What we learned about company culture by running a startup lab
Fluxx launched the first corporate accelerator for one of the biggest media companies in the country and experienced first-hand what works. And what doesn’t.
If you take a handful of startup founders into a corporate environment, they’re going to experience some degree of culture shock.
“My day would usually start with getting Lucy dressed, fed and off to nursery. Then I’d set up my laptop at the kitchen table and get to work on planning our next event. Since the lab started, just getting on the tube, commuting into London and sitting in an office is an event.”
“We’ve worked as a tight team of three for a year. Now we’ve got people with different experiences and opinions getting involved in our business.”
“No, this is not the way we usually dress. We figured we’d smarten up for the big office.”
For these startup founders, life inside a corporate accelerator was going to take some adjusting. And it was our job at Fluxx to help them thrive.
Most corporates want to work with startups to drive new revenue streams and get closer to emerging technologies. Thinking about the culture that makes that relationship work is not always top-of-mind.
Culture is not ‘the soft stuff’ you can think about later. Get the culture wrong and you could spoil your chances at ever turning startup potential into ‘the hard stuff’ — cash.
When we launched News UK’s first corporate accelerator a few months ago, we chose from over 200 applicants, welcoming a lucky seven into our programme.
Seven startups, from different parts of the country, across different sectors, with businesses at different stages of maturity who have never met before coming together for the first time. The one thing they had in common was a shared ambition to make their business a success.
In a short period of time, we had to get them working well with each other, working well with a big corporation and working at an accelerated pace of progress.
Here are 8 things we learned about how to overcome startup-corporate culture shock and avoid distractions that can get in the way of innovation.
1. Set expectations up-front
Let’s not forget, an accelerator is a contractual relationship between the startup and the corporate, often with a monetary value attached (ie- a convertible note). What does the corporate sponsor expect the startup to achieve during the accelerator? And equally, what value does the startup expect to get from it?
For us, it took longer than we anticipated to prioritise lab milestones for each startup. This meant, in some cases, they simply weren’t able to achieve as much as News UK may have wanted them to during the lab’s fast four weeks.
So in the next round, we’ve created ‘Discovery Days’ to make those expectations more explicit from the start. Here, they’ll work with News UK decision makers to agree what aspects of their business they’ll need to prove during the lab in order to achieve a particular outcome — whether that be investment, a supplier relationship, or introductions to their network. This should not only help startups hit the ground running, but help create better outcomes for all once the lab is complete.
2. Speak like a human
Nobody likes jargon. And being open, transparent and timely is especially important when it comes to legal documents. We worked hard with News UK’s legal team to remove any traces of ‘legalese’. For example, instead of using the typical 300+ words to discuss intellectual property, we simply said, “You own your own content. What you walk in here with is still yours when you walk out.”
Unfortunately, agreeing plain english legal documents took time which meant that for the first few weeks of the lab, we were still finalising terms. Not ideal. This created an unwelcome distraction, and in some cases, prevented startups from being completely open about existing insights, data and even their APIs. As a result, some startups didn’t get the most value from the short time they had to collaborate with us. Now that we have clear documents drafted from the pilot, in our next round, the lab won’t begin until they’re signed in hope of a more open, free-flowing exchange from the start.
3. Prioritise collaboration over competition
Startups often feel like they won their place in the lab and are competing against one another for the prize of investment. So when Fluxx brought together the startups on day one, the first activity we designed into their programme was to co-create a shared set of ‘lab principles’.
This let them decide for themselves how they would work best together and gave us a forum to emphasise that they are not each other’s competition. In our case, there was not one pot of money to vie for. Rather each of them could achieve positive outcomes.
During the debate, some principles were more easily agreed than others such as holding group-wide daily stand-ups, publicly sharing failures as well as successes, and being mindful that each resident still needs to run today’s business whilst planning for tomorrow’s.
What was less easy to agree were degrees of privacy. There was a desire to share learnings, but at the same time, a need for confidentiality. A key issue was that our working space didn’t prioritise privacy, but collaboration instead. We based the lab at Unruly where they each had their own tables in close proximity to one another and access to one meeting room which they had to share with over a hundred people. That was a challenge.
