations in which the artist is fully immersed in their process. The process itself is the goal, the products are 'by-products' whose quality is determined by the level of joy and concentration the artist brings to the process.
Tribal dynamics, also mentioned here and in the article fit into this model as well. According to Phil Jackson, NBA coach with eleven championship rings, a beautiful system (or process) is the key to success. [2][3] In the case of the Bulls and Lakers, this consisted not only of the triangle offense, a system that promoted a pure style of basketball playing which involves the entire team, eschewing traditional 'plays', but also extended to the way the team practiced, meditated together, had fun together. In this sense, process and culture become the same thing.
1: The Farther Reaches of Human Nature, Maslow. http://books.google.com/books/about/The_Farther_Reaches_of_H...
2: Eleven Rings, Phil Jackson http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/eleven-rings-phil-jackson/11...
3: Tribal Leadership, Logan, King, Fischer-Wright http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0061251321/ref=as_li_qf_sp_...
Thus Spoke Zarathustra 1. 11: The New Idol
>Where there are still peoples, the state is not understood, and is hated as the evil eye, and as sin against laws and customs.
>This sign I give to you: every people speaks its own language of good and evil, which its neighbor does not understand. It has created its own language of laws and customs.
>But the state lies in all the tongues of good and evil; and whatever it says it lies; and whatever it has it has stolen.
We have a family culture that makes it possible for a lot of 'rules' to go unwritten and unmentioned, I think primarily because we're on the same page. We don't need an employee handbook, or weekly meetings, but we're an efficient organization.
I think it's disingenuous to say tribes and families don't "require much process." The processes are just more implicit than explicit. When you ask your parents for a new toy and they evaluate whether to say 'yes', that's a process - just an informal one. The only reason that's really possible is because the relationships are much more intimate and fewer.
When you start to scale into numbers where it's just infeasible for "everyone to know everyone" then formal processes have to take the place of those informal ones. I can't evaluate Jim's request for 10 additional storage disks informally because I don't know the first thing about Jim.
Coordinating lots of people is really hard. I would guess Airbnb is getting about the size where keeping the culture intact will require a sizable time commitment from the top level. Airbnb keeping that same culture at 20,000 employees would probably be a sociological feat all on its own.
If you want your company to be the size of a religion, you do.
Sure, but what's that - like 10 people? Yeah I'll agree then you don't need processes.
I don't think so.
> And while you can have those kinds of relationships in a company that's composed of 5 people, it's really hard to do that in a company of 5000.
I think you took my comparison too literally. The comparison was meant to highlight that people who share culture have less process. In a company of 5000, it's harder to have a mono-culture, but the closer you can get to that then the less "process" there is.
Yeah, I guess I’ll need a different example to really believe you. I think if cultivating relationships aren't a possibility (and they aren't, logistically, in large enough companies), we naturally (and justifiably) result to explicit processes in order to accomplish things between different groups of people. I don't think culture has anything to do with it.
Yah, I guess this is where we're missing each other. See, I believe that if you put 2 west coast americans in a room, their morals, likes/dislikes, and goals are more likely to naturally align than by putting in some odd mix of countries with clashing cultures.
Think Netflix travel policy ("be responsible") vs more traditional companies with rules and travel agents for implicit vs explicit, or cultural vs process driven.
The caveat to my statement was that you can keep that kind of culture at scale if you're brutal about either ensuring people are good cultural fits, whether that's by stringent hiring processes or swift termination.
Not that I think Netflix necessarily has the wrong approach here - it's a tradeoff to avoid having these explicit processes. But it's food for thought, nonetheless.
Having meetings about culture and "core values" is a sure sign your culture's fucked. The fact that he thinks having a meeting about culture might in some way help fix some culture issue indicates to me he's really not the person to impart pearls of wisdom when it comes to company culture.
tl;dr that's mba-speak, bro.
One company I consulted at, maybe 200 people, went through a substantial internal process to make their values explicit. I wasn't there for it, but I understand everybody participated, and there was a lot of discussion about what they really wanted in a mission statement and a set of values.
When I was there, it amazed me to see employees at all levels actually pulling out the list of values when hard decisions were happening. They used it to remind themselves of what really mattered to them.
Admittedly, I've only seen it once, but it really appeared to work. It's definitely something I'm keeping in my pocket the next time I'm at something that crosses Dunbar's Number.
