Culture @ Sqreen
Here at Sqreen we know that great culture doesn’t happen all by itself.
A few months ago we shared an article on Getting startup culture right, and wanted to follow it up with a behind-the-scenes look into culture at Sqreen.
So, what is Sqreen’s culture like?
We’ve been intentionally slow to label Sqreen’s culture, as we believe putting words on a wall isn’t enough, and a lot of the time, it isn’t even the right starting point.
What we do instead at Sqreen is constantly try to describe our culture using recent, repeated examples — that’s how we ensure we’re being realistic, and not idealistic.
For example, if we say we care about Sqreeners as whole people, and not just employees, we could point to our generous-for-stage parental leave policy or the way we’ve helped former Sqreeners find their next career step, or even our employee to founder bootcamp project.
If we can’t find a recent, repeated examples of something we profess our culture to be, that means we should take a hard look at whether or not it’s actually part of our culture, and think about what we might need to change.
Sqreen’s personality
If I were to try to describe Sqreen’s personality, I’d probably say Sqreen is fun, bold, smart and humble. We try not to take ourselves too seriously, we have a really talented team and value emotional intelligence (EQ) just as much as IQ. We’re also much more concerned about the success of the team than we are about individual superstars, and we make sure to prioritise and automate the sharing of skills and knowledge with each other.
What we value
Our values center on things like sharing, learning and paying it forward, which is why we have an Open Book policy, run our Sqreenity side-project program and are always ready to help others outside of Sqreen with what we’ve learnt.
We’re also big on ownership and solving problems that others might have not dared tackle.
We are what we repeatedly do
Our norms and rituals are often informed by our love of food. Sqreeners routinely gather for meals, snacks and to celebrate milestones, whether they be product or revenue goals we’ve hit or personal achievements. We love to celebrate each other’s wins at Sqreen; often cake is involved. To balance this out we also have weekly trainer-led sports sessions (aka ‘Sqreen-fit’).
We also have some specific challenges that come with having a distributed team across Paris and SF, and we manage to stay close and aligned via a number of rituals like our Friday all-hands and our weekly team recap emails.
Hiring for cultural improvement
We don’t often talk about cultural fit at Sqreen, because we’re not looking for ‘more of the same’, rather people who can add something to our existing culture to improve it. We think the precursor to improving a culture is to be humble, curious and intelligent. In interviews, we’ll ask candidates to describe the best and worst company cultures they’ve seen, and what they’d like to bring across to Sqreen, or that they’ve never seen implemented but would like to try.
Act short term, plan long term
Finally, our mission is to make security simple, and to do so for the long term. Making hard things simple is really part of our DNA, and can be seen everyday at Sqreen. We are allergic to complexity and keep refining until we can find the simplest way forward.
Also, it can be tempting to always think short-term when you’re in an early stage startup — the next quarter, the next 10k of ARR, but having an intentionally long term vision for Sqreen helps us avoid a lot of the common pitfalls of scale.
If you’d like to learn more about avoiding the 8 common pitfalls of scale and how to future-proof your organisation, join me at Tech.rocks on December 4 in Paris!
