“The first 6–8 people we hire will set our culture”

Sanjay Venkat, CTO and co-founder of Datavore Labs, in a conversation about hikes, culture and understanding people.

Hi Sanjay! It’s lovely to meet you. Could you tell me a bit more about Datavore Labs and your role?
Datavore Labs is a data analytics software company in the financial services sector and I’m the CTO. But titles isn’t really a big part of the company internally. In reality there’s two roles, hackers, those who build the code, and hustlers, those who figure out the sales process. So as the CTO I’m running the hacking side of the business.

So I heard the company went on a hike. What was the reasoning behind choosing to do that?
Well, a lot of us are climbers and we decided that we needed a break. So naturally we thought of going for a climbing trip. We packed our tents and bags and went out in the forest for long hikes, climbing and sitting around a campfire. It wasn’t really targeted as team building, we just needed a break.

What’s your reflection on the hike?
I mean, if you spend a couple of days in a camp with a bunch of people you learn how to cooperate and you also learn very clearly what everyone’s strengths and weaknesses are, along with their roles in specific situations. It’s very easy to sit down in a corporate environment and realize that your boss’ role is to govern you or to manage you and those role become very static. They’re static to some extent in a startup as well, but it’s a bit more flexible since startups can change the direction they’re going in quicker through conversation. So being on the hike you learn that there’s a sense of diversity in skills and people and you start to respect that and work along with different people.

Are you doing something similar again?
Yes, we’re already planning on going go-kart racing. It’s about having fun and as a team we spend a lot of time together and try to go out for beers at least every two weeks to give ourselves enough breaks in between since it can be very stressful to work in a startup and you can burn out.

How does that stress come about?
A lot of people seem to think working in a startup is a great glamorous job where you wake up and do whatever you want to do and make millions of dollars. The reality is slightly different in the sense that there’s a lot of money involved but there’s also a lot of risk involved. You can fail catastrophically because some big companies decides to come after you so there’s a lot of strategizing when it comes to that.

Being on the same mental level of the team is an important part, and that’s what taking breaks helps you do. We are focused on a common goal, and equally focussed on making sure we enjoy the journey. Understanding people is paramount to accomplish both.

So getting to know people and understand them is important?
Yes, and understanding the texture of people is something that comes out of team building exercises. Corporations does that too, but usually it’s very staged like falling into someones arms. I don’t really believe in that and I don’t think it’s going to have a that big of an effect on working more effectively together. But seeing people in five different settings makes it easier to understand and comprehend what they’ll accept, what they’ll reject and, worst case, what they’ll accept but not wholeheartedly.

How do you enable that in your day to day?
The way we’re set up now in the office is that we have a big table where everyone sits next to each other and can see what everyone’s doing and hear what people are talking about. It’s the idea of close proximity of a team along with single objective goals. We also do things with team building that are less formal than meetings in order to get the work done. I think corporations have two main processes they have to fulfill. One is communication among a number of people and the other one is coordinating the efforts which is required to reach the goals that are set up. Those two things are fulfilled by meetings and managers, and usually lots of both of them.

We believe there’s a shorter way to do that. So instead of having lots of meetings and managers playing Chinese whispers we do a quick and simple standup every morning where each team member answer the questions:

• What did you do yesterday?
• What are you doing today?
• What are your blockers?

So we’re communicating and coordinating on a macro-level. And then every week we have a bit more elaborate meeting on what we want to accomplish for the next week. That usually takes an hour for the seven of us, which in corporate America is a bit of a rarity

We talked a bit about team building and, obviously, the hike you’ve been on. What do you think of when I say “culture”?
I don’t know, I really don’t. Because I don’t really know what good culture is as such. But for Datavore our culture is a very hustling culture. We are here. We need to get here. These are the skills we have. What do we need to do? And then it’s a matter of giving people enough resources to do that. No plans or prescriptive stuff, more descriptive directions of where we’d like to go. I think the smartest way to build something is to put a bunch of smart people in a room and giving them no constraints.

For startups in general I think the culture tends to be much flatter and more about just getting things done. Because there’s no middle ground, either you’re going to be in business or you’re going to be out of business.

Have you ever sat down and talked about culture at Datavore?
We haven’t. But we’ve done things that enforces a certain culture. For example we have our standup meetings at 10am every day. People were showing up late so Jake [the CEO, editor’s comment] came up with a game and brought a jar and said that every time anyone is late by more than a minute you have to put a dollar in the jar for every minute you’re late. Guess what happened? We only have $6 in the jar and we’ve played that game for four weeks.

It’s so easy to stand up and demand that everyone’s going to be there at 10am for the meeting, but usually a small alternative fix the problem in a more fun way. Everything changes and you start to lead by what you do instead of shouting out orders. You can’t be like Zeus and wield things to happen. You actually have to do them.

Who do you think shapes the culture in a startup?
The first 6–8 people we hire will set our culture and define the future of our company. Because they’re the people who are the culture bearers.

That’s why we’ve taken our time in hiring our first people. What we did was we reached out to our networks of people we’ve worked with in the past who we believed were really good and brought them in. We’re pretty similar as well, and we’ve noticed that when you put people with similar interests together they tend to work much better together. You could argue the fact about diversity making teams more creative but even if we have similar interests we’re still very different people from a personality standpoint.

How do you approach growing the team?
I mean, it’s very easy not to grow and that’s something we’ve focused on in the sense that there’s no reason for us to grow extremely fast if we can’t control the growth. Like I sad, I’m a total believer that the first 6–8 people are the culture carriers. So if you want to grow a company you have to pay respect to the culture you’re trying to build and grow in a nice organic fashion.

Thank you so much for your insights and for sharing your story at Datavore. Where can people find out more about Datavore?
Thank you! People can read more on our website.

I’m researching culture building in startups for my MA in Digital Media Management at Hyper Island. For more info: http://bit.ly/building-startup-culture