The "core values" are for the drones, specifically to keep them in line and not cause any issues. The board members can keep doing what the $%%$ they want as the only values they have are economic, the generation of profit for the company.
Just remember that corporationa are not "ethical" so having "core values" is an oxymoron. The only thing a corporation exists for is profit, so "core values" is the clown face painted on a psychopath. A corporation will lie, rape and destroy to make a profit.
Human beings have values. Human beings can be ethical. But most corporate leaders leave their humanity at the door when running a corporation. It is just business.
"Core values" are a delusion for the masses, a stupid form of mind control to keep the losers in thrall [1].
[1] See the definition of loser here: http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-o...
Core values are useful for attracting and keeping the Clueless in the Gervais model. But in doing so, they make the company more than just a purely amoral economic engine. In order to sustain the delusions of the Clueless, the Sociopaths at the top need to pay at least lip service to preserving their illusions, else they leave in a huff and start acting like a wrecking ball, as a certain other prominent HN poster who likes to throw around Gervais Principle links has done. That lip service is pretty much the entire social purpose of the corporation.
One often-unstated corollary of the Gervais Principle is that the whole idea of "money" and "profit" is a social construction developed by Clueless and Losers to rein in the will-to-power Sociopaths. Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great, and Napoleon Bonaparte went on killing sprees to satisfy their need for power. Steve Jobs and Richard Branson go on building sprees. That's entirely because the Clueless and Losers have created a society where the only way to the top is to take a bunch of people with you.
As for the wage suppression agreement - I'm not exactly happy with that, but when I read the Apple/Google e-mails uncovered by discovery, I see a stunning example of realpolitik. Make nice with the 800-lb gorilla until you're ready to compete with him, which Google did with Android. While I'm not exactly thrilled that this came at my expense, I think a world where mobile developers have a viable alternative to going through Apple's App Store is significantly less evil than one in which Apple is the sole determinant of who can launch.
http://www.bhorowitz.com/programming_your_culture
I like the fact that he makes it clear that there are many different ways to define a company culture and that, if possible, leaders should make a conscious choice to choose among them.
* Move fast and break things.
* Take pride in the work we do.
* The customer is always right.
Does this sound like it will have problems? Yeah, I think so. But does the current system have problems? (Left as an exercise for the reader)
There's one more tidbit that comes to mind: what happens when the "core values" indicate that it's time for the company to close up shop? I'm not sure there's a catch-all answer, but this is a question for anyone who pays lip service to the idea of culture to ponder.
http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Square-Reviews-E422050.htm
It seems that good companies really have good reviews in general.
Thanks for making me feel better :). I should read these reviews for more companies.
What happens in small tourist towns when all of the available property gets bought by outsiders wanting to 'Airbnb'?
Let's face it, 'Airbnb' isn't about letting out the spare room or the flat whilst one is away for some pocket money (whilst helping some weary traveller out). Airbnb is about buying places specifically for rental.
So, what happens?
The few real 'Bed and Breakfast' hotels have a hard time of it and local people (not on big city wages or the money for a deposit) get pushed even further down the housing ladder.
So, even if the culture is not messed up in the hip Mac-book Air stuffed office of AirBnb, the culture could be messed up in some far off town.
It appears there is a lack of short-stay housing supply. AirBnB facilitates that market. Short-stay property owners should seek to spread their operating costs across multiple properties. This will drive out mom-and-pop operations - that is good business. The added wealth from leaner short-stay operations should make up for the temporary displacement.
The displacement is a process our political process has to manage. But spitting on markets for eroding the incumbent's edge is an old game for tired societies.
AirBnB undercuts existing hotels by sidestepping required regulations. There isn't a lack of short-stay supply; AirBnB just works more cheaply because it has fewer expenses.
The added wealth from leaner short-stay operations should make up for the temporary displacement.
The point of the parent comment is that that wealth is not kept in the town, but siphoned off somewhere else.
Note: The existence of a minority of people gaming the system does not equate to what you claimed.
http://www.fastcompany.com/3021179/secrets-of-running-a-six-...
http://mashable.com/2013/11/04/bought-apartment-rent-airbnb/
http://www.quora.com/Airbnb/Does-it-make-financial-sense-to-...
