On top of being an extremely talented VC, Mark is an incredibly experienced sales person. He offers a huge amount of knowledge to anyone who tunes in to his snapchat channel every single day. He previously did a series on managing your company board that was invaluable. He’s now doing a series on sales for startup founders, that is approachable and inspiring.

I’m a technical founder and I’m learning about sales. I’m lucky my cofounder is a Maverick (to take one of Mark’s words), however bringing new sales people in our organization has always been a challenge. Mark provides amazing insights and a structured way to look at the sales process and a sales organization.

Here is a recording of the first day, and if you tune in right now you’ll be able to catch the 3rd day. Every episode is 5 to 10 minutes long, no excuse to not tune in.

Culture is what defines the values and behaviors of your organization.

The team is the product of your culture, the same way your product is the product of the team.

Creating a strong culture is a powerful way to impact your team and achieve greater results.

Culture is often misunderstood

In the generalist press, you read about “startup culture”. How Google and Facebook offices make a creative environment. This is only the tip of the iceberg.

In companies, when people mention culture, they talk about touchy feely words the communication department wrote on the walls and on the website. On the floor, the reality is that most managers don’t understand what their role is regarding culture.

It’s simply hard to understand

Culture is one level of abstraction away from operations and results. Experts agree, there is no obvious way to create a strong culture.

Why care about culture if it’s so hard?

The goal of culture is to create trust inside your team

Trust is the foundation that enables innovation, performance, meaning and ultimately happiness.

• Innovation: People feel they can bring their ideas and won’t be shut down for arbitrary reasons. Constructive criticism is a great proof of trust.
• Performance: Trust removes the layer of dummy proofing, and make people work faster. If something is not clear, people won’t be afraid to talk.
• Meaning: When people are trusted, they feel confident what they bring is valued by the organization.
• Happiness: When you feel part of a trusting community, you feel more connected to others, which is a big part of happiness.

Culture is about creating a high level of fit and resilience in your team. It becomes a requirement during the scaling phase of any organisation. It allows companies to hire faster, attract and retain the best and most ambitious talent.

Leading and getting culture right

To make culture concrete, let’s review 3 hard facts about culture. This is a very different reality from having words on your office walls and doing inspirational speeches.

Culture comes from the top

Culture is how you, as a leader, treat others, and how you let people treat others. Ultimately the culture is a reflection of the behavior of the top management.

Every failure in the organisation is an opportunity to enforce the culture. Culture is defined by how you respond to those events.

Culture is defined by the worst behavior leaders tolerate

If you think the touchy feely words on your walls make people stop and reconsider their behavior, it does not.

If a key contributor on your team acts like a diva/cowboy/a*hole, dealing with the situation can sound risky. But ultimately, showing you care by acting reinforces your culture.

Communicate how you perceive people’s behavior, and empower natural leaders to act in the name of the company culture.

Culture is ultimately about how people make decisions when the leader is not in the room

Making decisions is the most important thing a team does.

Ultimately you want to remove yourself from the daily operations while keeping the agility and velocity of the first days of your startup. You want to empower your team.

The key is to take time to explain your decisions in front of the whole team, expose your thinking process, make it clear why in a particular context this decision is better than another. Your team will pick up this process, apply it internally and will keep each other accountable.

Conclusion

Culture is deep and fascinating, I highly recommend watching this amazing series on Youtube called Blitzscaling created by Stanford University and Greylock VC. In this series, Reid Hoffman and his team interview leaders of the startup community (Reid Hastings from Netflix, Diane Greene from VMWare, Eric Schmidt from Google, Shishir Mehrotra from Youtube, Sam Altman from YC, etc.) about practices they put in place to enforce culture while scaling their organization.

Read the culture deck from Netflix, this is a great example of culture communication, and it is also an amazing tool for recruiting.

In our daily lives, we can be easily distracted

Digital technologies have improved our lives to an extent that was hardly predictable. Yet, it also gave birth to increasingly powerful distractions. Sometimes, we’re hit with the realization we’ve been checking our Facebook feed for the 4th time in 2 hours. Waking up from this situation, we’re wondering how we got there, trying to remember what we were doing before.

As our lives become more and more complex, we rely on our subconscious for a larger amount of tasks. Our subconscious acts like an autopilot. Autopilot is great as it requires very little mental energy to complete tasks and can process a huge amount of information with little effort. Habits and routines are how you train your autopilot.

