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Surviving the Climb… Enjoying it Even!

Part 3 of 3: How team, culture, and gratitude for growth become more than just startup buzzwords…

I don’t have any one formula for how to survive all of this. I certainly can’t take credit for Shelby’s potential survival, as I know I went through my own bouts of self-doubt and existential crises. That being said, there are a few things I know that helped me and likely helped the team.

The operative word above in that last sentence is team. You hear people in startup land talk about it all the time… Teams full of “A-players” and “world class teams” etc. That’s all well and good — every founder wants to hire like Jobs did — but there’s more to a “team” than being comprised of many stellar individuals. Great teams actually know how to work together. They know how to GSD.

It’s easy to be on a winning team. When you’re winning, everyday is fun. Everyone’s in a good mood. There’s nothing to complain about. Just show up and do some stuff and your name still goes down in the record books.

Startups are not that,* especially when product development is undergoing massive change, dragging along, or worse, failing. Most startups fall into this category, most of the time.

This is my “So, you’re telling me there’s a critical bug and there’s nothing we can do about it” face.

But great teams are the ones who stick through these tough times. They don’t shy away from big challenges, nor do they run for the hills at the first sign of trouble. If anything, the troubles they face together help bond the team in such a way that any future issues are met with “well, we’ve been in situations like this before.”

That’s what we have at Shelby. No fair-weather fans. No band-wagon groupies. Just great people who aren’t afraid of a challenge AND who make it fun to show up to work everyday.

Time and again, we’ve been faced with tough engineering choices, hard product decisions, or the occasional clash over vision, but we’ve always come out better on the other side.

This all starts with picking great people for your team in the first place, but equally as important is the culture that you breed within the team.

Culture is another term that is bandied about in startups, but let’s get one thing straight… Culture is NOT your fucking ping pong table or free beer or flexible schedule. Yeah, we have those things here at Shelby, but we also have clearly written core values [published here] that we spent days and days writing together as a team. These are the values that define how we approach our work, and with a framework like this, it enables anyone on the team to answer tough questions they face in their daily work.

Dan leading a discussion of our core values at Shelby. Summer 2012.

I spend a ton of my time talking about company formation and working with other founders on their own companies, and I’m always startled by how many companies lack a basic mission statement or some such document stating the company values.

And I get it, you probably started your company with one other best-friend-forever and didn’t need to write this stuff down. You knew each other well and the most important thing was to get an MVP built, then raise money, then hire, then build more, then hire more, then raise more… it’s a hamster wheel going at light speed that never ends, but if there’s one piece of advice I can give early stage founders, it is to take the time to write down who you are, and who you want to be, before you go do all that stuff. Feels like a stupid HR values-exercise from your former big company employer, but it’s YOUR values, and that will make all the difference in your culture going forward.

Revisiting our core values at the Shelby Summit. Winter 2013.

I’ll try not to drone on about our core values, but I will touch on the elements that really stick out to me as I look back on the last year leading up to this recent launch.**

1. Honesty and transparency go such a long way. It’s impossible to overstate this. With true transparency about the company, there are no surprises. Whether it’s how much money is in the bank or how the metrics look, it’s just data. At Shelby, I present this info to the team every Monday. By making a habit of consistently reporting this information, it allows everyone in the company a chance to act accordingly and appreciate a given situation for what it is and have honest discourse. Hell, you’ll even laugh about some of it. If you’re an early stage founder, I urge you to embrace transparency.
2. Talking openly with friends and mentors will keep you sane. Whether it’s your best friend from childhood or a fellow founder/CEO, having an open dialogue with someone who understands YOU or understands what you’re going through is paramount to your sanity. For me, it’s been a combination of friends/family, peers, and mentors. Each brought a unique perspective to a given topic, and some were able to ground me when I was getting too high or build me up when I was feeling low.
3. Be grateful for your growth. This isn’t about your growth hacks. This is about your personal and professional growth as an individual, and as a team. Like I said, startups are a hamster wheel spinning at light speed. You have to stop to celebrate a win, to look back on all the product you’ve built, to appreciate the personal growth you’ve made as a result of everything… it can make all the difference in enjoying the experience.

If you haven’t recognized it yet, the image at the header of this post is my own rendering of the famous “startup curve.”

The famous (or is it infamous?) Startup Curve.

I used it in a recent presentation to the team in which I was readying us for our recent launch. It was imperative that the team understand that launch, in and of itself, was going to be a climb. After all the work we had already done, it could be demoralizing to think “the peak of the mountain still isn’t in sight?!” so I took the time to recount all of our major milestones, looking back at all of our growth in the the last three years. For teammates old and new, it was a powerful experience to be taken on the journey again. It ended with us perched just above the “wiggles of false hope” approaching “the promised land” …proud of how far we’d come, and energized to forge ahead.

Are we at the summit yet? No way.

But do we know where we are, know where we’re going, and know what steps we need to take to get there? You bet, and that makes the surviving the climb that much more fun.

The team (sans Chris + Vincent) after our recent iPhone app launch. Don’t mind Mike… his face is stuck like that.

Leadership lessons learned:

1. Teams who survive, even thrive, in tough times are the true great ones. Find the people who can hang tough.
2. Culture is about shared values. Take the time to define your values sooner than later.
3. Transparency with your teammates makes for real discourse and no surprises.
4. Honest conversations with peers/friends/mentors helps keep things in perspective.
5. Growth, personally and professionally, is the real payback for climbing the startup mountain. Take time to set growth goals and time to reflect on them.

Bonus tip: Have some fun once in a while! For me, that’s going surfing or on other adventures. As a team, that means cracking beers and making fun of Intern Zero.

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