The $billion$ numbers don't make me think it is anything otherwise. Compare with the 'Youth Hostel' movement of a foregone age and how that broke even as a charity (no tax), with well meaning folk leaving property to them (no debt) and the 'youths' doing their own cleaning with bedding they brought. AirBnb stinks of speculative bubble money and it is only a matter of time before the rentseekers of the buy-to-let market get their fat arses into it.
Further, Culture is the achievement of various people pre-globalization. By discarding that, we are not becoming better, the results are positive in short term, but wait till it takes the nosedive, just like the real estate crisis of 2007-08.
I agree with the other comments in this thread, AirBnB essentially opening up the market of desireable destinations to real-estate speculators, regardless of any impact this may have on the local population. Facilitate residential hotels, let speculators invest in them and handle the management, take a nice cut, damn the local regulations (and taxes) by claiming to be only an intermediary, and who cares about disruptions to the lives of the locals (directly through residential zoning violations, indirectly by warping the local real-estate market).
I think voters in destination cities and towns need to pass AirBnB legislation to limit residential subletting to something like 40 nights per year and collect sales and hotel tax on every transaction.
The picture of an appartment turned into commercial space (startup office) is telling of their "culture." Culture of cheating and disrespect, essentially.
‘What Your Culture Really Says’: https://medium.com/about-work/e8ab06c3b75f
> Let’s examine popular startup trends that are being called “culture” and look beneath the surface to find the real culture that may be playing out beneath it. This is not a critique of the practices themselves, which often contribute value to an organization. This is to show a contrast between the much deeper, systemic cultural problems that are rampant in our startups and the materialistic trappings that can disguise them.
You and that article nailed it for me.
This sentence finally made it click for me. Culture is not about making people happy. It is the set of principles on which you convince people to base their decisions and actions that affect the company. If those principles can be made uniform without hierarchy and approval processes, that makes a company unequivocally more efficient.
I believe there's a fundamental difference, however, between culture as an emergent property, subject to its members' needs and changeable by its desires, and 'culture' as a set of metaphysical properties determined by a company's founders, to which one must either conform or find themselves terminated. A culture which you have no influence over isn't really a culture to which you can belong.
Mind one: Cultures are stupid. They're artificial and require buy-in. This either alienates people, or indoctrinates them, and in either case, you end up with something artificial, stupid and derivative.
Mind two: Cultures are organic and incredible. They "become" because they are reflective of a small (VERY small) subgroup of people and their own rarely synchronous core values. Because of how humans only accept the idiosyncrasies of others if they're reflective of more than one person, cultures help to expose idiosyncratic tastes and behaviors to people who might not otherwise be exposed to them.
Now that that's out of the way, at some point, your company will not have the clout or draw to be able to pull in the talent you want 100% of the time. Candidate A might be perfect on paper, but maybe doesn't like surreal humor. Candidate B might be the best Javascript gal you've ever seen, but she's not big on noise rock.
These sound like stupid and trivial things, but the heart of a culture is the enthusiasm that lives alongside finding people who all march to the beat of the same drum. Who, for whatever reason, all were fans of The Gilmore Girls or who have a weird fascination with whale sounds or maybe like fighting with broomsticks.
You will lose culture, so long as you're willing to bring on people who aren't exactly like you.
I would have liked to see more concrete examples of what they do want to do, what they want to avoid, and how exactly they're going to "execute" at getting culture right.
For someone who wants to have a certain level of professional decorum at work, the use of "fuck" in your CEO's blog post about your company's culture would certainly be exclusionary.
It's also quite likely to drive away even-tempered contributors in favor of a "bro" audience.
Perhaps that was the point: http://www.glassdoor.com/Reviews/Airbnb-Reviews-E391850.htm
To put it in a way that Ben might understand, it's fucking bullshit. It's not the worst part of the book to be sure, but there's no value to it, the reasoning is weak, and the evidence is non-existent.*
* The worst thing is when he espouses the importance of work/life balance for the CEO, and then talks proudly of a death-march that he put his employees through. A death march which he says must be good because a grand total of one employee told him it was a great experience. A death march which didn't result in the loss of all his employees not because Ben is a great leader (he ain't), but because the economy was such a catastrophe that even a shitty, abusive job working for a profane and self-congratulatory motherfucker was better than the alternative.
