Rule 9: Build team chemistry
Creating a healthy corporate culture is the ultimate chemistry experiment.
It is a combination of unintended elements and intended elements, and it starts with the idealism of cofounder values. From there, it evolves and solidifies in the trenches of daily interactions.
In the early days of a startup, corporate culture takes the back seat to product development, fundraising, and generally keeping the ship afloat. While decidedly less urgent, it is just as, if not more, important. As a company grows, corporate culture might be the single greatest influencer of future success.
In Silicon Valley, companies develop street credibility based on their culture. You hear people in cafes and restaurants arguing about the best work environment. Is Google better than Airbnb? Does Apple beat out Pinterest? Beyond bragging rights, the companies with the best culture attract the most competitive talent, especially among millennials.
The evolution of the Loopd corporate culture looked a little like this:
Unintended Elements
Loopd was started by three young engineers who came together by chance. It was like a bad joke, “An American guy, an Indian guy, and a Chinese guy walked into Draper University and decided to start a company.” But instead of a punchline, a startup was born.
To have a shot at success, we needed a crash course on one another’s work habits, personalities, skill competencies, and emotional intelligence, so we became roommates in the Draper University dorms and set up our operations in the Hero City coworking space in San Mateo.
The education was intense, and not without some surprises.
Sambhav struggled with programming; Allen liked working through the night; and to say that my understanding of industrial design was lacking would be more than accurate. On a personality level, we were also a study in opposites. Sambhav was laid back, Allen anxiety-prone, and I was comfortably extroverted.
Despite these differences, and perhaps because of them, we had to work to overcome our weaknesses and tolerate our inevitable mistakes. There was a learning curve, but we learned. Through daily interactions and some much-needed trips to the beach and the mountains, we evolved into teammates and friends who truly enjoyed being together.
This bond and sense of dedication permeated the rest of the company as well.
Intended Elements
In the Fall of 2014, my cofounders and I decided to punctuate our first year by writing down our core values. We assumed that a set of values would help us characterize our culture for ourselves, future employees, and customers.
Around the same time, we retained Bobby Riley of Soldier Design for our branding operating system, and values definition came as an indirect byproduct of that endeavor.
Without going into detail about Bobby Riley’s branding process, it involved some deep thought about “the things, the beliefs, the experiences, and relationships that matter most to you.” Out of this process, we developed a list of core beliefs ranging from “collective greatness” and “passionate about relationships” to “bias towards adaptability” and “clarity through candor.”
Of these values, “clarity through candor” resonated the most deeply with me. This belief holds straightforward integrity and inspiration supreme and disdains spin. It requires accuracy and uniqueness both personally and professionally.
As the CEO, this exercise helped me define the type of positive attitude and communication methods that I wanted to embody personally and enlist in prospective employees. I had a clear rubric to gauge cultural fit of potential teammates and could avoid those individuals who would become toxic to our company.
In retrospect, the unintended part of our culture was the ethos and spirit of the company. From our early achievements and failures, we developed a driving sense of mutual respect and unbreakable resolve. The intended part of our culture became our operating practices, dictating and reinforcing how we executed business objectives, interacted in the office, and worked with our customers.
It’s really important to have values to get the right type of people at a startup. But if you hire people with an underlying negative attitude, they will not follow your values. You want people who execute their jobs and produce a positive environment.
I hope you enjoyed this preview to my new book Takeaways: Secret Truths from Leading a Startup. Don’t forget to subscribe to OWN IT to access the first ten rules.
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