How to Fuck Up Your Startup’s Founding Team — Part I
Little Habits That Will Help You Ruin Your Startup’s Culture
A startup doesn’t have a culture. A startup is the culture.
Starting up, in large part, is an act of ego. Ego powers the belief that the new thing that you create will be good enough to change the way tens and thousands of people live their lives. You don’t always call this ego — instead you call it vision, or passion — but the idea is the same.
As important as ego is to the founding of a startup, it is also corrosive to the creation of a good culture. Founders often get lost in their own ego and are not able to see the broader picture.
Maintaining the culture of the founding team is the cornerstone of an early stage startup. The kind of culture you have, even when you are just a one-person company is what decides how you hire, how you work as a team, what your core values are, and what the startup would eventually turn out to be as it grows.
Taking that first step to building your team and culture is the most important and sometimes the most difficult one. But it doesn’t have to be — not with the right perspective.
While there are lots of things you can do to build your startup, these are few things not-to-do while forming your founding team:
Pretending to be a Startup.
To start your startup, you’ve thought of some plausible-sounding idea, raised money, invested in PR, rented a cool office, and have hired a bunch of people. From the outside that seems like what startups do. But in real, you might gradually fuck yourself from the inside, because while imitating all the outward forms of a startup you have neglected the one thing that’s actually essential: making something people want.
Good startups care about being successful, not going through the motions to look successful. Making appearances can not be part of your culture. Your company is not the interior decoration of your office, and the humongous amounts of money you’ve raised. Your company is the way you approach your work, the way you communicate with each other and the sense of purpose you feel that keeps you motivated throughout the day.
Being All “Me me me…”
Building a startup doesn’t make you special. Try to understand this. You don’t get a free pass to the world just because you have a domain name with “.io” or “.co” at the end, and you’re building an app or a bot.
Having your own startup gives your ego a good boost. But unbridled ego can become arrogance. It doesn’t allow for other people to achieve and contribute. Founders who do not keep their egos in check are unwilling to acknowledge the help given to them by others, and have a hard time building and retaining great teams.
The best founders talk about “We” and not just “I.” Every discussion about the achievements of the company is a chance to highlight the contributions of other people and of the organization. Giving credit where it is due keeps the morale high and gives recognition to your team’s work.
Ignoring Mistakes.
Success usually happens at random. Strategies that lead to success are self-validating. You build narratives around the cause and effect of success, based on incomplete information and your own biases.
Ignoring mistakes makes it easy to falsely attribute success to the factors that are seen on the surface without understanding what has happened i.e. analysing the causality. This tendency gets even stronger when you’re looking at your own successes. You start building incomplete formulas for success.
It is always better to analyse mistakes than analyse success; because mistakes don’t give you the same kind of happy feelings that success does. It is because the mistakes hurt that you have to investigate them more closely. Mistakes make you start thinking critically and compare causal chains that leads up to, and flows from them. You’re more likely to consider complexity and examine why things happened as they did if you analyze mistakes.
Being Busy For Busy’s Sake.
It makes you sound important and feeds your ego when you say that you are too busy with an important work and don’t want to be disturbed. True, your work has importance, but it is not an excuse to ignore your new hire, or your intern. Being one of the founding members, they look up to you; and by being busy, you slowly start becoming unapproachable. This becomes your culture.
Great founders take quick decisions on everything. They respond to queries quickly and are always eager to help. In short, they are nice people who are highly efficient. This is one of the most striking differences between great and mediocre founders. Great founders do actual work and don’t appear to be busy. Great founders are executing machines.
To be Continued…
In later parts of this article, I’ll talk about Giving Harsh Feedback, Being Inconsiderate, Entertaining Bullshit and more.