This (which is one of Brian's notes in the article) is one of the best ways to think about culture that I've encountered. A company can't have "good" culture or "bad" culture. It just has a certain shared way of doing things that may or may not vibe with you.
On a related note, Tony Hsieh of Zappos believes what your culture is doesn't matter as much as having a strong identity. Just figure out who you, as a company, are and the rest will follow:
"...one of the really interesting things I found from the research is that it actually doesn’t matter what your values are, what matters is that you have them and that you align the organization around them. And the power actually comes from the alignment not from the actual values"[1]
On the surface 'culture' is just the way things are done (currently).
Deepen engagement and understanding of your values by collecting and writing down organizational folklore.
The best way your can preserve your current culture is to, as the leader, document your thinking and define and explain in your own words key unique and important ways of doing things.
Disney and Sony were both good at this. Both companies later experienced drift from their original core way of doing things. It was referring back to these early papers written by the fonunder (often many years after they were gone) that enabled these companies to constantly rediscover their roots when they got lost. Write as if you were about to die and wanted to leave instructions and guidance for the next leaders.
Fred Wilson's blog had a related topic; The Role Of Personal Chemistry In Investment Selection -- http://avc.com/2013/10/the-role-of-personal-chemistry-in-inv...
There is a slippery slope of exclusionary behavior associated with this line of thinking -- where some way of being that is foreign or different doesn't get hired or potentially doesn't get funded.
One thing this article gets right: there are tools and there are culture. Tools determine the process, which has an effect on the culture, but the culture develops organically depending on who's in the team. If you are super culture heavy, you'll hire A+ superstars (like the recent article about building a cult). But as for me, I don't want to be a cult leader. I want to build better tools to empower people to help each other and make their own decisions. Both in our company, and in the rest of the world.
and
> Ever notice how families or tribes don’t require much process? That is because there is such a strong trust and culture that it supersedes any process.
I think both the above are more related to being small than having strong culture.
> Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with passion.
having a shared way is natural and easy when you're small. Trying to continue that as you grow is a good goal, but it's just hard, which is why there's so much thought and research around how to lead, manage and how to make organizations thrive. It's not an easy problem, and saying, "hey everyone, just be vigilant and keep the same small company family culture even though we're growing" likely won't cut it.
At this point I'm convinced of only one thing: company culture is magic. Everyone influences it, but there is no controlling it. When you're a tiny little startup of course the culture will reflect your values as a founder or early employee, when you're bigger it will change on its own. You can hire for culture, and you can talk about it, or even wax poetic, but ultimately it's a chaotic interaction of individuals and you're a fool if you think you can control it.
Culture is about people getting along, being motivated towards the same goals, and working in the type of environment that they enjoy. Not all smart individuals have the same culture desires. Google is the posterboy for culture discussions, and they are very open and blunt about denying some extremely smart interviewees. They very carefully prune for cultural fit, and it has a large impact. Google's culture is a multiplying factor on the productivity.
A bad culture fit for an employee or employer is an < 1 multiplier to productivity.
"Families and tribes" (a) get by fine without explicit processes because they are small groups, or (b) they do have the processes but they don't need to be written down because they are taught implicitly from birth.
Arguments of the form "We don't need [insert any concept from management text books] because we are smart, technical people" are the flags on areas of your company that will break the worst.
Bro-Investor
Hint: remove Joe and Nate from the sentence and then pick I/me, you'll get it right every time.
It may take me some time to calm down after reading that.
Interesting, I've observed the opposite...
I think it's disingenuous to say...
In my experience, this is the first sign that [X] about to be fucked up...
I hope [company X's] other communications aren't as ugly as that heap of sentence fragments....
___________
These are the first 1-5 comment's on HN. Is this the work some 4chan Meme propogation software?
I don't live in my AirBNB's. I don't want to be friends with all of the people who stay at my places. I am running hotels where maid service is your responsibility, or you can pay an additional fee.
I have really nice places. They are cheaper than hotels, and you get way more space. I would love to stay at their equivalents in other places. But I don't want to make friends with all the people who stay at my places, or the places I might stay.
If AirBNB is going to work, it needs to be looking at ways to be more like TimeShares that you buy on a moment's notice, and less like a couch surfing site.
It needs to be mainstream, not more hippy.
