How a Startup’s Culture Saved My Life
There’s been a lot written recently about startup culture. Most of it is extremely negative. It talks about how we’re one giant cliche; a bunch of scooter-riding party animals who are indoctrinated by the core values of our various organizations in order to accept lower wages, longer hours, and ridiculous business practices. But I’m here to tell a different story — one about how a company actually living its core values may have saved my life.
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On October 1st, 2015 I had a colonoscopy after months of post-meal stomach discomfort. I fully expected it was a later in life dairy allergy, a stomach ulcer from all that gourmet coffee I guzzle from our free coffee bar, or at the worst some sort of esoteric IBS diagnosis. This what happens when you enter your thirties, right?
What I found out, at 32 — just 10 days after I had gotten engaged to my fiancee — is that I had colon cancer.
What I found it out is that my only option was immediate surgery to remove the entirety of my colon, attach my small intestine to my rectum (gross, right?), and hope that the tumor they removed along with it hadn’t fired a few spinning death tendrils into the other organs in my body.
But it wasn’t all bad. There was that silver lining that without a colon I couldn’t get colon cancer again. The only cost would be the lifetime penalty of what was described as “having an aggressive increase in number twos.” You can connect the dots on what that means. Oh. And a 6 week post-surgery recovery period followed by 6 months of chemotherapy.
I was scheduled and heading for surgery 2 weeks after my colonoscopy.
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I remember the day I had to tell everyone at my company that I had colon cancer. That I didn’t know what it meant; that I wasn’t sure if I was ever going to come back to work, to have a normal life, to survive. All I knew was that 10 days ago I was the happiest I’d ever been in my life and now I wasn’t even sure I’d have one. The conversation usually went like this:
Me: Hey, you got a few seconds to talk?
Them: Sure, let’s find a meeting room.
Me: So… There’s no easy way to say this. I just found out I have cancer.
Them: (stunned silence)
Me: Yep. I’m not fucking with you. So I’m going to be gone for awhile.
Them: …
Rinse and repeat 50 or so times. Except for one time.
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I decided to tell my CEO and Vice President of People at the same time. As executives, it was really important for me to be clear with them about what I knew and didn’t know. Naively, I was concerned about holding on to my job as I went through an incredibly disruptive period of my life. I worried about the hard math of a startup’s goals and financials making them draw a very pragmatic conclusion. And I was stressed that this unplanned life event was going to drive me bankrupt if I had to take unpaid leave. Aren’t hospital bills outrageous? Aren’t there always horror stories that you get five-figure bills for things you didn’t even realize you signed up for them to do to you?
One of our core values at this particular startup was Hospitality First. Sounds great on paper, right? But what does it really mean? It means that you look out for one another. It means that you treat everyone with respect and the way you’d like to be treated. It doesn’t matter if you’re a customer, an employee, or someone walking in the office to drop off the mail.
We marry that core value with another one: Committed to Quality. This isn’t just quality products or quality assurance or any of the obvious things that come to mind here. It’s also our equivalent of Lars Dalgaard / SuccessFactor’s famous “No Assholes” policy. We’re committed to the quality of people who walk in the door and work here.
When you marry these two core values, you get a bunch of people who care about others and want to make sure they are treated well.
Like I said, I was naive.
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My conversation was very simple. It started the same way.
Me: Hey, you got a few seconds to talk?
Them: Sure, let’s find a meeting room.
Me: So… There’s no easy way to say this. I just found out I have cancer.
Them: OK, this is how we can help.
Me: (stunned silence).
What I went on to learn is that my company had committed to, with zero fanfare, pomp or circumstance a program where Short Term Disability was 100% covered for every single employee automatically. By default. Everyone had it.
For those of you who don’t know, if short-term disability is offered as a benefit by a company it is almost always an opt-in benefit. You pay a monthly piece of your paycheck to be covered and can then exercise it if, heaven forbid, you ever need it. Then while on it, you collect 60% of your base salary and don’t use any PTO or sick days.
Learning that, I was floored. I was shocked. I had thought in my mental model that, like most places I’ve worked before, I surely had waived that benefit when I got hired because it’s a sucker’s bet: like car rental insurance. Nope, they don’t even bring it up because EVERYONE gets it. They eat that cost knowing that it’s the right thing to do.
But that’s not all. They had also instituted — without an announcement, company town hall, AMA, or any other startupy mindfuck reason other than that it felt like the right thing to do — the commitment to cover the difference in the short-term disability provider’s 60% salary coverage and your full salary. Meaning: you’d still collect 100% of your paychecks while on the disabled list. They would cover that extra 40% that insurance doesn’t pay the employee. Yes, they would pay me out of their own rapidly burning startup pockets while getting no work from me.
Like I said, Hospitality First.
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Anyone reading this probably thinks that I am being a bit of a sensationalist when I say that this simple act of compassion has helped save my life. And maybe I am. But I can tell you that at that point in time, back in October, with so many other things happening so quickly that were beyond my control? That very simple, very human, act of kindness by of all things — a for profit business — resonated for me. It gave me back some shards hope in this fucked up world.
I couldn’t control my diagnosis. I couldn’t control my treatment. I couldn’t control the pity and fear that I saw in my friends and loved ones when I told them the news. I couldn’t control that this was going to derail everything my new fiancee and I had planned for the next 12 months (the post-engagement bliss people describe as the best in your lifetime). I couldn’t control that I would torpedo her happiness as she suddenly went from partner to caretaker overnight. Everything was in a tailspin.
But one thing I didn’t have to worry about controlling? My income. My financial stability as I focused on what was most important: surviving.
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So I apologize to everyone that thinks these post-millennial companies with their catered lunches, hover boards, open floor plans, and change the world via B2B enterprise software mission statements are bullshit. They, like anyone else, come down to the people that make them up and the tiny decisions that they all make. And reality, like always, is probably far closer to the middle than the extremes.
But having core values and finding people to work with that share them breeds a culture. A culture manifests an environment. And an environment creates a place where you’re proud and humbled to give your most precious asset: your time.
That’s my story. My fingers are crossed that this is where it ends.
