Revamping our Cultural Operating System

There’s a well known startup adage that says “companies are more likely to die from suicide than homicide.”

Most people who know me know that a large part of my success has nothing to do with me. I’ve always believed in putting the team first, and the power of culture. The ability to weaponize culture in order to create a competitive advantage has been our secret weapon since inception. Many of the beliefs around culture were formed early on in my career during my time at Zefer, where they created an incredible culture of freedom and responsibility and used that culture as an asset, rather than treating it as something that formed passively with the passage of time.

We have been on an incredible journey at mParticle since the beginning. I’ve written about much of it: from the moment we launched in 2013 to almost not making it in the early days to becoming a breakout success and helping create and lead an entirely new category in an industry where we had no prior experience. Some days are better than others, but it’s been so amazing so far.

As we have recently begun our Series D fundraise process, I felt that it was important to reflect on what we have accomplished and not only what I wanted to happen with the company, but also have an incredibly honest conversation about why as well. Becoming honest about the why led me to understand the what and ultimately confront a number of challenges we began to have that needed to be addressed. And admittedly, come to see how I was complicit in the environment that was created.

Despite growing around nearly 100% year over year for the past number of years, somewhere over the past year we had begun to lose our way culturally and I didn’t realize it fast enough. To everyone at mParticle, I ask your forgiveness and your commitment that we move forward knowing this will never happen again.

I believe that eliminating the fear that we collectively have as we deal with the uncertainty that comes along with growth (especially in a new category) is one of my most important responsibilities as CEO. As I began reflecting, I realized that I wasn’t eliminating fear throughout the org however, and in fact my own fear was perpetuating more fear throughout mParticle. I was empowering people to operate in suboptimal ways, because of these fears. While this was a painful realization, it was liberating because it was the first step in fixing what wasn’t working. I also started to see that it was more complex than simply blaming myself or pointing a finger at number of people.

As I began looking across the company, I saw the most talented collection of individuals that we have ever had but, also saw a team that wasn’t enjoying what we were doing as much as they had in the past. To be honest, I was starting to feel the same way. I couldn’t help but ask, if we had so many great people and we were growing, why wasn’t it getting better and more fun? In other words, I couldn’t understand why the collective whole wasn’t greater than or equal to the sum of the parts. What I was seeing and feeling was unfamiliar territory to the cofounding team here, but it became clear that we (I) had stopped paying attention to certain beliefs that we had built the company on, and the way we were operating was diverging further and further from those beliefs.

Out of fear, we were compromising our core principles to maximize short term outcomes. We made a number of wrong hires, kept certain people for too long, and lost some good people along the way. Not just people who were good at their job but, truly good people. After auditing the working dynamic within a few different groups, it became clear that we had started to develop what I felt were some serious culture and communications issues. If our core values serve as the operating system by which the business runs on, the OS was broken.

To begin to address this, we kicked off a cultural audit, beginning with an audit of our values and cultural norms. As we dug in, we found that while some of our values were still relevant, many had become outdated. We concluded that, many of the values which were designed in 2015 to help ensure our survival were no longer needed. Instead we needed values that could ensure mParticle is the type of company that we all want to work for. We realized that we needed to not only recognize and reward performance (which can be short term) but we needed to evolve our values to ensure long term success by holding each other accountable to being good people, safeguarding against toxic behaviors; eliminating a sense of fear across the org.

At our last executive offsite, rather than discuss roadmap priorities and hiring decisions like we usually do, we set out to do a culture overhaul. Our executive team includes people from incredible companies such as Mulesoft, Okta, Salesforce, IBM, Google, and more. We talked at length about what was working, and what wasn’t; what a healthy culture is, and where we needed to evolve. We set out redefine our culture from the ground up, scrutinizing every word, every value, every cultural norm.

Through this exercise, we realized that our values oriented heavily to performance rather than holding each other accountable to being good people, and just as importantly eliminating fear and anger. Fear and anger must be eliminated because they are the enemies of innovation and ultimately long term success. Put another way, our values emphasized results but didn’t ensure for an environment where people could do their best work. Our values also didn’t ensure that we had an environment where people could hold other people accountable to being good people. We were attempting to grow up but still behaving like teenagers.

Its easy to label any talk around culture as some sort of corporate kumbaya, which is why we didn’t want to stop at merely reinventing our values and cultural norms. Establishing a new set of values would allow us to recognize the behaviors we believed are in the best interest of the company, but we needed to also implement a better operating framework to reinforce those behaviors, and address our compensation plans to reward certain behaviors and outcomes. In order to address all of this, we began to ask the following questions:

1. If our kids, spouses, or parents worked here what is the type of environment we would want for them?
2. What values represent the DNA of successful employees?
3. What are the worst behaviors that we have observed and what can we do to prevent more of the same?
4. How do we ensure that our new set of cultural norms serve as infrastructure to root out this behavior as fast as possible?
5. Which behaviors have the highest causal relationship with success?
6. How do we increase the probability that these positive behaviors occur more often?
7. How do we recognize, reinforce, and reward desirable behaviors?
8. Do our comp plans and benefits reinforce our culture and the behaviors we want to see?
9. Do we have a standard decision making process to dramatically reduce ambiguity?
10. Does each team know what they are accountable for?

In addition to overhauling and coming up with a new set of values for 2019 and beyond, as well as rethinking some of our benefits, we also implemented the V2MOM operating framework from the top down. This framework was created by Salesforce, and aims to create clarity and alignment across the org and within each function. V2MOM stands for Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, and Measures. It is a way to set the vision and create alignment, in cascading function throughout the org on what we are trying to do, how we’ll get there, and how we’ll measure success.

After introducing a new operating framework, we dove into our compensation plans and recognized that many could be improved to better align with customer value. After looking at each teams comp plan, it was painfully clear that while some made sense independently (and some didn’t), there was no alignment across functions. The goal of updating each of the comp plans had three objectives; to make them straight forward, to ensure alignment across the org, and to ensure everyone can make money as we’re successful.

There was a ton of work that went into this and I cant thank my entire executive team enough. Through this process, I realized a couple things:

1. Its my mission each and every day to ensure that we all have a work environment that we are proud of, and feel safe in. Im growing everyday as CEO and don’t always have all the answers. I want everyone here to feel just fine if they don’t have all the answers either. We will get there together…
2. We are all truly responsible for each other. We have an obligation to each other to be good people and to make each other better people. None of us are perfect (aside from the dogs in the office).

We must acknowledge that this about progress and not perfection; and must take sincere enjoyment in our process of becoming stronger than we have ever been. If we are to be successful, we will be successful as one, and I couldn’t be more excited for the next phase of mParticle.