Building and Scaling Teams & Culture
As early stage investors, so many of our investment decisions are driven by team. In other words, our belief in the founding team and their ability to build game-changing companies with world-class teams behind them.
Recruiting and retaining the right team is the most foundational driver of a company’s success over time. The race to find and retain top talent remains a huge challenge in today’s startup environment, especially with the move towards hybrid work environments. Almost all of the 55+ companies in our Bread & Butter Ventures portfolio have distributed teams and many are fully remote-first. It begs the question, how do you build a team at lightning speed and scale culture in meaningful ways, without the benefit of always being together in person?
To answer this, I rely a lot on the lessons learned throughout my career. I began my career with 15 years at Google which is a wild ride I am so grateful to have experienced; we were about 2,000 employees globally when I joined and over 100,000 when I left. As Director of Google for Startups, I built a team from scratch who spanned 17 timezones, was culturally diverse, and completely distributed. I’ve also worked with hundreds of companies since then through my work with Rise of the Rest and now at Bread & Butter. I absolutely love the people side of the work: hiring, managing, measuring, and building.
So much we could cover but sharing here a list of advice in three areas: 1) Hiring 2) Managing and 3) Building Culture.
Key Tips on Hiring:
- While nothing replaces meeting in person, I firmly believe that hiring can be done completely virtually. Set up a standardized process all candidates go through to remove as much bias as possible. Identify a slate of interviewers who will be involved for each role. If you are a super lean team, consider leaning on your advisors or investors to be part of the slate for senior hires.
- For final round candidates, we suggest a collaborative exercise to learn *how* the candidate works. Examples of this include: create a First 90 Day Plan, create and present a draft sales pitch, etc. Keep it brief and consistent for each finalist and then engage in an interactive review and discussion so you both get a feel for one another.
- Hire people with a range of strengths and styles and be aware of what makes them thrive. Be cautious of hiring people who think and work exactly the way you do, because diversity of thought is a core asset.
- Most importantly: while everything feels and is urgent, don’t hire just to fill a seat; the wrong hire can have reverberating negative effects and it’s important to move fast but set and keep your bar high.
Key Tips on Managing:
- The old adage says, “People don’t leave companies, they leave managers.” How can you aim to be the best manager anyone has ever worked for?
- Think about and care for one’s whole self and lead by example.
- Onboarding is always critical, but especially in distributed teams. Focus on a successful onboarding process with clear bi-directional expectation setting. What is the scope of role, what does success look like, how will you measure it, what will the communication mechanisms & cadence be internally
- Set up a synchronous and asynchronous framework for communication between manager and direct report. I recommend a 1:1 every other week, and then an async update on the off week (for example: a quick snippets update of 5 bullets).
- For teams: I recommend annual team offsites twice a year, in person. Outside of that, you can host functional or smaller group gatherings as needed but we highly recommend focusing on two big moments of quality time in person. These offsites should include big picture vision + planning but mainly focus on building trust, community, and strong relationships.
- Feedback, feedback, feedback: we recommend performance check-ins twice a year and an annual upward feedback surveys + org-wide survey to continue to allow an opportunity for data and transparency.
- Suggest that CEO/key leadership block an hour a week for open office hours, when any team member can drop in (including virtual) where help is needed, to unblock something, or just for time with leadership. This is in lieu of the “hallway conversations” that are often so helpful.
Tips on Culture
Set a consistent goal that this will be the single best environment anyone on your team has ever worked in and shoot for your north star.
Do some big-picture goal setting against what this looks like to you and repeat that back to the team for collaborative feedback.
- We suggest setting an annual theme of the year. This is essentially an annual north star. Examples could be. Ship an A+ Product. Focus on Operational Excellence. Tripling Revenue Growth. One brief unifying theme to rally the company behind.
- Recognition. This is especially important to find creative ways to approach this for distributed teams. One of my favorite traditions is “Shoutout of the Week” — where the CEO sends a brief end of week note calling out one team member for going to extra mile or really overdelivering (if your team is super small, you could do this monthly).
- Aim to create a culture that feels like family — people you trust, are in the trenches with, are authentic with, and who you are building with. Some tactical ideas that work virtually as well as in-person include:
- Book club/podcast club
- Lunch & learn series
- Day of community service w/ projects in your respective cities
- Give people their birthday off
- Subsidize lunch once a week or month and eat together
In a word, I think an important superpower for founders at the early stage is: magnanimous leadership. The ability to inspire people with a bold true north vision, sell a team and a dream, tenaciously knock on doors to get those early meetings, land those key hires, and get those first pilots. A great team begins with great leadership and the belief that every team is as strong as each member.
We’d love to hear your tips on building and scaling great teams and we love to meet new folks in office hours each week. Looking forward to connecting!