Yes, it needed that hippy core to get started, but to really grow it has to transition from the hippy core to mainstream. You can't be a $10B company with a target audience that is only people who all want to be friends. That may be sad, but it is the truth of business.
Have you talked to the support people there? My phone support people have sounded stoned, made inappropriate jokes, and been horribly unprofessional.
They are slow to respond, and worthless if anything goes wrong.
How many changes have you seen to the website over the last 100 days? How many of those had a positive impact?
AirBNB needs to grow up, they need to think mainstream, and they need to learn how to deal with real people at scale.
Then be thankful that the culture you hate has created something you value. You sound like the complaints that Google doesn't offer phone support, just correct software and a knowledge base.
If you want to deal with a traditional, huge, corporate juggernaut, feel free to check out their offerings. Let us know if you find anything.
AirBNB's corporate culture is based on the idea that nobody will care because the users would do it for free but it is nice to get paid.
When you raise 500M on a 10B valuation, people start to care more that your stuff works. If you get a moldy muffin at a bake sale you say, "no big deal that was a nice guy". If you get a moldy muffin at Starbucks you get a lawyer.
I am now a "Starbucks Franchisee" and so people expect more. I am also betting big on AirBNB with multiple properties, so I need them to do their part.
As to the "dig" that I should be using Hyatt or Doubletree to do this... I expect I will soon. You don't expect them to stay out of the market do you? I expect Expedia to be in the space in the next 3 years as the legality of running a hotel (and that's what I do) gets shaken out in NYC and SF.
So while I understand that you are already using them, that you see that they've raised money, and that you expect more from their franchise program than non-existence - indeed, you've set your stake down and established yourself in it - it strikes me as less than fair that you would show this level of entitlement toward a non-existent program.
It's a bit like complaining to a bakery that your customers no longer wake up to the nice fresh smell of croissants in your apartment upstairs from them, now that the bakery get their croissants delivered from another baking location. Well, okay. But that's not their model.
This is what your tone sounds like to me:
"Dear airbnb: I've taken it upon myself to set up as a franchisee in your non-existent franchise program. And as an airbnb franchise owner, boy am I pissed. Your level of support for what I'm doing is appalling. Orders of magnitude worse than what I would get from a program that exists. As a $10B company, you cannot afford to stop supporting what I'm doing. It's a travesty. Make no mistake, I am upset and fully intend to abandon you and start using your competition - just as soon as it starts existing. Your days are numbered."
I understand that you think they should go in the direction of supporting you (which may not even be legal!) but I would seriously consider the level of entitlement you show when making these requests. At the end of the day, you're not entitled to be a franchisee if they don't have a franchise program.
There are other services for furnished short term rentals. Few of those let you do 3 day rentals. I am on some of the ones that allow 1 week rentals. So there is competition in that space, and has been pre-airbnb.
So yes, they have a "franchise" this analogy is falling down because they are more like Amazon and I am more like one of the providers who lists on them. Or, Ebay listing my car for me.
When Amazon, or Ebay have support issues, or performance issues, or "image" issues it effects those "self entitled" sellers who are trying to make a living on their platform.
And yes, just as ebay and amazon if you don't do a good job the providers of what is sold will leave.
I actually didn't mean "self-entitled" in a general way (like, about your personality), or anything - rather just entitlement about something in this particular relationship. For example, the same level of entitlement that you show might be absolutely fine when you deal with Starbucks, for example. (If I read correctly that you're a starbucks franchise owner). It's just that you're showing this particular entitlement about airbnb, and there is nothing to justify it, as they don't operate the same way or make the same sort of promises about their relationship with you.
Anyway it wouldn't hurt to ask nicely, saying, pretty-please, wouldn't you consider doing something different/ more explicit, better business support than what you're doing now, for this and this reason. They might not want to do that - then don't use their business. I wouldn't operate an eBay store for example, because of the terrible things some eBay store operators say about eBay and their policies. I just wouldn't use it as a business front.
I think if you don't want airbnb to just ignore you, you should consider playing at their level, with constructive feedback about what to do and how to do it, and if they don't want to do that - then to make a hard decision about whether you want to do business on their terms, or make a living somewhere else.
You can't get them to change their behavior by starting to behave as though they already promised to do that or set the relationship up like that. They aren't DoubleTree opening a franchise program. It's just a different sort of organization.