Learning from this experience, in the next round, we’re hosting the lab at News UK HQ which has both a larger number of break out spaces for collaboration as well as private meeting rooms to allow for quiet confidential working sessions.
4. Demonstrate your commitment
There was no doubt that the startup founders in our lab were committed. Nick, for example, the founder of Jobsnapps, worked his day-job from 8am to 2pm, and afterwards worked in the lab until midnight. Every night.
So News UK needed to show them that they were just as committed. And that they did.
Each startup was assigned an executive sponsor who sat on the News UK board as well as 2–3 mentors in areas they needed guidance with whom they met with once a week at minimum.
Not only that, but the supporting business functions like commercial, UX and data were actively involved. During our customer immersion week, Craig, from News UK’s research and insight team physically based himself in the lab so he could drop everything when the startups needed him.
This not only had an emotional impact in helping the residents feel like a priority personally, but had a practical impact in demonstrating a fair value exchange for their time in the lab.
5. Treat people equally, but differently
Each startup in our lab received a place in residency for different reasons. So we tailored the lab experiences for each to give each of them the type of support they needed to prove their business model.
For example, one week we had two startups doing very different experiments. Jobsnapps was testing value propositions using live advertising in The Sun. Whilst Wyamee was trialling their technology with the data team in the newsroom’s workflow.
One seemed glamorous and exciting and the other, more functional and perhaps even a little boring. If you misunderstood, it could look like one experience might be more valuable than the other.
If there is a sense that one startup is being favored over another, a culture of resentment will quickly poison a culture of productivity. We learned the importance of communicating the ‘equal but different proviso’. That everyone won’t be having the same experience, but that they will all be having an experience of equal value and benefit to their business.
6. Choose fluidity over structure
Fluxx designed the News UK Startup Lab to provide specific resources to whom they were needed, when they were needed — rather than create a rigid structured programme to which the entire cohort must adhere. That’s not respectful of their time or their needs.
The flexibility helped the startups get things done quickly no matter how different their journeys and put them in the driver’s seat where entrepreneurs tend to be most comfortable.
7. Celebrate learnings publicly … especially failures
One of Fluxx’s founding principles is that ‘if you cannot fail, you cannot learn.’ In fact, current research shows that resilience and perseverance are linked to a greater degree of lifelong success.
By publicly sharing both successes and failures, we helped foster a culture of collaboration, humility and prioritisation.
During the lab, Mum’s Enterprise wanted to understand how they could monetise events which they currently offer for free. The hypothesis was that a certain threshold of people would purchase an event upgrade in the form of specialist workshops or coaching at one of three price points. The results didn’t show enough purchases and so the hypothesis was disproven. This wasn’t a failure, it was a pivot. And a pivot is progress.
8. Make a positive working culture a hard success metric
As a product and service innovation company, Fluxx treated the lab as a product in its own right. Its success would not be measured by how much investment the companies received, but rather if the founders would write a positive testimonial about their experience regardless of the outcome. We measured the health of Lab weekly using anonymous Survey Monkeys which enabled us to change what wasn’t working whilst there was still time to influence the experience.
For example, when we learned that close quarters was impacting people’s ability to be productive, we got permission from News UK to access a larger building with more quiet space as needed.
We also were reminded that this is an incredibly intense experience for everyone. So we introduced a few Friday social gatherings at the pub which enabled people to get to know one another better and enjoy the process even more.
Build, measure, learn — it’s in our DNA and it just works.
Looking back at News UK’s first Startup Lab, we’re proud of what we created. And we’re even more proud of what our startups achieved as more than half achieved a positive outcome. But no matter how many times a corporate runs an accelerator, there will never be two that are alike.
Setting out on this journey can be daunting — and when you’re staring at the numbers on a spreadsheet, focusing on culture might not seem very important. But at the end of the day, we do this to unlock the potential of people.
It’s people who change the world, and if we get that right, the numbers might just follow.