When you want to tackle a new type of challenge, you can’t be on autopilot

You can actually end up armwrestling against the autopilot. Bad habits are slowing you down. They consume your time available and by doing so, increase your stress level while completing other important tasks.

You might have great plans to achieve your goals, you might deeply want to follow your plans. Yet, you end up side-tracked for no apparent reason, which can be discouraging.

Get back on your way to reaching your goals

Before going into the specifics, we need to quickly review how the brain works, specifically the dopamine system.

The model I use is called the Hook Model by Nir Eyal. This model is appropriate because product designers use it to study and build the habit-forming products we use every day.

Let’s illustrate this model with a simple Facebook feed experience:

• Internal trigger: You are working on something difficult, and suddenly in your head pops this thought: “I feel annoyed, argh, let’s see how my friends are doing”.
• Action: Launch the app and scroll the feed.
• Variable Reward: Some interesting news, some funny, some boring.
• Investment: I like 2 interesting items.

As you can see, the model is very simple and works like a charm.

Back in control

Now it’s time for you to leverage the knowledge of the Hook Model for your own interest, break bad habits, and develop good habits.

Let’s disable the triggers, this way you will stop the behavior. It’s easy to disable the external triggers, for example: disable push notifications from your apps, put your phone on silent mode, etc. There is ample material available online on that.

Where it really becomes tricky is to disable internal triggers. It’s a 2-step process: first block the action, then repetitive blocking of the action will train your brain to unlearn the behavior.

Here are some free tools you can use to disable internal triggers:

• Web: Blocksite Chrome Extension
• Android: AppDetox

The key here is to set up the rules to instantly block the action. If you block the app only after a certain amount of time, you are not unlearning the behavior.

When experiencing the “blocking effect”, it’s a good time to reflect on what triggered you to start the app in the first place. After a few days of blocking you will start to feel much more aware of your subconscious behaviors.

Turn your distractions into reward for achieving your goals

Plan some breaks after completing important tasks. Knowing you will have time to enjoy things after your task is done makes it easier to support the “blocking effect” of those tools. You’ll start to notice your productivity going up. Even better, it turns distractions into a well-deserved reward for staying focused.

Of course in this digital age, social media can be an essential tool for work, which makes it hard to completely cut off. You can always unblock the app and website when you need it. There’s nothing wrong with that. Unblocking introduces friction which is exactly what you want in order to refrain from developing bad habits. Just make sure you restore the block when done.

Conclusion

Give it a try and see how it can change your life like it did for me and people around me. This will create opportunity to develop new healthier habits, like reading, writing, exercising, etc… Read about tiny habits for ways to make learning new habits easy.

Please share your experiences in the comments! Have you tried any of these tools? What do you think?

Breaking bad habits: Mindset and tools to help you get back control of your time and reduce… was originally published in Psychology of Stuff on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Developing a Mobile App for the App Store always had its challenges. Discovery being one of the most important.

Apple is working on their App Store to make it easier for parents to apps for their kids.Apple has created a new Kids category specifically for this purpose, this is a new section distinct from the Education category, that has been used as the main category for kids for a long time.

New guidelines have been added for your App to be featured in the Kids category.
The main guideline is that all external links or forms must be gated by a Parent Gate.

Apps primarily intended for use by kids under 13 must get parental permission or use a parental gate before allowing the user to link out of the app or engage in commerce

It’s designed so that kids don’t accidentally click on ads or on links and end up stuck and start thinking that the App is broken, and then need attention from an adult. Kids under 8 usually don’t make a distinction between an Ad and the App they are playing.

Many people relate those guidelines to COPPA, which got updated very recently to suit the mobile market growth.
In my opinion, it’s more of a coincidence. COPPA only relates to Personal Identifiable Information that the kid could enter or the developer would collect.
For sure a parent gate will slow down the kid from entering information, but there is no verification of parent identity. As consequence it is not enough to provide any COPPA compliance.

Our Company, Floop Technologies is developing various technologies to help kids app developers, including the only COPPA-compliant sharing platform, and we’ve decided to provide a simple and Apple-approved Parental Gate. It’s simple to use and integrate, have a look at www.getparentalgate.com